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Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
You might have noticed we also have a nice new logo, thanks to Ian MacAllen of Design is the Message!
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The tenth original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in November, is “Sobriety Through the Major Aracana” by Christy Tending. The eleventh original essay is coming in a few weeks. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Our first in what will be a series of seminars was Publicity 101 For Writers with book publicist Lauren Cerand, was held October 8th. Paying subscribers can view the resulting video here.
Essays from partner publications…
Cavities and Crowns: What Our Teeth Tell Us About Our Lives
by Angelique Stevens
“I was still lying on my back, the white nylon bib around my neck, the sour taste lingering in my mouth, when the hygienist said, ‘Oh honey, you’re beautiful. You should take care of your smile.’ The dentist had just given me a twenty-five-thousand-dollar estimate to get all of the problems with my teeth fixed. ‘It’s like buying a car,’ he said. And I wondered what kind of car he thought I owned.”
Forest
by April Lim
“‘Each girl in my family has one’ is the excuse I give when asked about my bracelet. Gold wire, pebble gems of ruby, emerald, sapphire. It’s not a lie, but not the whole truth.”
Why I Finally Gave Up on England
by Waverly S. M.
“I felt perfectly desolate, convinced that the UK was past the point of changing for the better. Leaving began to feel like a comfort; if the country couldn’t get out of its rut, then at least I could get out of mine..”
Primitive Child
by Jason Allen-Paisant
“When I was a child, I knew a tree – mango, coconut, guinep, breadfruit, star apple, guava – through climbing. And if, because of their size, they were unclimbable, I looked longingly at them. I stoned them to down their fruit or I would cut bamboo poles or tree limbs to pick something from them.”
Supper at Scribner’s
by Michael A. Gonzales
“Every Friday (payday) I entered that cathedral of literature, and splurged on a crisp, new book as opposed to going to one of the many used book shops scattered throughout the city. Scribner’s was a place that felt as welcoming and safe as a warm embrace. At an hour when folks were sitting down for dinner, I was sorting through the shelves looking for something new.”
The Day the Lake Took the Edmund Fitzgerald
by Martha Lundin
“I spent my most formative years with this lake. I swam in her waters as a child, diving for rocks. I hiked along her shores and built castles in her sand. Later, in college, I let her waves lull me to sleep as the northern lights shimmered over a dying fire. I used to think I knew everything I needed to know about her body. I was superstitious in my adoration of her. If I love her enough, she will stay the same forever. But lakes are bodies. And bodies do not—cannot—stay the same.”
Treading Water
By Nazish Brohi
“So if moralizing is now misplaced in literature, what space is there to write about imperiled people, except to set them up as subjects for recreational grieving? And why should imperiled people be expected to display their pain for empty empathy that won’t translate into lifesaving action?”
Sobriety Through the Major Arcana
by Christy Tending
“Writing my sobriety—that is, creating narrative and meaning and something tangible from it—becomes an immediate part of my process. It is part of how I have made sense of this intergenerational box of shit I have inherited, and tried to turn it into something useful for someone else.”
Essays from Around the Web…
Mary Magdalene and SCOTUS
by Kelly Thompson
“She didn’t have dementia. Does anyone? She had trauma…She lived a life—a long one—in a woman’s body.”
Loanwoards on the Frontlines
by Andrew Zubiri
“cooties, n.
1) from the Austronesian kutu or Tagalog kuto, a body louse 2) an umbrella term for germs believed to be picked up from strangers 3) In the Philippines, hundreds of thousands die from cholera on top of the casualties of the Philippine-American War, as American military forces herd Filipinos into crowded concentration camps and quarters with unsanitary conditions. 4) Asians are shunned, if not brutally attacked, and blamed for the spread of Covid. People avoid sitting next to me on the bus.”
The First Time I told Someone
by Richard Newman
“I had no words for what he was doing, no training such as young children get now in how to attract another adult’s attention or try to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was finished, and when he was finished, I ran. I don’t remember how far or how long or in which direction, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if running would turn me into another person. When I finally stopped running, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, I sat a long time with the knowledge that my running had undone nothing, that my body was still the body he had touched.”
On Being Saved
by Áine Greaney
“In your mother’s and grandmother’s country—your ex-country—protestants went on fox hunts. In their red coats and tally-ho fox horns, they rampaged across your and your neighbors’ swampy farms because, just a generation earlier, they were the Colonial or occupying force. They were not these old Methodist women in stout shoes or these Medicare men in Sunday overcoats.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Memoir Monday founder (and reading series host) Lilly Dancyger is offering a workshop:
Essay Revision Intensive, 12/3
📢 Apply for the Writing Between the Vines FREE Writing Residency!
Writing Between the Vines writing residency is celebrating its 10th year in 2023. Applications are now open for solo and co-residency retreats. There are 5 locations available. Deadline is November 28th.
📢 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.
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!
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