Future tense, trans terminology, a sandstorm, oldish for Eilish, and a ghost town...
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each personal essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
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Does Making Predictions Impede the Formation of Memories?
by Hanna Seo (Illustration by Sirin Thada for Catapult)
"Reading that paper, I felt like Dorothy stepping out of her house and into Oz for the first time, life in technicolor. Might it be harder for me to revisit the past because I’m always living in the future? Perhaps anticipation, trying to predict what will happen, has always been a diversion for me, where the 'now' gets swallowed up by my guessing at whatever comes next."
Felt Space
by Lee Anderson (Art by Eva Azenaro Acero)
"To call myself transgender with three syllables feels too heavy. Like if I can cut it down to just trans, keeping both my figure and my identity trim, it doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. In a way, it doesn’t. To be trans is to be transcendent, transgressive, and transmogrified, but it is also translucent, transected, and transformed.”
The Overspill
by Elaine L. Wang (Image © Wade Tregaskis)
"February 2003, right before the SARS pandemic. I was loafing on the playground when the sky turned a shade of urine. At first there weren’t any ripples in the air. Everything was still. Then the winds whistled and screeched, marauding in circles. The yellow color stiffened – a curtain of dust was descending – and we cowered against it. We clung, we tumbled. It loosened our hold. Teachers screamed for us to shelter inside, and from there memory drops away."
Happier Than Ever
by Amy Shearn (Photo Courtesy of Amy Shearn)
"I guess I’d expected that, once single for the first time in my adult life, I would probably continue to feel ancient and exhausted, like I had been feeling for the preceding few years, as my marriage was petering out. As it turns out, when I’m alone, I’m giddy with freedom; I live like a teenager, or maybe like unencumbered 20-something women are supposed to and I never did."
This Town Has Become A Museum
by Andres Octavio (Illustration by Pedro Gomes)
"That is life in a dwindling community eroding by the day, adagio, slowly, like a seaside cliff. You don’t notice the creeping onslaught of change when you live within it every day; it is only visible on the rare occasion when one leaves, returns and sees it anew."
Continuing Ed…
Author Courtney Maum is offering what looks to be an interesting memoir writing course at Domestika. “Learn how to write a compelling personal narrative by exploring different literary devices and story structures.”
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