Introducing a new Memoir Monday partner!
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and, starting this week, Literary Hub! We’re thrilled to welcome the newest Memoir Monday partner, and excited to share great writing from Literary Hub alongside our other partner publications’ picks each week. Starting with this one:
Letter to Sacramento: A Riotous Anodyne
by Indigo Moor
But let us be open and honest. After 23 years together, we owe that to each other. You have had your problems. Your skeletons refuse to stay hidden. With such a luscious landscape and rainbow kaleidoscope school pictures, it is easy to forget that some parts of your rainbow shine brighter. Some of the bends are thinner, more ethereal than they should be.
Arrest Record
by Desiree Cooper
There’s a theory about Black parenting. They say that we punish our children harder, louder, more physically than non-Black parents as a remnant of slavery. It’s like broken windows parenting: you come down hard on the small infractions to prevent bigger infractions that could become a matter of life or death. I don’t know how true that is, but we made a giant mountain out of a molehill that evening. We yelled at Jay for shoplifting and fumed that he had purposely disobeyed us. It was time for a lesson.
Growing Up Sansei in LA
by Karen Tei Yamashita
By bubble, I mean a protective community space of Japanese Americans who didn’t have to explain to each other who they were or how they got there. Didn’t have to explain the war, that they’d been imprisoned in camps, exiled non-alien citizens, had returned to the West Coast to try to resume their American lives. The bubble was never an easy space; its safe containment also harbored shame, antagonisms, censures, provincialism, but it was still home. We stayed in this bubble even as we moved through three LA neighborhoods, confined by racial covenants at the margins of postwar social mobility.
Tired of Dying: Ashes Action, Covid-19, and Protesting Under a Pandemic
by s.e. smith
You may not realize it, but you’ve seen visual and performing artist and AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz. Think of a photo, tightly cropped. A man’s back, arm akimbo, his hand in his pocket, only a brief curl of brown hair visible, someone in a plaid shirt just beyond.
The Crime Victim Who’s Obsessed with True Crime Shows
by Taylor Schumann
I sat up straighter and leaned forward to concentrate, the way you do when you’re driving and you’re lost and you inexplicably turn down the music to see better. The noise I felt all around me was fading, and somehow I was seeing more clearly. I didn’t feel anxious anymore. The show wasn’t scaring me; it was comforting me. The show wasn’t triggering me; it was calming me. I wasn’t just watching someone else’s story; I was watching my own. They were different, of course, but they also were the same.
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?
by Kevin Brazil
I knew that I was what the word gay named as early as I can remember, but I’d never heard the word queer as anything other than an insult until I arrived at university. That might be a reason why endless arguments about what it means to be queer have felt to me to be unavoidable yet somehow dispensable. I know I live the life it is trying to name, but I know that life can be lived without that name. And I’ve never felt that life more intensely than in those moments in warehouses and clubs when people with different desires, desires which need to exclude others to be fulfilled, nevertheless come together to make something collective.
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