Don't Sleep On these 13 Great Personal Essays...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring three verticals:Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Lonely Animals” by
, guest-edited by Katie Kosma. A new essay is coming Wednesday.
*Submissions are currently paused for First Person Singular. I’ll do a limited submission period later this fall. Stay tuned…*
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I published the second installment of “The Prompt-O-Matic” series. An interview is coming next week.
Essays from partner publications…
Escape Velocity
by L.E. Marshall
“Few things order the universe: numbers, limits, calculations, and constellations. I started running both to chase down some understanding of how someone I loved could abandon me so utterly, and so too, to escape the reality of its happening. My body was the only place to do the math, and once I started, I couldn’t stop.”
Re(re)thinking "In Sickness and In Health"
by
“For many years I thought it would undermine my feminist principles to make any concessions whatsoever for marriage. Yet one of the first things that I, a confirmed city girl, found myself saying to my husband on the day we received the diagnosis was, ‘When it comes to that, we’ll sell the house and move to a rural area, get away from traffic and crime and noise. You’ll be happier there.’”
I’m Still Unlearning Widespread Pathologies About My Race
by Fred McKindra
“I’ve long puzzled over what made the ‘80s and ‘90s so difficult to forget. Perhaps it was the music. I’d long resented the shape hip hop had given Black manhood, the weight of hypermasculinity America had forced Black men to shoulder. That silhouette had grown out of the gangsta rap years of the ’90s, an image and idea I as a gay Black man had felt excluded and menaced by throughout my teens and 20s. The Black masculinity I’d confronted and avoided most of my life grew out of that time. If there was something to diagnose about the burden of Blackness I’d inherited, it originated there.”
The Protagonist Is Never in Control
by Emily Fox Kaplan
“It’s done: The bad man is now your stepfather. Your best friend is your stepsister; her little sister is your little sister, and your little brother is hers. You’re the kids now, as if it had always been. The bad man and your mother confuse and undermine the relationships between you, isolate you all in different ways... They call your family blended, even though it is anything but: it is an angry, bleeding thing, with jagged edges and broken bones.”
Hilary Leichter on the Partnership Between Reader and Writer
by Hilary Leichter
“It is a curious thing, to feel anything at all, looking at ink on paper. But the reader is not just looking—the reader is reading, retaining sentences, and retrieving them, aligning one chapter with the next. If the reader is asked to carry a part of the book, they will take it to a place the author has never seen. When a book arrives somewhere emotionally moving, it’s because the reader has helped put it there.)”
Lonely Animals
by
“Then again, alone in our bed, I no longer had to worry about waking her up. I reached for my phone and downloaded the dating app on which Claud and my ex and the coochie woman had all seen each other. I didn’t really want to join the dating app, but I did want to see the other people who had. For the required profile picture, I uploaded a shot of No. 492, mid-flight over a body of water. What was its greatest fear?”
Essays from around the web…
'Language is blood; language is family’ — even if I’m losing my Spanish
by
“I, the oldest grandchild, learned Spanish from my maternal grandparents who never learned English. As their language broker, I seamlessly switched back and forth between English and Spanish. I translated soap operas for Abuela, and for Abuelo, I negotiated transactions at the pharmacy and grocery store, where he bought me endless packets of M&Ms.”
As They Like It
by Nicole Graev Lipson
“I don’t know what to say when Leah is greeted as a boy, for I haven’t figured out what to do with my uncertainty, or what kind of mother to be in this upside-down theater. And so I say nothing as we leave Starbucks, nothing on the far side of the crosswalk, nothing after we’ve passed the temple security guard—because to say something feels like stepping into a thicket I don’t know how to beat a path through. To say something is to name, and to name is to turn the intangible into something real and solid and corporeal that must be reckoned with.”
I Bought a Condo, and Feel Like a Stranger
by Josephine Phay
“I am an unfilial daughter. I know this. I know it like I know the stories of how my parents gave me my name, my childhood, my shot at life. Am I over-generalizing if I say this is one of the marks of an Asian parent? I mean, this vehement insistence that the relationship between parent and child is an eternal debt, a cosmic transaction? A Gordian knot of DNA and memories so intricately scrambled together that there is no way to establish good, clear boundaries between them—and me?…I did try. That is how I know I am unfilial. I am a bad daughter because I bought my own place, and moved out of my parents’ home.”
Finding Comfort in the Horror of Stephen King’s Maine
by Elizabeth Austin
“People often told me that everything happens for a reason, or that we were lucky it was just leukemia (the saltine cracker of cancer!), or that I should stay strong and think positive! These were easy platitudes for people to offer who didn’t have to spend their days and nights holding their child’s head over a bucket while the medicine that was saving their life also tried to kill them. It’s hard to stay positive when your kid’s doctor pulls you aside during a particularly tough round of chemo and gently but gravely reminds you, 'some kids die of cancer, and some kids die of cancer treatment.'”
I Entered A Beauty Pageant at 57 To Fell Better About Myself. That’s Not Exactly What Happened.
by Cathy Alter
“While it’s not exactly accurate to say it was a voice from the grave that commanded me to drop out of the Mrs. America pageant, it’s not exactly a lie, either. The truth lies somewhere in between and involves a questionable photographer, a threat from a friend to disown me, and a dingy bra once worn by Ivana Trump. But for five days, I was Cathy Alter, your Mrs. Georgetown DC.”
On Reading Fast and Reading Slow
by Beth Kephart
“I couldn’t read Shakespeare because I couldn’t take Shakespeare fast. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Hemingway was easy, but Fitzgerald was finer; I read Fitzgerald fast. Mary Oliver. Joan Didion. Marilynne Robinson. For every book in my hand there were ten by the bed, and, feeling the pressure of the unread, that huffy and impatient glance, I read books I loved far, far too fast.”
I'm married to a twin. Here's my advice on marrying one.
by Diana Danielle
“I vividly remember the first time I met the sister who my husband had shared a womb with. I'd been anxious about it because I had no navigation system for this kind of terrain. To up the ante, by the time she flew to LA to meet me, I had already proposed marriage to her brother, Drew, live in front of four million TV viewers on the KTLA Morning News. The show's producer, whom I worked with regularly as a Los Angeles publicist, had explained that on Valentine's Day of a leap year, women were allowed to turn the tables, so I shot my shot.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Submissions for ’s second annual Memoir Prize are open now.
“From Tuesday, September 26, 2023, through Thursday, November 30, 2023, Narratively is accepting entries for our 2023 Memoir Prize. We’re on the hunt for revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view. The winning submission will receive a $3,000 prize and publication on Narratively.”
📢 Writing Co-Lab has some new classes on offer…
Writing Co-Lab provides dynamic online classes and workshops in every genre to deepen your craft, sharpen your publishing acumen, and ignite your imagination. Writing Co-Lab is cooperatively owned and run by teaching artists, so up to 90% of your tuition goes directly to the instructor. With free open mic nights, early morning writing clubs, and faculty “ask me anything” sessions, Writing Co-Lab is committed to fostering community inside and outside the classroom. We have upcoming classes taught by acclaimed writers like Edgar Gomez, Bushra Rehman, Omer Friedlander, Natasha Oladokun, Kyle Dillon Hertz, Mila Jaroneic, Amy Shearn, and Alexandra Watson. Check out our full class listings and come write with us!
📢 Take my Skillshare workshop on blending the individual and the collective in your essays!
📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:
By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:
The title of the essay and a link to it.
The name of the author, and the author’s Twitter handle.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.
You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!
I just read Lonely Animals and I loved it. I’d love to submit when you are open in the fall!