Hot Off the Presses: A New Batch of Personal Essays
PLUS: A Narratively Academy workshop with Kerra Bolton, private coaching with Starina Catchatoorian, and "Summer Salons" From FAWC in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, 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 “Smoke,” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Most ecently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #19,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #18: .
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 “Washington Square” by
.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Nurses Make for Good Bullets
by Jeneé Skinner
“On several occasions mom speaks jokingly of her death. “Don’t go through any trouble for me. When I’m ready to go, we’ll have a goodbye barbeque, then I’ll load up on my meds and once it’s over, you can bury me in the backyard.” Though it is dark and unfair of her to say, it’s funny she thinks there’ll be a backyard to bury her in since she’s never owned a house. But now that she’s tried to put some of her plan into action, I wonder if her body is making her pay for it. If the meds that were meant to free her, are slowly doing what she’d hoped would be quick—killing her.”
I Tried to Finish a Dead Man’s Novel
by Richard Kelly Kemick
“Later that night, as I sat in the blue light of my laptop screen while a Word document’s cursor blinked back at me, I flipped up the clasps, and the briefcase’s hinges creaked open. Inside were thirteen notebooks, a stack of legal pads, ballpoint pens, a floppy disk, and piles of paper, yellowed with time. The headlights from a passing car poured through the window and across my shaking hands.”
Mothercare
by Lynne Tillman
“Mother was a smart, resourceful, attractive, tactless, competitive and practical person. She was what was called a girl with promise, and if times were different, she might have fulfilled that promise. She had wanted to write and paint, but instead she married and had children. She worked for a while before marriage but as soon as my father was making good money, as they called it, she quit, fulfilling an American 1950s ideal – women whose husbands do well will stay at home with their children, content to be wives and mothers. Mother was not, and she was angry, and for that I don’t blame her.”
Learning Sideways
by
“By the time I turn to paper arts, just after I turn 60—gelli printing then binding, paper making then cyanotyping then origami folding then collaging—I am a dogged autodidact, stuck inside my hapless ways. My artist husband knows to leave me alone—to offer encouragement but no rules, to say, occasionally, You know there is a color wheel, to allow me to shrug off that news.”
Essays from around the web…
Rented Horrors
by Kathleen Alcott
“Something horror movies have always understood is how fear is a granular phenomenon, one whose most powerful vehicle is not the antagonist, but the onus he creates in the consciousness of the pursued: the woman whose survival depends on her never becoming paralyzed with terror, but also never relinquishing it entirely. After Polly’s kidnapping, after Polly’s murder, none of the children in our neighborhood could be seen outside locked houses. All the jewels of small-town Americana that had brought the families there became doubled with evil—the lacy eaves of the Queen Anne Victorians rendered gothic, the branches of huge oaks splitting the sidewalk at forty-five-degree angles violent.”
How to Stay Alive Underwater
by Allya Yourish
“I grew up in Portland, Oregon, surrounded by enlarged images of fish. The backgrounds were always aquamarine water, clear as glass, the fish gape-mouthed and frozen in time. My father took all these photos, kept his SLR in its underwater casing, even though we lived two hours from the ocean. ‘I’ll teach you sometime,’ he’d say.”
And Then What Happened? Reclaiming Your Stories
by Kevin Wood
“The thing about storytelling—personal or otherwise—is that a million decisions factor into the telling. And like other decisions in life, not all are born of conscious reason. Because buried in that pile of insufferable drafts there was also this: a reminder that this dark and heavy story actually offered hope. I had cut it out.”
My Parents' Obsession With Purity Nearly Ruined Us. Years Later, I Found Their Secret In A Box Of Their Things.
“My first sexual intercourse, just before I started college, was unplanned. It would have been largely forgettable if we’d used birth control…Looking back, it’s hard to admit to my own foolishness. I’d had the same boyfriend for 18 months. While our Catholic upbringings were a factor in this long period of chastity, my unpreparedness was also due to my mother’s admonition that a girl using birth control is sinning by anticipating sex.”
Alcohol Defined Me, Even After I Became a Mom. Until One Day It Had to Stop
by Blair Sharp
“During my son’s first year of life, I felt like I was stuck with this new version of myself. I wanted to keep my fun, carefree personality and be a good mother at the same time. Looking back now, I don’t think I knew how to make both things true. I also didn’t want to change simply because I had a child, and accepting that reality seemed easier than changing. And like many, I believed my drinking wasn’t “bad enough” to warrant quitting altogether—until it was.”
To make meaning of my father’s life, I went to death row.
by Sophia Laurenzi
“But I did know that I needed to do something good with my life. I’d wanted to help people facing execution for years, ever since I saw a man marched to the electric chair on a television show when I was 11 years old. I had not been able to stop my father from killing himself, but maybe his death would mean something if I could keep someone on death row from being killed. I could help show judges and juries that my death row clients’ lives were worth sparing by exposing the trauma and abuse and mental illness they had experienced. I could show that they were human, and more than their worst crimes…I got the job.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Academy’s Summer Writing Workshop: Mastering Personal Essays About Family
Academy is offering a Summer Writing Workshop: Mastering Personal Essays About Family with Kerra Bolton. If you want to craft compelling personal essays about your family without getting caught in the messy middle, this intimate five-week workshop (capped at no more than 10 students) is designed to help writers polish their storytelling and get their pieces published. Starts July 8.📢 Writer/Editor Starina Catchatoorian is Offering Private Coaching…
“I'm excited to announce I am now consulting privately with writers. This summer, set your writing intentions and goals! From June 6 through August 6 I'm offering a $30 discount (normally $125/session) at $95/session for Memoir Monday readers. See website for more details.
📢 Attend “Summer Salons” at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center:
A lineup of influential figures in the arts and culture scene will host Summer Salons at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center from May 31st to September 7th. Poets Tracy K. Smith and Major Jackson, curator Helen Molesworth, photographer Catherine Opie, author Sarah Schulman, and journalist Peter Slevin will lead intimate weekend conversations and workshops.
Whether attending in person or via live stream, participants will engage directly with the artists in unmoderated discussions, followed by Q&A sessions and hands-on workshops. Prices are determined based on affordability, and all ticket sales will support the Fine Arts Work Center’s commitment to providing free arts and culture events, including this summer’s nightly readings and artist talks hosted each week Monday through Wednesday nights, open art studios, and open-mic readings on Thursday nights, among other free events. The lineup:
📢 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.
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!