Fourteen Personal Essays, Submissions info, and more...
Plus: *THERE WILL BE NO NEWSLETTER MONDAY, AUGUST 14TH AS I WILL BE TRAVELING.*
*THERE WILL BE NO NEWSLETTER MONDAY, AUGUST 14TH AS I WILL BE TRAVELING.*
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, 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. *THERE WILL BE NO NEWSLETTER MONDAY, AUGUST 14TH AS I WILL BE TRAVELING.*
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Re-Parent Trap” by @Boo Trundle.
Re: submissions for First Person Singular, here’s some good news: The week of August 7-14, Katie Kosma, my fellow former Longreads editor, will be open for submissions of essays of 1.5K to 3K words. Katie will be editing one essay per month here. I’ll share Katie’s email for submissions on Monday, August 7th. Get your pieces polished in the meantime!
Here’s what Katie Kosma says she is looking for:
Completed, previously unpublished essays of 1500-3000 words.
I'm especially drawn to bravery: bravery to fully tell all the parts that matter to you, bravery to reexamine those parts and life-fulcrums with candor, and bravery to push creative boundaries.
And here is Katie Kosma’s email address for submissions: editorkosma@gmail.com
(*I’ll probably do a limited submission period of my own, soon, too, likely in the fall. So many pieces came in last time I had my submissions open that I’ve still got more pieces to respond to. - Sari)
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I published “Private Storm on Black Mesa Landscape” by Jean Iversen there.
Essays from partner publications…
Voices on Addiction: Inheritance
by Christy Tending
“We simply have not treated climate change as the intergenerational curse that it is. We have left it, again and again, for the next generation. We have chosen comfort and familiarity and numbness over a reckoning that might have spared our children.”
How to Fit into the Publishing World
by Annahid Dashtgard
“This is my coming out as an author, and it matters to me that I’m represented as authentically as possible. Still, when the host organization’s director comes on stage at the end to thank us presenters, she tries, stutters, and proceeds to grossly mispronounce my name. There are only six of us to thank. What she’s enacting, the fact she has not bothered to get the one word right while I have memorized a speech of over a thousand words to support her event, is not just a one off. It’s a goddamn pattern.”
It’s Not Like I Even Wanna Talk about How I’m the Only Black Person Watching Clerks III
by Gyasi Hall
“I don’t wanna talk about how I’m the only Black person watching Clerks III the night Kevin Smith comes to Iowa City. The joke is that there are no Black people here, and the ones who are here are really good at hiding, or else they’re really good at being hidden. It’s the kind of joke you learn to make as soon as you spend more than twenty minutes living in Iowa, a joke that lives alongside all the funny ways to complain about the drunk undergrads and the increasingly elaborate metaphors for the cornfields that surround us like, I don’t know, something vast and unfathomable that intends to do us harm.”
How I Became A Modern Bootlegger
by John Koopman
“This is something they don’t tell you about criminal activity. When you’re facing economic hardship, you’re also usually facing mind-numbing, soul-destroying drudgery at the jobs that are available to you. It’s not just that they don’t pay you enough. They also make you feel dead. A lot of people turn to illegal or otherwise questionable activity simply because they want to feel alive.”
Catch Me a Catch
by Elaine Soloway
“Let’s bypass the high-tech method of mate finding and turn to one more traditional, aka matchmaking. Why not hand the task over to those qualified to do the picking?…My Kids.”
You Don’t Need to Suffer to Make Art—But It Can Help
by Sarah Rose Etter
“Writing a novel is impossible. I never thought I would do it. It is tantamount to building and solving a puzzle by yourself. It’s endlessly fascinating and humbling. It’s a process I will never master and that’s why I love it. If I’m lucky, I’ll have written five or six books by the time I’m dead. If I’m extremely lucky, two or three of those will be decent.”
Once A Dancer
by Diana Evans
“One cold, dark Monday night in a March of my midlife, in that moment of winter when spring wants to hold on a little longer before arriving, I travelled across London to a bathhouse basement in King’s Cross to learn the dance routine to Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’. The basement was part of an establishment called Drink, Shop & Do, and like several feel-good, eclectic pop-ups founded by twenty-first-century entrepreneurs, it no longer exists post-pandemic. The idea was that one might wander in from the urban concourse and hang out in the bright-toned cafe, maybe browse for a while the gift cards or jewellery on sale in a corner, and then, if the mood took you, or indeed if you had come especially, you could venture downstairs to the bare floor and the waiting music to get your freak on. There were many other activities offered under ‘Do’, as I recall, such as candle making, Lego robot construction and tea towel screen-printing. It was a nice concept, just flimsy in the face of a plague.”
The Atomic Disease
Rachel Greenley
“Recently, I visited the Hanford overlook. I was trying to answer the question of whether nuclear power harnessed for energy instead of a weapon could be good. I also had a more personal inquiry; how did my own husband get the atomic disease?”
Private Storm on Black Mesa Landscape
by
“At 53, after 30 years as an editor and communications manager, pursuing creative nonfiction writing was a now-or-never endeavor. I knew that once I entered the program, there might not be another chance to be this quiet for months, maybe even years, as my money and schedule would be bound tightly to this long-held dream.”
Essays from around the web…
The Insidious Faux-Feminism of Barbie
by Chavisa Woods
“According to the faux-feminism of the Barbie movie, mothers are a matronly monolith who are supposed to stand as placeholders for their daughter’s achievements. This is somehow a feminist statement? This same statement applied to men would read as so obviously asinine it boggles the mind.”
After
By Anne Gudger
“I’m Annie, I said, and the blondes and brunettes bobbed their heads Go on. We’re listening. My husband died in a car accident. I wanted to say he was alone. Crashed his car on black ice on the way to go night skiing. I wanted to say I was pregnant. I wanted to say I’m a single mom now to my darling boy. I wanted.”
Empirical Evidence: An Abecedary
by Andrew Zubiri
“When my Lolo’s younger brother visits from Honolulu, we are excited for his coming-home presents: floral ‘Hawaii’ T-shirts and boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. I can’t wait to impress my friends with the black souvenir hat embroidered with the logo of the Navy ship USS Missouri BB-63.”
Summer Lovin’: Considering the Teen Vacation Romance Movie
by Jenny Singer
“How terrible it is to be raised addicted to romance when you are a child and there really isn’t anything you can do about it. How awful to be seized upon for years by the vague idea of potential affection, to be making eyes at your male peers as they enjoy the luxury of unembarrassed playtime. There is a strange claustrophobia to this feeling that you are forbidden from pursuing your goal by the exact culture that taught you to pursue it. In these circumstances, movies that suggested another possibility were both deluding and comforting—another world was possible, for the thin, white, beautiful, and lucky.”
The Last Time I Had a Best Friend I Was 11
by Diann Leo-Omine
“Quietly, I attended her funeral. What right did I have to be there, as her former best friend? How could I reconcile with her now, with her passed on?”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Take my Skillshare workshop in blending the personal and universal in your essays!
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, 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.
REMINDER: *THERE WILL BE NO NEWSLETTER MONDAY, AUGUST 14TH AS I WILL BE TRAVELING.*
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!