Eleven Great Personal Essays to Dig Into this Week...
Plus: Workshops by Rae Pagliarulo, Rosie Schapp and Dianne Jacob; and a call for submissions for our collaboration with Literary Liberation.
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, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.
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.
*While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing this and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
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Essays from partner publications…
One Hundred Reasons Not To Die
by
“But here I am now, one crow away from crone, a middle-aged woman turning oranges in the oven because it’s the kind of thing the woman I’m dating does, and to beat all she and her friends plan to take needle and thread to string the dried disks into a garland with cranberries and rosemary and all that cookies-in-the-oven, tee-vee-land stuff. And believe it or not, it’s not even for a Christmas tree. No, it’s all a part of a welcome-home surprise they’re scheming up for another friend, a homey kind of banner so homey the friend might forget why she went away from home in the first place, by which I mean her eviction after Hurricane Helene.”
In Praise of “Toxic” Female Friendships
by
“Only one storyline in The White Lotus Season Three has anything resembling a happy ending: childhood friends Laurie, Jacklyn, and Kate finally rekindle their lifelong love for each other after a week of backstabbing and gossip. The viewer is left with no doubt that the three will continue to talk shit about each other until death do they part, but by the same token, the viewer has no doubts that they’ll be in touch for the rest of their lives. There’s no contradiction between the toxicity and the beauty in this female friendship: it has both.”
I Need a Fortune-Teller Who Can Tell Me if I’ll Become My Mother
by Jennifer Hope Choi
“Anyone who’s been on the road for longer than a week understands there are pitfalls to what may seem like a derring-do flex of freedom. There are certainly ways to bathe and nest in a confined mobile space, but for how long? Wanderlust conveys an air of exhilaration, risk for the sake of stimulation and adventure. But to be a nomad is another matter, something more enduring, a state that shudders with existential restlessness. No end in sight. No thrill either.”
Braving Imposter Syndrome at Hula-Hoop Camp
by
“I blended in enough on the outside. Still, my insides screamed IMPOSTER. It wasn’t just about age. There were some other middle-aged hoopers there, including Philo. It was that the other hoopers had an ease about them, a way of moving their bodies without a hint of self-consciousness. They gave off a sense of belonging and an inherent coolness I’d never possessed.”
Essays from around the web…
Why I Broke Up with New York
by Lena Dunham ()
“All good New Yorkers know that to live in, and love, the city takes a certain amount of chutzpah—you have to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to push your way through the throngs, shout your coffee order, rush to nab the last subway seat or the only on-duty cab. You have to be unsurprised by the consistent surprises that come with a new day in New Amsterdam. And you have to love it all, even if you pretend you don’t.”
To Tell You the Truth
by
“There are particulars in a father dying that require attention to detail that I can’t carry. Like, what do you do with all the stuff? Everything he possesses means nothing to anyone except himself. Piles of books on Buddhism and gardening. DVDs and CDs of monks chanting or sisters humming or Motown moaning. Obsolete. And clothes worn to shreds. Bed linens, one set, wrecked with the stink of lying still, soaked through from the chemo night sweats and failing kidneys.”
What It Really Feels Like to Lose a Family Member by Choice
by
“People used to say things to my brother like, ‘you’ll regret it if the next time you see him is at his funeral,’ and I’m sure my dad has heard similar from his closest friends. It’s a dramatic thing to say; something meant to evoke action and resolution. But maybe the least painful outcome is actually not having the person who causes you pain in your life?"
What happened when I went off the social media grid
by
“‘Just FYI—if I don’t get back to you on Insta, … I’ve deleted it from my phone,’ I’d say with a cool, casual air of someone who’s escaped the matrix of social media, like I was better, completely leaving out the part where I’d become an addicted insomniac crackhead. My L.A. friends called me ‘brave.’ My New York friends were nonplussed if not annoyed: ‘So what? I’m supposed to call you now?’”
White Trash Roots
by Linda R. Monk
“I come from a long line of people whose lives seemed straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Landless whites, rootless, disposable—’white trash.’ It’s hard to create home from contingency, or a feeling of belonging from worthlessness.”
Che Cazzo Fai
by
“It wouldn’t have worked, anyway—having Karin as my mother. I am now a woman, and women, I know from my father, disappoint. They are expendable. Push one down and another pops up in her place. You don’t try to be good, if you are a woman. You never live up to expectations—so why try? Better to be the bad girl. Better to live for the rush of endorphins you get from a bottle or a body. Better to leave first, if you can.”
How to Win a Knife Fight
by Katie Henken Robinson
“We’d skate around the rink with our arms linked and hobble up the stairs to the food court in our skates and buy slushies that turned our tongues blue, and then somehow or another the boys would puff up their chests and decide to fight and the girls would choose their fighter, and then we’d gather round the boy we chose and he would gently show us his pocket knife, unopened in his palm, looking harmless as a baby hamster, and we would say, please don’t use it, and he would say, I don’t know.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Academy’s How to Write About Social Issues in Unprecedented Times, with Kavita Das, Weds. 5/7
Learn how to write persuasive essays and op-eds with Kavita Das in How to Write About Social Issues in Unprecedented Times, an in-depth craft seminar at Narratively Academy this Wednesday, May 7 from 6pm to 9pm ET.
📢 What’s a Hermit Crab Doing in My Essay? Tuesday, 5/13 With at Hippocampus.
In this How-To Tuesday, we’ll talk about one of the most fun experimental forms of creative nonfiction: the hermit crab essay! These forms can also be an effective way to approach sensitive topics with levity and wit. Your essay could take the form of anything, from a recipe or personals ad to a corporate memo or a weather report! Think outside the box!
Together, in this session we will:
talk about what they are and how they work
look at great examples of hermit crab essays
start thinking about how to create our own
If you’ve always been curious about experimental forms creative nonfiction — or you just want a refresher! — this session will leave you inspired and ready to write.
📢 Life Writing: On Food & Drink, a 6-Week Remote/Online Workshop with , beginning May 20th
“When is a dinner more than a dinner? When it’s also a lens through which to see a world, a framework within which to consider ideas and relationships, even a platform from which to advocate for justice. When we write personal essays about food and drink, we are also telling the stories of our lives, and the lives of others. This is a creative nonfiction course, appropriate for essayists, memoirists, journalists— any writer who has ever considered the meaning of a meal.
In this six-week course, we will read and discuss works by Ciaran Carson, Jessica B. Harris, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead and others, which, taken together, convey some sense of the breadth, depth, and creative range possible in writing about food and drink. Workshop discussions of students’ writing will be at the core of our two-hour sessions.” Via Irish Writers Centre.
📢 A Late-Summer Writing (and more) Retreat in Sun-Soaked Sicily with
“Join us for four days of food writing, eating and drinking, and touring a winery and farm September 19-23 on the island of Ortigia in Sicily, Italy. We will also have a cooking class, plus lots of time to discuss voice, sensuous writing, community, and more.”
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and
will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.📢 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.
Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.
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.
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So glad you linked to Linda Monk's WHITE TRASH ROOTS! She's been working on that piece in Imaginative Storm workshops over the years and I love how atmospheric it is.
Love the essay by the poet on audacity!