Essays and Submissions and Workshops, Oh, My...
Plus multiple calls for submissions, and workshops from Narratively Academy and Minda Honey.
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 continue 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 ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
📢 Next Monday, September 1st we’ll have another crowd-sourced edition of “Memoir Monday,” while I travel. Get ready to share links to your favorite personal essays that were published recently, or ever…
Essays from partner publications…
How Would Jane Austen Define an “Accomplished Woman” Today?
by Grace Aldridge
“My ex-husband-to-be and I first exchanged ‘I love yous’ the summer after my junior year, when I stayed on campus at my small liberal arts college to complete a fellowship I’d been granted for a research project. I was tracking the concept of “bloom” in Austen’s novels. She used this term to describe the limited period of time in which each of her heroines was at the peak of her loveliness and liveliness, irresistible to those around them—including the man each would come to marry.”
New York City Is the Cruelest Place I’ve Ever Lived (an excerpt of "Before They Were Men")
by Jacob Tobia
“As a queer person, you’re supposed to move to New York and finally feel free. It’s sold as an epicenter—arguably the epicenter—of liberation for queer and trans folks. But there’s a reason Stonewall happened in New York. There’s a reason why New York City was one of the first places where the trannies and faggots and dykes and whores finally said ‘ENOUGH’ and began punching back.”
Drones and Decolonization
by William T. Vollman
“I never like it when authorities or committees of any nature, for any reason whatsoever, especially the noblest, officially expunge a writer’s public presence. To ban implies to me that the censor harbors some discreditable motive, such as – this is the most excusable if also the most pathetic – fear that the writing might somehow be actively dangerous to the state. To which I demand: How could a dead writer’s notions possibly threaten Ukraine, at least in comparison to a Russian drone? Or the censor might instead be impelled by outright hatred; not to mention the quotidian motive of self-advantage.”
Do It for the Love: Michael Franti and Me
by
“How long did I have? Could I weather chemo a third time? Would I see my son marry? Get to hold my first grandchild? Visit Italy again? After the initial gut-punch, I decided that for as long as I had left, I would live as loud and as large as possible. I would travel. Keep writing. Go to concerts that feed my soul. Spend time with people I cherish. Do things that give me joy.”
Essays from around the web…
Our Marriage Includes an Emergency Backpack
by
“Discovering each other meant discovering each other’s worlds. Through him, I learned Arabic, my Iraqi-born father’s long-forgotten tongue. Through me, he reconnected to the Hebrew he had spoken as a young man laboring on Israeli construction sites and later in Israeli military prison, where he had been sent for his participation in protests.”
I Thought Grief Would Destroy Me
by
“When Andrea’s death was still hypothetical, I did not imagine it was something I’d survive. Certainly not something I could stand through. Without them, I thought I’d feel like a house with the roof blown off, leveled by a hurricane of grief. But instead of wreckage after a storm, I’m more like a flower in a season growing slowly colder. I am losing Andrea one petal at a time.”
The Biggest Small Triumph
by
“For a few months after the accident, I couldn’t go anywhere in a car without taking an Ativan or a Xanax first. I felt on-edge most of the time, but especially in cars. I was waiting for the next loud noise to rearrange everything. But I also felt really determined to get back to my old life, when I could go dancing or take a drive upstate with friends or even just take a shower on my own. I wanted to feel independent again.”
King of the Creek
by Beth Deutsch
“One Friday night in the winter of our grief, David and I curled up in front of a fire for pizza and a movie. Although this winter had been particularly hard—its cold colder, its gray skies grayer, its shorter days seeming cruelly longer—that night I was feeling pretty good. I lit the Shabbat candles, said blessings over the bread (or pizza, in our case) and wine. I had chosen the movie Ezra because a friend had recommended it, but I had no idea it was about the struggles of a young boy on the autism spectrum. The beautiful film strikes too close to home and by its end I am heaving in my husband’s arms.”
How Addie, the blue heeler rescue, made me part of her pack
by Anna Bruno
“My life isn’t a rom-com, but I did fall in love with my future husband’s dog first, writes Anna Bruno. Addie is a working dog, and she taught me what it means to keep going, together.”
To the Hiker Carrying Two Backpacks
by Maggie Downs
“What you carried had nothing to do with proving strength. It was love. Remembrance. Honor. Things I hadn’t even considered. How often do we misjudge the burdens others bear? How often do we let our own stories blind us to what’s real?”
What’s Real Can’t Die
by
“Friendships carved from the marrow of one another’s bones are like that: primordial, untamed by time or distance. Matt was always with me. Still is.”
Four Words for a Really Bad Marriage
by
“After the divorce was final,my ex-husband was indicted on multiple counts of financial fraud. He was arrested in a pre-dawn raid at his Chicago apartment, booked, and posted bail. I didn’t know about any of this for weeks until my children sheepishly told me that Daddy had gone to jail. He’d asked them not to tell me. People probably assumed I had turned him in. I hadn’t.”
