Eleven Great Personal Essays to Read this Week...
PLUS: Workshops from Narratively Academy and Literary Liberation, and "Summer Salons" From FAWC
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 “The Bargain” by
.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 Prompt-O-Matic #15,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #12: Carvell Wallace,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #13: Laurie Stone.”
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 “You Are Where You Eat,” by Vivian Manning-Schaffel.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Black Feminism for Beyonce, Megan, and Me
by Jennifer Stewart
“All of this changed when Megan Thee Stallion entered my life after my divorce. My socially conservative world avoided talking about sexual pleasure. It seemed that God prioritized two things: male pleasure and childbirth. The woman’s pleasure was never a consideration, and women responded with humor by positioning sex as a sort of relationship tax. From white housewives to black girls from around the way, sex became a way to get what we wanted out of men, whether it be jewelry or a designer bag, or a new kitchen appliance. Sexual pleasure was demoted to a happy, infrequent, surprise.”
Downstream
by
“The spring after the hurricane, when the pool reopened and my children returned to swim team, I watched them every afternoon from the shade on the pool deck: the confidence of each breath above water, the strength and grace of every stroke, how the water almost seemed to part for them…After practice, when all the swimmers and their parents had gone home, I returned to the pool alone, lowered my body into the water, took a deep breath, and tried to remember what I had seen: first one arm and then the other, turning the head up over the shoulder to breathe. It wasn’t as easy as my children made it look.”
Sinking Town
by Amitava Kumar
“The reason I came to Joshimath was to see the houses that had developed cracks. I had read reports about a sinking Himalayan town, and understood, in a vague way, that the town’s fate was tied to poor development and ecological disaster.”
What Should You Do with Your Stuff before You Die?
by Christina Myers
“A few objects will outlast us; we can imagine our jewellery going on to children or grandchildren, and a solid hammer can be handed down over a few generations. But most of the goods that pass through our hands are short lived in the grand scheme of things. We will always need another one, of whatever we’ve just bought, at some point. Until one day we won’t.”
Loving Renee Back
by [sarah] Cavar
“I don’t know how to look a ghost, this ghost or any other, in the eye. I never learned. Instead, I see Renee––tall, bracelet-laden, jingling––with the rest of my senses. I smell her; she smelled the way every mom except my own smelled, like a stranger-woman whose hugs had teeth. She shared the often-grating accent my grandparents also possessed, situated as we were a mere mistake from Rhode Island, another moment from Massachusetts.”
What My Father Left Me (an excerpt of “Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History”)
by Margaret Juhae Lee
“When he and my mother moved into Mirabella in 2015, I had urged my father to sell off the land that was still under his name. He was the patriarchal head of the family—the eldest son of the eldest son, the one supposedly in charge…‘Dad, I don’t want to have to deal with land in Korea after you die.’ My father discovered that a family member had forged his name on one of the land deeds, as did another relative from the generation before him.”
Essays from around the web…
Statues and the Colonised Mind
by Farah Ahmed
“But this morning I saw a woman in front of it and cursing. She tore the flowers off the statue, threw them in the bushes and after shaking her fist at Gandhi, walked away swearing. I was shocked by her reaction. Wasn’t the statue just a mound of bronze? And what was it doing aside from reigning over the park so peacefully? Obviously, the statue had triggered something in the woman.”
The New Me
by Kristen Gentry
“We were on our way inside to call home when Mama pulled up, delivering a quiet apology. She said she’d overslept, which sounded about right. I hadn’t yet learned to question her, at least verbally, though my unease was growing. Why was she always sleeping so much? So deeply? Why did it seem like she was asleep even when she was awake?”
Junior Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
by Dave O'Karma
“I started working on a knuckleball…Why, you may ask? Does it have anything to do with the recent loss of a job I've worked for 30 years?…Yep, that was soul-crushing. Still more devastating is knowing that at 56, my life's résumé feels fossilized, typewritten, landlined and snail-mailed in an iPad-Twitter-Android world that demands breakneck speed.”
Astonish
by Diane Zinna
“The sky is opening up, a slit in the fabric of the night-gone-strange. You turn and your house full of girls is a strobing firefly. So small. They’ve been so mean all night. This was a mean dare. Nicole said gah, just do something for once in your life, you are so boring, so useless. It was your birthday but Jen G. said it was like you weren’t even there. Your eyes are full of sweat, tears, drips of rain. You’re so small in the rain. You were supposed to touch the sign. It was part of the dare. But you need both hands to cover you. You take longer than you should to decide which hand to move. A car appears at the end of the street and slows. Now the night retreats and it’s just you like a butterfly pinned to a black board. You turn away from the car to hide your face, the parts that your hands cover. Like a child who thinks they’re invisible if they close their eyes….From the car, a man’s voice: Young lady, young lady.”
Borrowed Light
by Sai Pradhan
“A series of cables were hooked up to the orb, as if it was all nothing more than a simple construction site. I live in Hong Kong, so I suppose, technically, there should have been unending bamboo scaffolding as well, but there wasn’t.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 This Week at Academy: How to Write a Nonfiction Book that Reads Like a Novel
New workshop, starting this week: The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel. Author Audrey Clare Farley leads this 8-week workshop for writers working on book-length narrative nonfiction in genres such as memoir, biography, history or true crime.
📢 LETTERS FOR REVOLUTION: A Two-Hour Workshop from on June 8th
Throughout history, Black women have resisted oppression. From colonization to the #metoo movement, Black women have done the labor of building community, seeking justice, and creating safe spaces for others. Letters For Revolution is a historical fiction writing course, where true historical stories of women who resisted oppression are combined with epistolary writing techniques. This story combines the best of history and fiction and gives you the tools to ground yourself in storytelling.
📢 Attend “Summer Salons” at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center:
A lineup of influential figures in the arts and culture scene will host Summer Salons at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center from May 31st to September 7th. Poets Tracy K. Smith and Major Jackson, curator Helen Molesworth, photographer Catherine Opie, author Sarah Schulman, and journalist Peter Slevin will lead intimate weekend conversations and workshops.
Whether attending in person or via live stream, participants will engage directly with the artists in unmoderated discussions, followed by Q&A sessions and hands-on workshops. Prices are determined based on affordability, and all ticket sales will support the Fine Arts Work Center’s commitment to providing free arts and culture events, including this summer’s nightly readings and artist talks hosted each week Monday through Wednesday nights, open art studios, and open-mic readings on Thursday nights, among other free events. The lineup:
📢 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!