Fourteen Great Personal Essays to Devour this Week...
Plus a call for submissions from Raising Mothers, and some workshops from Narratively and others, in the announcements.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring three 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 “Seeing Someonw,” by Amy Shearn. A new essay is coming soon.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing, plus writing prompts and exercises. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “Seven Essays on Friendships,” a reading list by Anandi Mishra.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Lead the Way
by Ofelia Brooks
“The Black girl develops the tenacity she sees in her mother. Her mother, very familiar with racism, taught her how to fight it. She thrives. She graduates high school as valedictorian. She attends Ivy League schools and, already used to defending herself, pushes against racism at every turn. At every school, in every job, in every relationship. The Black boy doesn’t think his mother’s tenacity applies to him. He has no idea how to fight off racism. It bothers him, but he feels resigned, powerless to escape it. He graduates high school with okay grades and gets into an okay college. But the racism there intensifies and infuriates him. To his fortune, the college’s binge drinking culture is the perfect coping mechanism.”
Wild Borders
by Russ McSpadden
“I sometimes bring my child on these work trips to “toughen him up,” but that language is more convenient, saltier, than precise. Besides helping him grow his hiking legs and grit, I want to teach him to be tender and open to the inconspicuous beauty that lurks out here.”
The Meaning of White
by Emily Urquhart
“I’m marching and singing along with nine preschool kids, leading an imaginary reptile parade, when one of them suddenly stops, points at me and shouts, “You’re the momma dinosaur!” It surprises me at first, to hear myself be called mama. The word stirs up a sadness I thought I’d left behind.”
What the Germans Left Behind
by Anna Parker
“The summer storms that rumbled through the valley were particularly intense at night. We would watch the raindrops drive into the darkness from the long rectangular window in my parents’ bedroom which, located at the front of the house, gave us a view of the line of trees separating our cottage from the one in front. The branches of the trees, two towering lindens and an elm, thrashed wildly as their trunks swayed perilously back, forth, sideways.’”
Every Day I Write the Book
by Michael Musto
“One well-meaning writer recently told me I was ‘having a wonderful final chapter,’ before realizing the awkwardness of his remark and taking it back. But by now, I know how important it is for me to not think of any chapter as my final one, regardless of what others might assume.”
Stillwaters
by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene
“In a meandering conversation along the Garden Route, a lovely Christian woman asked me rhetorically, Why are my fieldhands so partial to alcohol? I said nothing about dop. I said nothing about men like her father’s father. How could they pay pregnant women cheap wine over wages? I did not ask her, How did your farmer father and all your forebears sleep at night watching foetal alcohol syndrome spread throughout this outrageously beautiful coastline like a virus on the vines?”
Playing the Dozens: On the Joys and Functions of Sh*t Talk
by Rafi Kohan
“According to the activist H. Rap Brown, who changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the dozens served as linguistic training for many Black youth, too. As he writes in his 1969 memoir: ‘Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.’ And: ‘We played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks played Scrabble.’”
The Water Spirits Will Carry Us
by Kerra Bolton
“We didn’t start out fearing swimming and open water. History and epigenetics transformed faith into fear. Historical evidence suggests that as far back as the 15th century, coastal West Africans (those from Senegal, Gambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Cameroon, and Nigeria), including women, knew how to swim as much as the Europeans of the same era. Members of West African communities even developed a breaststroke prototype that Europeans didn’t use until 1899.”
Essays from around the web…
A Daughter Finds Unexpected Discoveries on Her Father's Favorite Trail
by Tarn Udall
“Nine months after emailing me about the Clock, my dad died at 61 while on a solo backpacking trip in the Winds—and only 20 miles from the Clock. He had a massive heart attack and crumpled to the ground with his hiking poles still in hand. When he didn’t return on time, a search began, and it would be almost a week before his body was spotted from a helicopter. I had just finished my first year of law school. I don’t believe in God, but to have your father die in his favorite place in the world rather than in the checkout line at Safeway does give you some faith.”
