Don't miss our reading tonight!
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and monthly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Tin House, Granta, and Guernica. 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. It may be the start of a new work week, but at least we have this great new writing to get us through it.
My Long, Strange Journey Writing About the Minecraft Universe
by Alison Lowenstein (art by Harry Bhalerao)
At this point, I was an old hand at the Minecraft Universe and no longer saw these books as that much of a challenge. I did, however, see them as an opportunity to connect with my son. Now I had a deeper understanding when he told me what had happened in that day’s game, and I knew what questions to ask him.
Enough: Crime and Composure
by Natalie Eilbert
I was raped in October 2018. It happened in the midst of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s mounting accusations against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh, which made my ordeal feel more like an object lesson than a violence.
Our Home Is Mortal Too
Katherine Angel
I remember my mother saying: ‘It’s stuck in time; it’s a museum of a museum.’ Visiting it was to observe colonialism set in stone, embalmed, slowly gathering dust. Yet there was not much at stake for us, for a white family visiting on a day from the city, living a life among the bricks and mortar that were the riches of atrocity. It was not I who was being humiliated by the museum’s images, its objects, its very rationale.
We Are All We Have
by Megan Stielstra
I spent last December taking care of my 70-year-old mother after surgery. She doesn’t like being taken care of. She takes care of herself. She lives happily alone in an impeccably decorated condo near Ann Arbor full of art and books and a fireplace that turns on with a remote control. She does Pilates every morning. She visits my 93-year-old grandmother every afternoon. She wears vegan “leather” and doesn’t eat dairy and goes to her doctors’ appointments and canvasses for the Democratic party and Facetimes her grandson in Chicago on Sundays so I can have a merciful extra hour of sleep.
Finding Eden and Myself in a Vietnamese Shopping Center
by Kim O'Connell
I’m happy that, for now, the older grocery remains, because it’s my mother’s favorite—plain, old-fashioned, cluttered, a throwback to a Vietnam that she can only remember. I may never have the courage to haggle over the price of a duck, but there’s comfort in knowing that, long after my mother is gone, I’ll be able to stand at the counter and remember a time when she would.
Writers’ Resources
Tin House has announced their 2020 residencies, with application details and deadlines here!
There’s a new section of my Writing Personal Essays with Substance class listed at Catapult—Saturday afternoons starting March 14!
Important announcement about the reading series: After tonight’s event, we’ll be switching from a monthly schedule to a quarterly one. The next Memoir Monday event will be in March, and will take place in San Antonio, Texas, during the AWP conference (details about that coming soon). So tonight is your last chance to catch us at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn until June, 2020!
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Until next Monday,