Hot Off the Presses, 11 Great Personal Essays
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The eighth original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in September, is “Cooking With Dana For the Last Time” by Dianne Jacob. The ninth original essay is coming later in October. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Essays from partner publications…
Murder to Middle School
by Laura Green-Russell
“Family drove hundreds of miles to be there, and I don’t remember any of it. It was like a silent movie playing in my head. There were people moving, talking and sometimes even laughing, but for me, it’s all blank. Empty and silent. The only thing clear to me was that my dad was dead.” *This essay was the winner of Narratively’s spring memoir contest.
Gentlemen, Start Your engines
by Rajpreet Heir
“At the heart of the racetrack exists the behavior our culture tries to hide, a place where everything terrible resides, where regressive behavior and values are celebrated.”
Nuns, Nurses and Busybodies: The Queerness of the Character Actress
by Anne Rodeman
“While my professors assigned the other girls in my class scenes of burgeoning or tortured love, I was assigned a scene from The Cherry Orchard as middle-aged Arkadina, bandaging the head of my son Treplev after his suicide attempt. I got the kooky clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Maybe it should have bothered me that my professors saw me as Angela Lansbury. But, increasingly, it made me feel singular. Powerful. Even if I wasn’t out of the closet for another nine years; maybe especially because I wasn’t. They said I was funny. They knew what to do with me. “You have a niche,” they told me. I understood what that meant.”
Forty-Nine Days of Mourning: On Culture and Ritual at My Father’s Funeral
by E.M. Tran
“The funeral home director’s office was cramped, perhaps because I, my sister, Rosie, my husband, her husband, my mother, my father’s assistant, and a man wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit and who was in some way associated with the Buddhist temple, were more people than the office was used to hosting at one time. Things were not helped by the size of the director’s desk, a handsome executive which monopolized most of the room. It was my sister’s birthday, which I forgot about until after our visit to the funeral home. Now, every year on her birthday, I will be reminded that my father died.”
Full Body Scan
by Sandra Butler
“As I drove down the freeway, my radio program was interrupted by an enthusiastic young man suggesting products I might buy to overcome the ravages of the aging process. Really? I thought. Am I ravaged? Ravaged sounded permanent. Like a building that has already collapsed….When I arrived home, I removed my coat and shoes, then my bra (we’ll get to that later) and readied myself for a full body scan to assess my ravages. ”
Choosing the Flowers
By Sanjna Singh
“This was not my father; this was just bone. As a Buddhist, I had contemplated impermanence for years. I had meditated in a charnel ground in the mountains of Sikkim, with Kanchenjunga glowing in the night behind me. Bones I could handle.”
Essays from Around the Web…
Where There’s Smoke…
by Liz Alterman
“A cigarette was his sixth digit, a tiny, ever-present firework, a small stick of dynamite that later caused his life to implode…It’s strange that the thing he used to light the cigarettes that ultimately ended his life has brought me the most comfort.”
Monstress
by Nisha Mody
“I bellowed ‘I am Hidimba!’ as the butt of my jokes when I was hangry or when my mom gave me a sour look because of my outfit. I used her primal ferocity to get away with daal and turmeric stains on my shirt. Hidimba and I had the same barbaric disorder. I evoked her name when I shuffled my feet while walking, one of my mom’s chief complaints. While I shuffled mine, Hidimba stomped with hers.”
The Doctor Said
by Judith Hannah Weiss
“I speak like I’m landing on this planet for the first time. Words spurt from my mouth and go splat on the wall. This may have happened to Bruce Willis, too.”
The Rules of Karaoke
by Katie Hunter
“Know your muses. At the bar, pretend to browse the booze-streaked binder like it’s a doctor’s office People, like you might as well look at it since you’re here, even though you know better and you’ve spent weeks covertly planning this shebang. Planning it under the cover of happy hour with your colleagues who say oh, sounds good, let’s do it when you toss out the idea beside their classroom door, where eighth-graders push past you like you’re window dressing. Teacher’s helper, that’s you, with your happy hour ideas and extra pencils and poker-faced “walk please” no matter how many times the girls in their baby tees rush past and wrap other girls in gossip and hugs, reminding you just how ferocious friendships can be. Just how precious…Walk please. That’s you. But tonight, it isn’t.”
Girl in a Cast
by Lisa Renee
“The first few years of my life, I wore a cast on the broken side of my body. Daddy — the keeper of the tale — says the cast extended from armpits to knees, keeping my tiny body splayed like a spatchcocked chicken. There was a hole for diapers; they were just pushed in and pulled out as needed, no pins or fastenings, the cast being the container. It must have been a miserable mess.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Memoir Monday founder (and reading series host) is offering two courses:
Memoir as Detective Novel, 10/22
Essay Revision Intensive, 12/3
📢 Debut authors, apply for “Get the Word Out,” a publicity incubator that book publicist Lauren Cerand is offering through Poets & Writers magazine. Deadline: this Friday, 10/21.
Get the Word Out participants will:
Participate in a six-session online publicity workshop led by an experienced book publicist
Attend six online seminars with leading professionals in publicity, marketing, sales, and related professions
Devote considerable time outside of scheduled sessions to promoting their book
Contribute to a peer learning community by sharing what works and what doesn’t, helping each member of the cohort to amplify their impact
📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:
By Thursday of each week, please send to memoi 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.
Memoir Monday is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors to its First Person Singular series of original essays. To support this work, become a paid subscriber.
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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