Announcing our next reading line-up!
Join us on Monday, March 15 at 8pm EST for the next Memoir Monday reading—featuring Candace Jane Opper, Marcos Gonsalez, Jeannine Oullette, and Randa Jarar! Register here.
And check out the readers’ books at our Bookshop.org page! Purchases made through our affiliate page help support the authors, independent bookstores, and Memoir Monday.
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
The Troubled Task of Defining Southern Literature in 2021
by Ed Tarkington
Perhaps the most troubling epiphany for white Southerners, literary and otherwise, has been the widespread acknowledgment of the continuing pervasiveness of white supremacy. This is a hard truth to swallow for people who have grown up unconscious of the extent to which they have historically benefited and continue to benefit from a status quo foundationally rooted in a moral evil, one which still infects so many through their inherited biases.
The Valley and the Stream
by Danyl McLauchlan
‘Is the conscious mind created by the brain?’ Jakob asked, smiling the smile of someone who is both filled with wisdom and loving compassion, and aware that he is about to kick someone’s ass in a spiritual debate. ‘How does it do that?’ I didn’t have an answer to this question. Nobody does. But I didn’t worry about it for the rest of the retreat, because I didn’t worry about anything. I meditated.
Cure
by Wendy Elizabeth Wallace
It’s 7 a.m., and I’m sitting cross-legged at my desk, eating cereal and listening to NPR, when a smooth-voiced reporter tells me the first patient has been treated for an eye disease using CRISPR. The procedure involves injecting material directly into the patient’s eye, which the researchers hope will alter the errors in the genetic code that cause the disease and allow the patient to regain vision.
In the Shadow of Saris: Exploring Identity Through Memory and Dislocation
by Bhavna Mehta
The other day I looked for my one and only sari blouse and found it at the bottom of a plastic storage box in my closet. So many years have gone by, and I don’t remember how the measurements of my chest would have been conveyed to my roommate’s mother in Chennai, but I can still picture Auntie arriving in California with a kumkum-red blouse and a matching sari for me. What an intricate thing this blouse is, the three small tucks for each breast reaching in to create a concave space, the low neckline, the shoulder just wide enough to cover the bra strap, the six hooks in the front hidden, full of promise. How happy I was to have my very own; how long I had longed for it.
Writers’ Resources
Registration is now open for a one-day essay revision intensive at Catapult, with Lilly Dancyger!
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