The One Thing I Did Right
by Lani V. Cox
“When I went off to college, I discovered my inner hippie, like full-frontal New Age, happy baby yoga shit. To be crystal clear, I wasn’t a crunchy granola who drove a fuel-friendly SUV, or a patchouli-laced Earth goddess with a killer jewelry collection. No, I was a card-carrying tarot addict, but I had to give all the decks away (but one) when I realized I couldn’t make a decision without consulting the oracle first…But I also did a deep dive into self-help literature, which one inevitably finds in shops with sage bundles, prisms, and wind chimes.”
The Girl and the Haint
by DW McKinney
“As an adult, I questioned the Ol’ White Woman’s existence, but how could I deny the presence of someone who had seen me grow up? Who had listened to my childish songs filling the air like birdsong? Who had always been a presence lurking in the background, watching over me? The night we prepared my grandfather’s den for in-home hospice care, I walked out onto the adjoining patio and stepped down into the backyard. I thought, That Ol’ Woman will get you. I laughed. Maybe I wanted her to get me. That way I would have some company and she might join me. In the midst of my grief and in earnest communion, I sang a spiritual.”
Childless
by Kristen Gentry
“I knew of Mama’s depression but didn’t understand it. Aside from the dark clouds in The Neverending Story, I couldn’t fathom a powerful Nothing that consumes without will or warning. I wondered what happened and searched myself for the wrong I’d done, my sin that had sung to the serpent. I worked hard to be good. I excelled at school, spoke quietly, tried not to ask for too much. I saw ensuring my mother’s happiness and sobriety as my personal responsibilities. and the lives of their children. We escaped violence but fell into the hands of poverty.”
Lullaby
by Jane Ratcliffe
“Rather than sleeping apart after a disagreement, we huddled into each other, the cats curled at our feet, terrified at the notion of our relationship not spanning forever. "I'm sorry," I'd say. And I meant it. "I'm sorry, too," he'd say, his head snuggled into my neck, his arms wrapped tightly around me. "Let's never be apart," he'd say. "Never," I'd say. Though soon enough he would start drinking and I would start controlling. Or, from his perspective, I would start controlling and he would start drinking. But I never stopped loving him. Or liking him, for that matter.”
Family Day at the Psych Ward
by Michael Cannistraci
“I drove to my brother’s house. Steve had married a recovering addict, Linda, he met in rehab, and she had a calming influence on him. However, she couldn’t take him to the psychiatric emergency room. An older neighbor had just come over after fracturing her wrist, and Linda was trying to manage that crisis while Steve was pacing frenetically and talking in half-sentences. Steve hated the sexual side effects of taking his medications and would refuse to take them, spinning into constant cycles of mania. Linda tired of taking him repeatedly to the psychiatric hospital to stabilize him and smooth the jagged edges of his mood cycles.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Raising Mothers Is Accepting Submissions
Raising Mothers celebrates and centers the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and Brown parents. Raising Mothers publishes experimental and traditional fiction, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews, book reviews, photo essays, and comic/graphic narratives. Raising Mothers publishes work that centers parenthood from either a parent, or child-centered perspective from BIPOC people exclusively; women, femmes, disabled, nonbinary and LGBTQIA+ parents.
📢 Starina Catchatoorian is Leading a One-Day Music & Memoir Virtual Writing Workshop
"Join me for another round of my one-day Music & Memoir Virtual Writing Workshop on Feb 15th, 7-8:30 EST. Whether your goal is to write a personal essay, or a book, or simply unlock your creativity, writers of all levels will have the opportunity to write and share their stories using music as a portal for inspiration.” Register at Starinawrites@gmail.com
📢 Narratively is now offering results-driven classes, seminars and writing critiques taught by Narratively’s editors, contributors and storytelling heroes.
Narratively Academy's debut lineup of classes includes Telling Your Story: The 60-Minute Seminar for Kickstarting Your Memoir, with instructor Kern Carter on Tuesday, February 13, and The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel, an 8-week workshop with Audrey Clare Farley starting February 15.
📢 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!
Thank you so much, Sari! I appreciate ya!
It's truly amazing how much great memoir writing there is every week!