Eleven Personal Narratives to Read this Week...
Plus, a new one-on-one mentoring opportunity with Narratively co-founder Brendan Spiegel 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 “Happy Birthday to Me,” 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 #7: Jami Nakamura Lin,” the seventh installment in that interview series.
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 “What the Prior Tenant Gave Me,” an essay of my own that’s an ode to artist Joe Coleman. A new essay by Vivian Manning-Schaffel is coming Wednesday.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Julia Alvarez on Falling in Love with Writing Again
by Julia Alvarez
“You don't have to lose your vision or a spouse or be stricken with a terrifying disease. But as with clogged arteries, sometimes we seasoned writers have to clean out the debris of careerism, the knowledge of all we've written, read, accomplished, so that the force can drive the green fuse through the flower. Fall in love with writing again.”
How to Feed a Dying Body
by Xi Chen
“For patients like Mr. S, however, strokes are not existential threats to their humanity. Instead, they’re dots in a constellation we call dying. In cases like these, the knee-jerk desire to treat and cure gives way to a slower conversation about how to best bring a sense of an ending to an entire life. This was how I, as the only junior on the Palliative Care team, came to be paged and consulted to evaluate Mr. S. for transfer to our unit and induction into hospice.”
The Mother Artist
by Catherine Ricketts
“The work of the mother and the work of the artist are undervalued and undercompensated. Creative work, after all, is “nonessential,” as the pandemic has made explicit. And while most everyone would affirm that the work of the mother is essential, her work is still largely taken for granted. Most communities lack substantial structures to compensate, validate, or buttress her in her labor. It is challenging to persevere in either vocation and especially challenging to persevere in both. Just as arts budgets are cut when resources are strained, creative practice may be the first thing to go in a new mother’s life. Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen?”
Know your Nonagenarians
by
“It’s happened. I felt it. I’ve just passed the adolescence of my senescence and am entering the home stretch. And much like I was dying to learn the birds and the bees of baby-making when I was 10, at 75 I want to learn to age gratefully.”
Essays from around the web…
Life in a Luxury Hotel for New Moms and Babies
by Clarissa Wei
“A week after I gave birth to my son, I lay face up on a heated massage table so that another woman could milk me. Spa music twinkled in the background as she squeezed a few drops into a glass bottle. I was trying not to feel embarrassed for producing so little—was my emergency C-section to blame?—when the awkward small talk began.”
Dying Cities: On the Lone Book of ‘Lost’ Novelist Elaine Perry
by
“Recently I received a note from respected memoirist Bridgett M. Davis (The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, 2019) inquiring if I’d ever read Another Present Era (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Elaine Perry. Published in 1990 when Perry was 30-years-old, I had never heard of the book or its writer. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Davis’ note read. ‘It’s dystopian and futuristic at the same time.’ As a fan of ‘dystopian, futuristic’ fiction, I thought it was odd that I’d never come across Perry’s book. While I was a reader of Octavia Butler’s writings, it was cool to find out that she, contrary to the beliefs of many, wasn’t the only Black woman writing speculative fiction during that era.”
The Parents Who Regret Having Children
by R.O. Kwon
“These studies align with what I've found in my personal life: While most parents don’t regret having kids, some do. Perhaps in part because I’ve written publicly about choosing not to have children, I’ve had people, especially mothers, confide in me about parental regret, and frequently enough I’ve lost count.”
I Thought I Gave Up My Virginity To A Pretty Ricky Song But That's Not The Point
by m. mick powell
“it was 2008 i was fifteen he was my camp counselor at the camp for artistically gifted kids i was an artistically gifted kid wearing a knitted raspberry beret and my first stolen set of lingerie”
Can You See Me?
by Catherine Wang
“It’s easier not to know. Or to try to forget. I forget that I’m seen as a Chinese Lady, until I get called the name of another Chinese Lady at work, reminding me that Chinese Ladies are collectivized, seen as interchangeable. Or when cat-callers yell Ni Hao out their car windows, or when classmates tell me that I’m ‘cool for an Asian,’ or when a salesclerk asks me ‘what breed I am.’”
How to Find Joy in Writing through Hard Times
by
“But this is not an essay about sadness. It’s actually about joy. About how writing my feelings into fictional characters took some of the heavy weight of reality off me and passed it onto imaginary friends who could help carry the burden.”
A Triangle is the Most Stable Formation
by Stephanie Sauer
“The desire to destroy, though, does not leave me. It does leave the unsteady heartbeat I’ve come to know as marking giddiness. It leaves the memory of fun I took in destroying perfectly made things: mailing bubbles, green fronds stripped of their stems, sturdy cardboard boxes, seedpods that fell like helicopters, a fully bloomed dandelion, a sap-laced pinecone in a camping fire…”
🚨Announcements:
📢 May Memoir Mentorship: Perfecting the Personal Essay
co-founder has 15 slots for one-on-one editing workshops in the month of May, with two rounds of feedback and a personal consultation on essays up to 2,500 words.📢 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!