The Fall of Eighth Grade
by Holly Mitchell
“I accept who I am later, in scientific isolation. When I am sure, at 16, I remember Anne, and how I was around her, uncharacteristically comfortable, yet jealous. Was that a crush? I wanted more time with her in any form at all. Thinking back, I suspect she was gay too, that I recognized in her something I hadn’t articulated about myself. I look her up online, and I creep through her public photos, finding neither proof nor anything else to challenge my theory. I’m in high school, and she is in college. Somehow, our difference in age seems larger than before.
Questions Answered: The How To Write An Essay Collection Q&A
by
This is not a personal essay, but rather a really informative Q&A with one of our greatest living writers about writing an essay collection. In my opinion, it is more than worth the price of a paid subscription (as are all of Alex’s posts)! I also highly recommend his essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. - Sari
🚨Announcements:
📢 Check out ’s New Fall Class Lineup…
Narratively Academy just announced their Fall 2025 writing class lineup, with new classes on Infusing Memoir with Magical Realism, figuring out if your story is memoir or autofiction, how to write stories about shame and silence, and much more.
📢 Submit a Story to Writers by 9/1 Read to be Considered for their 10/25 Storytelling event in Kingston, NY…
On October 25th, Writers Read will hold a storytelling event at the Center for Photography (CPW) in Kingston, NY. If you’d like to be considered as a storyteller, submit your true story story. “Submit your true story in 650 words by midnight on September 1; if selected by our editorial team we'll invite you to present it this fall before a live audience in Kingston, New York.”
📢 ’s 6-Week Workshop for Black Women Writers 9/21-10/26
Join Minda Honey in a 6-week workshop built on the seminal anthology Black Women Writers at Work edited by Claudia Tate. This is a space for Black women writers to engage in craft discussions and community. Focusing on the first portion of the book, we will study the life and work of Claudia Tate, Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara and Gwendolyn Brooks (and work our way through the rest of the text in subsequent courses in the series). The last two sessions will be reserved for workshopping. This workshop will meet Sundays on Zoom, from Sept. 21st to Oct. 26th 1P to 3P ET. 7 spots remaining — reserve your spot today!
📢 Call for Submissions for “Freedom Ways,” a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and
Memoir Land and Literary Liberation co-publish an essay series that is now called “Freedom Ways.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation. Here are the first two essays in the series:
📢 At : Paid Call for Submissions for Personal Essays by Humans About the Human Experience (No AI Writing Allowed)
We are looking for original, unpublished 1,000-2,500-word personal essays that explore transformative, powerful human experiences, especially those that are often kept secret or hidden.
We pay $50 for general essays. Deadline: September 30, 2025 (ET); earlier submissions have the best chance of acceptance.
Object-ives is a new column featuring rotating authors that will run on Fridays in our Stuff-ed section for flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words about an object you own or have owned in the past. We pay $25 for Object-ives essays.
📢 “Nuts and Bolts” Seeking Sinéad O’Connor essays…
To celebrate the July launch of the anthology Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us (One Signal), with contributions from notable essayists including Lidia Yuknavitch, Porochista Khakpour, Rayne Fisher-Quan, Megan Stielstra, and many more, anthology editors Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne will be running a series of additional essays about Sinead on the Substack "Nuts and Bolts." To celebrate and explore the legacy and impact of Sinéad O'Connor's music, protest, spirituality, and example of living her truths. Please send pieces of 2,000 words or fewer to sineadanthology@gmail.com, with a deadline of August 31, 2025. Pieces selected will appear in Summer 2025. All rights revert to the author after publication, and previously published essays are acceptable as long as the author holds the rights. Compensation for those chosen for publication will be one copy of the hardcover anthology.
📢 Call for Contributors to an Anthology about Infidelity
Tentative title: Stepping Out: Writings on Infidelity
Editors: Susan Ostrov Weisser, author of LOVELAND: A MEMOIR OF ROMANCE AND FICTION and Nan Bauer-Maglin, editor of GRAY LOVE and LOVING ARRANGEMENTS
This essay collection explores the enduring and complex issue of infidelity in romantic relationships, a topic that remains taboo and emotionally charged despite the evolving norms around love, commitment, and sexuality. The book will feature personal essays from those with direct or thoughtful insights into infidelity, whether as participants, victims, or observers. Analytic essays approaching the topic through psychological, sociological, historical, or literary lenses are welcomed. Reprints will be considered. Please send inquiries or a 1–2-page description to both Susan at weisser@adelphi.edu and Nan at Nan.Bauermaglin99@ret.gc.cuny.edu by August 31st. Be sure to include a short note about your previous writing, your profession, and any other relevant information about yourself.
📢 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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Oh thank you so much. This compliment is a wonderful surprise.
Another brilliant line-up. Thanks, Sari :)