Eleven New Pieces, Courtesy of the Personal Essay Boom 2.0
Plus, a couple of great workshops in the announcements section...
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 “First Person Singular in Review,” a look back at earlier essays published there. This Wednesday, 2/28, I’ll publish a new essay 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 Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #2: Lenz” the second in that interview series, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. This Friday, 3/1, I’ll publish Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story author
’s responses.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…
The Paradox of a Fair-Skinned Black Girl in the Segregated South
by Wylene Branton Wood
“But thanks to my parents, the decisions they made and how they lived their lives, I was cocooned in an environment of love and safety, largely shielded from the traumas of racism and the worst instincts of the human heart. Yet, they could not have known that trauma could be inflicted on me by someone of our own race.”
My Body Remembers the Story You Want to Erase
by Raennah Lorne
“Early in the evening, the party gathers around a fire pit and someone asks us each to share the story of our worst lay. I keep quiet and notice the silence of another woman, whom I know you’ve also slept with. After dark, she and I sprawl out on the trampoline, stare at the stars, and laugh about how bad in bed you are. Later I will wonder if she is also laughing to balance an unacknowledged pain.”
When Your Childhood Belongs to Everyone: Growing Up in a Downtown Manhattan That Changed Forever on 9/11
by Emma Dries
“When your own past is subsumed by a collective past, you cannot lock away a memory until you feel equipped to deal with it; it is not yours anymore. What to do with a childhood that, while in some ways singular, private and cozy, is wrapped up in a history of a city that belongs to everyone. When your 9/11 story no longer feels like your own because the beats are worn, known, and predictable, at least to you, served up to each new listener like a surprise treat when they find out you were three blocks away.”
How I Remember My Brothers
by Troy Sebastian/Nupqu ʔa·kǂ am̓
“Soon, I came to realize that my brothers were not John and Robert Kennedy. They were Johnny and Kenny Sebastian. Johnny was not the president of the United States of America. He was a twenty-four-year-old rodeo champion who was killed by a drunk driver. Kenny was not the former US attorney general killed in a hotel kitchen. He was a twenty-one-year-old boy who knew he would never make it to twenty-two.”
Generation Gap
by Sarah Moss
“For a few years, starting when he was about ten, my older son and I used to go to all the plays in each season at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon. We lived nearby. His little brother was too young and my husband was just as happy at home with a book. I’d been dubious about his company at first. It’s a late night, I’d said, and you probably won’t follow all the dialogue, there are very few kids in Shakespeare, even the jokes are quite Elizabethan. I didn’t want to have to leave at the interval because of a child’s boredom. Try me, he said.”
The Woman Behind the Mann
by
“My mother-in-law, Patricia Lowe, began to write a memoir about her parents in her own old age. When she died, her work unfinished, I inherited all her research. Reading Helen’s letters, her erudite, humble introductions to Mann’s novels, her illuminating essays about translation, her poetry, I heard the echoes of other women artists, then and now, torn between their creative vision and their devotion to family and profession. I knew that Patricia would have liked me to finish the memoir that she’d started…Instead, I began writing a novel about Helen, seeking to tell her story through the lens of my empathy and imagination.”
Essays from around the web…
Why I Hope My Parents Won’t Read My Novel
by R.O. Kwon
“…queerness, kink, really anything having to do with sexuality – these aren’t topics Koreans tend to discuss. ‘Korean people aren’t queer,’ Han says, joking, and we both laugh. But it’s what I heard, growing up. It’s still not unusual for first-generation immigrants, along with elders living in Korea, to think being queer to be a strange illness, a blight afflicting other people, but not us. And it’s difficult to be told one doesn’t exist, or that one’s desires necessarily constitute an illness.”
I Can't Stop Thinking About the People in Alabama Who Lost Their Embryos
by Kate Suddes
“I feel tremendous empathy for those parents. I have a starting lineup of embryos, too. There are five of them and they live across the country from me now. I’ve thought about this scenario often. What would I do — how would I feel — if they were lost in a fire or flood? I thought about it nonstop in the days leading up to the embryo transfer that would turn into my youngest daughter. What if it’s the wrong embryo? What if it’s a ‘bad’ embryo? What if the wrong egg was fertilized with the right sperm or vice versa? What if we go through every single one and never have another living child?”
What is Special About Dusk?
by Katiy Heath
“A cloud would soon billow out, a considerable mass, smoky red; a disorientating blanket of color, devilish red, divine red, nuclear and unnatural. Yet nature is what would send red into our tender hearts on the afternoon of this annular eclipse.”
The Mind Crack’d
by
“The night your nerves first go amok, you run into the dorm’s hallway looking for help. You are so hot you are sure you will spontaneously combust. Your hands are over your ears — an instinct you hope might tamp down the electronic snow from an old television buzzing loudly in your head. You see the girl next door in the hallway and tell her you need to go to the emergency room. It is the first time you speak to her. Call Security, she tells you as she floats away. How you wish you were as light as she is. How you wish you were anyone else.”
How My Mother’s Postcards Forged Connections Across Generations
by
“‘I'm going around the world,’ my mother told me breathlessly. ‘On Friday.’ It was a year after my father had died, six months before their 50th anniversary. She was 76 and about to bravely board a 100-day cruise trip. The only boat she'd previously boarded was the Staten Island Ferry. I was worried: who would look after her?”
🚨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.
📢 Authors Chloé Caldwell and Alex Alberto just launched Scrappy Literary to help writers take the literary life into their own hands by finding unconventional approaches that work for them, and there are a few spots left at their next retreat in Hudson, NY, from March 10 to 13.
This retreat combines all of the ways in which Chloé and Alex have taken the literary life into their own hands: by letting go of imposter syndrome, cold-emailing, using the backdoor, going rogue, tapping into their unused resources, DIY-ing publicity, and more. These three days in Hudson will be packed with actionable exercises done in real time, like hitting submit, stalking agents, organizing your lit shit, and crafting your action plan to map your literary life. We will alternate with talks that open the publishing black box: how each avenue works, including real numbers: advances, royalties, distribution, sales, and industry statistics.
📢 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!
This is an outstanding selection, very engaging. Thank you for posting it!