Hot Off the Presses, a Batch of Great New Personal Narratives...
Plus: Memoir Land merch, Southern Vermont Writer's Conference, Narratively Academy's "Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel" workshop...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four 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
“MRI of a Rose,” by Ramona Jan.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #45: Colleen Long & Rebecca Little,” “The Prompt-O-Matic #36,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #46: Jasper Joyner”.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I published “Cinema and the City” by Michael A. Gonzales. I’ll have a new essay in the series soon.
Essays from partner publications…
Menopause Is a Pretty Fine Stage of Life
by Susan Glickman
“Eventually, over the (many) years that this process continued, I stopped trying to hide my condition. What was the point of pretending? Everyone who menstruates is destined to go through the same process. If society had a problem with that—tough. Women are tougher. After all, by the time we go through the “change of life,” we have already endured menstruation and are resigned to the fact that no amount of yoga or CrossFit really puts us in charge of our insubordinate bodies.”
Walking the Ghost
by Adam Spiegelman
“Reentry into the waking world, the working world, was difficult. I found myself on first dates struggling to explain away the wasted years, to valorize myself, to make light of, dodge, or outright lie. On one occasion, I spoke at length about being an end of life caretaker for my ailing grandparents, on another I was solemn and reticent about the brutality of basic training as a marine. In a dark club, a guy put his hand down my pants and felt the smooth, circular depression on my crotch—the scarred remains of an abscess resulting from a missed hit. Nail gun accident, I blurted out. The urgent, solitary mission of finding and acquiring more drugs was a deep-sea pressure holding the other, incidental parts of my life together, and, having come to the surface, my identity collapsed, had become shapeless and muddled.”
Silas Lucas
by Garth Risk Hallberg
“I was ten, school was out, and my father had an amazing idea. He was going to rebuild our house – a sloping three-bedroom with gray Masonite siding – entirely out of brick. And not just any brick, but a very special, hard-to-find brick that went by the melodious nineteenth-century name of its maker: Silas Lucas. In my father’s telling (offered serially as we drove through town, the way an actor might workshop a soliloquy), Silas Lucas was an itinerant American genius who had risen to run a brick foundry in our part of Eastern North Carolina, only to end up stalled out and beaten down and passed over and underappreciated and subsequently forgotten by everyone. Everyone, that is, save my father. By the time he’d moved on to his Silas Lucas fixation from whatever had come before, Dad had already amassed a small stash, which he carried around salesman-style in the back of his car.”
Spinning Webs in Space
by Jill Christman
“In 1979, the summer I turned ten, my dad took me and my brother Ian to weekly Skylab parties, where we sawed at gray, overcooked steaks on Styrofoam plates with plastic knives, moistening the dry meat with copious amounts of A. 1. sauce and waiting for Skylab to fall back to earth. We were not afraid of being the unlucky ones to get flattened when the space station reentered. In fact, we dreamed of a central Connecticut crash down.”
Between Agency and Fate: Towards a New Poetics of Illness and Healing
by Eleni Stecopoulos
“To write healing not as self-recovery but infinite extension to others, to write under the morbid symptoms of hyper-capitalism, with increasing numbers of people starving for the lie of scarcity, increasing evidence of what we know in our guts: that inequality sickens, it kills, anthropogenic disaster drives millions from home into the violent impasse of borders. Into the widening gap, the growing chasm, as Greeks say.”
Now We Are 60
by Lisa Renee
“Now we are 60 and we carry the elders. We buy pill dispensers and whiteboards. We take them to appointments, sleep on their couches, and make meal plans. We cancel our own plans. The plans we started to make when the kids grew up — those are cancelled. For now.”
Essays from around the web…
This Is The Last Dog We'll Ever Own. Here's What He's Taught Me About Love.
by Abby Alten Schwartz
“My husband, Stu, was ready to downsize five years ago. It took me longer to come around, but I’m ready too. Mostly. Because before we can sell our house and embrace a simpler lifestyle, we’ll have to let go of a lot — and I don’t just mean our accumulation of household “stuff.” We can’t cross that bridge until our dog crosses the Rainbow Bridge. The thought alone floods me with grief.”
Nancy
by Leah Korican
“That fall, when my best friend, Iris, is away visiting her grandmother and I am bored, I find myself hanging around with Nancy. She had come to our commune, Sunnyridge, alone in the summer and stayed on for months. In the kitchen, Nancy offers to hold Nathan while Mom kneads a five-loaf mound of bread dough, and when it’s Ann Marie’s turn to cook, she’ll patiently play with whiny, half-naked toddler Jarod for hours.”
Sew to Speak
by Donna Cameron
“No one had ever tried to change my left-handedness. I’d heard stories of people in more primitive times being punished for being left-handed, or being required to learn to use their right-hand. I couldn’t imagine that this was happening now, to me. ‘But I’m left-handed,’ I repeated, assuming the fact would sink in and she’d say ‘Oh, of course, so sorry.’ But she dug in. ‘I don’t care what hand you write with; you are going to iron with your right hand.’”
You Are Allowed to Dance When You're Grieving
by Diane Shipley
“I’m not saying anyone did anything wrong by sharing how unbearable grief is. No one was trying to sentence me to feeling awful forever. But now I see that my perfectionist, guilt-prone mind twisted what they said to mean that not only would I feel bad, all the time, but also that I had to, or I wasn’t doing grief “right” and would feel worse in the long run.”
The One Beauty Ritual I’ll Never Give Up
by Nicole R. Zimmerman
“With each era, my own relationship to hair removal has shifted. In 1980, when my mother liberated herself from her marriage by way of a month-long stay in Rome, including a dalliance with an older man at his villa on the Riviera, she returned with an untamed tangle under her pits that rivaled Gilda Radner’s SNL impersonation of Patti Smith. It was merely an affectation, like changing her middle name from Frances to Francesca, but I thought her hair growth was, like, gag-me-with-a-spoon gross.”
Snapshots
by Charmaine Arjoonlal
“When I rode the school bus to high school, a teenage boy regularly spat at me, his spittle hitting my jacket and slowly gyrating to the floor. Every school day my stomach lurched when I climbed the bus steps and stumbled to my seat. The bus driver and other students ignored the whole thing. Maybe they didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t.”
Woman of Sorrow
by Kristin Marie
“Most monsters have an origin story. Chucky was the product of a criminal who transferred his soul into a doll. Frankenstein was created by a doctor, stitched together with different people’s body parts. Jason from Halloween was presumed drowned as a child but survived in the woods for years before he began stalking campers at Camp Crystal Lake. My mother came from an alcoholic household, married an abusive husband, and had no support system after he left. I came from my mother.”
Writing in a Zigzag
by Brooke Randel
“One of the hardest parts of writing a memoir is that you, the author, change. Like glass that hasn’t cooled, you are never quite set in place. New knowledge comes to you, new experiences, perspectives, ideas. And what’s worse, it’s often for the better.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!
📢 I’ll Be Leading a Workshop at Southern Vermont Writer’s Conference Next Spring…
I’m thrilled to be leading a personal essay/memoir workshop at the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference March 30-April 4 2025.
📢 The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel workshop at Narratively Academy
The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel starts Monday, October 28 at Narratively Academy. Led by The Unfit Heiress author Audrey Clare Farley, this 8-week workshop class is for writers working on book-length narrative memoir and nonfiction.
📢 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.
Thank you so much for including "Nancy," this week. What a thrill to see my piece here, in this amazing company! I'm so grateful.
Thanks so much for including me here, Sari - so many great things to read!