Eleven Great, New Personal Essays...
Plus workshops via Anne Liu Kellor, Narratively, and Fine Arts Work Center in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring four 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 “War Creates Many Orphans” by
and guest edited by . A new essay is coming soon.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #1: Stephanie Land,” the first in a new Q&A series inspired by popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I published “It’s Not Over Until the Bride’s Father Sings,” my own story of eloping to Manhattan’s old, no-frills marriage bureau.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Al-Qahira
by Abdelrahman ElGendy
“She’s unbearable, non-Cairenes would say. I could never live there. To them, Al-Qahira is an untamed beast. She’s the grim hue hovering above, a smoke dome on the horizon when you approach her from afar, as if her twenty-one million souls all leaned on balconies and dusted their carpets at once. She’s a stifled gasp in a microbus crammed to ten times its capacity. She’s a child dangling from the bus’s door — often the driver’s nephew, hooking two fingers, index and middle, around the handle — urging more pedestrians to hop in the 'empty' vehicle.”
The Sunshine Cure
by Natasha Varner
“We were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe. But the binaries of good and bad don’t work so neatly when you’re a settler on occupied lands. When your health, your survival, your very being exists alongside so much suffering. Before, when I thought about disease and colonization, my mind would turn to smallpox blankets, to the sexual violence that spread venereal disease, to the livestock carrying virulent strains of illness that Indigenous peoples had no acquired resistance to. To things that were very distant from me and my closest ancestors.”
Dirt
by Camille Dungy
“Truth be told, I hadn’t considered the wind when I called the landscaping supply company to arrange delivery. I’d only been focused on completing our yard project before Halloween. Now, I wanted my husband to help me make the best of a bad situation. A bad situation I might be largely responsible for creating. As I said to our friend Tim, who happened by our house in time to watch us scramble to protect our dirt, ‘If this isn’t a metaphor for marriage, I don’t know what is.’”
Bonding with My Daughter Before She Walks Down the Aisle
by
“This wrenching death has betrayed us both—a father, a husband: gone. But now, a wedding. Our girl has a chance at the happiness I once knew, and I, a chance to renegotiate motherhood with a child who was once the center of my universe, now a powerfully competent woman, tempest-tossed, tested by life.”
Cause and Effect
by Lynn Cunningham
“It was one of those life-changing phone calls, only not the kind announcing you’ve won a lottery or been nominated for some big-deal award. The woman on the other end of the phone was a Children’s Aid worker in a community just north of Toronto. ‘Ms. Cunningham? I’m calling about your grandson, Andrew. Come and get him, or we’re taking him into care. Meet me at the hospital.’”
Proper Country
by Ralf Webb
“I am a moderately articulate member of my generation, state-schooled and Russell Group-educated, conversant in liberal discourse and conditioned, under the assumed threat of social exile, to hypervigilantly assess and critique my own spectatorship and relative ‘privilege’ in any given situation. And so, when I moved back to the West Country after almost a decade of life in London, I had my hackles up. On arrival to the village where I was to spend the next six months, I observed that it distilled something quintessential about the rural west, the landscape of my childhood and adolescence, that I’d sorely missed.”
Essays from around the web…
Chaos and Cosmic Order: The Year of the Dragon
by Grace Prasad
“I took my passport out of the drawer and laid it on top of my plane ticket, which I hadn’t looked at since the day it had arrived in the mail. It said: China Airlines flight 003, departing San Francisco at 12:05 a.m. on Friday, February 4, arriving in Taipei at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, February 5…My heart started pounding. How could I arrive early Saturday morning if the flight leaves Friday at midnight? It’s a fourteen-hour flight. Then it hit me: My flight actually leaves on Thursday night. Tonight!”
Anger Management
by Mishele Maron
“When Dave went off his lithium, he suffered mood swings and became paranoid, argumentative, and occasionally violent. After an angry episode Dave would sob and express remorse. Though I feared he might one day lose control and kill my mother, I always knew he would regret doing it.”
Fibers of Being
by Andrew Zubiri
“Even if a fiber, yarn, or strand of abaca rope breaks, its alternating twists protect against unraveling, sustaining the rope’s purpose: to tug, to bind. In my grandfather’s hands, abaca provided for his family. In the hands of sailors, the ropes hoisted sails across the ocean and secured anchors dredging the seabed. Abaca, extracted by the US from the Philippines, was the material that helped steer America’s ships to dismantle Spanish and Japanese empires, only to establish their own.”
Through the Threads
by Caitlin McGill
“Falling through the threads: Is that what blacking out is? Here and then not here and sometimes both? Perhaps it’s less a slipping through the threads and more, like Sarah Hepola says, a trap door: boom: here and then gone but still visible to anyone beside your body. Your body moving despite the breached brain. Your body your body your body.”
Grief, the Interior Decorator
by Brooke Randel
“I frame both of my grandma’s obituaries—the one I did not write and the one I did, where editors added a torch with HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR in all caps. I want my grandma’s life behind glass, which is to say I want to protect it, watch over it, be its elder maternal figure. I want her death behind glass too, which is to say I want it away from me.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Anne Liu Kellor is Offering her Both/And: Reading and Writing the Mixed-Race Experience 10-Week Class beginning February 28th
Both/And: Reading and Writing the Mixed-Race Experience is a 10-week online writing workshop starting on 2/28/24, from 5-7 pm PT. This class will hold space for mixed-race people to share freely about our evolving identities, as we read and discuss essays and free-write from prompts that explore topics such as: coming of age, messages we learned about race, whiteness, colorism, privilege, ancestors, silence, non-binary thinking, community, and belonging.
📢 Registration Is Open for Summer Workshops at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House), Melissa Febos (Body Work), Garrard Conley (Boy Erased), and Sarah Schulman (Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up), are among the writers who will lead weeklong workshops this summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the nation's most enduring artist community. Known for its off-season fellowship that nurtured the careers of writers like Louise Glück, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Michael Cunningham, the Work Center opens its doors to the public every summer with 65 courses in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and more. The workshops run from June 16 - August 17. With the intimate classes open to only 10 students, many sell out quickly. Registration is now open.
📢 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.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised 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!
The Natasha Verner piece was exceptional and glad to see it made your list. Also thrilled to see Brooke Randel's excerpt here. SO good. Such a lovely curated Monday!
Thanks for this list, Sari. Interested in reading your elopement story! (I kept telling my daughters it would be OK if they eloped, but full-on weddings with all the spendy accoutrements resulted anyway, haha!).