Just for You: 9 New 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.
*Starting next week, there’ll occasionally be original work as well, likely behind a paywall—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish. So, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!
Read about our expansion plans here. Stay tuned for submissions guidelines coming next week. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
Essays from partner publications…
Leaving Lviv
by Agata Izabela Brewer
"War, like Zagajewski’s Lviv, is unimaginable until our fingers touch its scorched stones. Until our eyes see its lightning. Until our ears hear the silence it makes of our church bells. Until our feet feel the trembling of the earth."
Opioids in Sobriety
by Ren Asba
"I became so good in my addiction at feigning sincerity, to the point that even I believed myself despite my constantly unchanging behavior, that when I began to actually do things in sobriety to address my missteps and change my behavior, I felt waves of doubt overtake me."
Best American Male: An Essay About Masculinity. An Essay About Power.
by Rebecca Hazelton
“The author tells her she has talent. The author encourages her to send out her work. The author suggests she mention his name. The author asks for her email address. Her cheeks flush with delight. What is the reader to think when at the end of the conference the author sits beside her on the brick steps outside the library? He tells her again she is talented. She glows. She is an incandescent bulb thrumming with heat. What is she to think when he leans overs and takes a long, luxurious sniff of her shoulder? When he says, ‘I wanted to know what you smelled like’?”
My Sexually Liberated Grandmother, Myself
by Julia Lee Barclay-Morton
“In 1979, at 62, it was a radical act for her to demand sexual enjoyment—which I know first hand she fulfilled, having walked in on her by accident one summer at a cottage in Maine, me age 13, and her 60, lying naked on a bed with a man with long blonde hair with his face in her crotch.”
Hiking Through the Colonial History of America's National Parks"
By Torsa Ghosal
“Having descended from people who were colonized and protested colonial oppression, I am vigilant about the meaning of my own movements. America’s public lands still persist as sites of intimacy in my memory since I was brought to them by my desperate need for companionship in a new country. Like the idea of wilderness itself, my fond memories are to some extent curated, and they start to collapse when I tally up the moments of belonging with the experiences of ethno-racial aggressions. Yet they are enough to prevent me from being cynical about what trips to state and national parks can mean to new immigrants.”
Essays from around the web…
The Silent Bell
By Catherine Parnell
“Pint-sized terror flooded through me as I handed my grandmother the bell and my note. She turned and left, and did not speak to me for a year, and in that year of the silent treatment my heart ticked from love to childish hate. But I also learned the power of silence, how it crushed and wounded in its severe ostracism, how mental anguish begets physical illness. That was the year I developed migraines, although nobody called them that back then. I became hard as a rock outside while in my heart auras of fear squeezed me. The headaches subsided when my grandmother thawed out, deciding that I’d learned my lesson. I was pathetically grateful to be the recipient of her attention again.”
The Sound of Intimacy
by Jenna Kunze
"Many of my close relationships with women are predicated on the avoidance of ‘catching up’. I never want to ask, ‘how’s your family? How’s work?’ – I want to know the information organically and in real time. But who has time for that? I also want to run five miles a day, complete my work, try new restaurants, and read…Voice recordings are a life hack. Audio messages sit in your conversation thread, one half of a preserved phone call, until you’re ready to listen to them. You can pack a fat amount of information into a five minute voice recording that would take double the time to type back and forth. It’s not quite the commitment mandated by a phone call (a solid hour for me, real-time responsiveness) but instead is a flexible version of a broken up, monologue-style conversation with a friend over the course of, hopefully, a lifetime."
Elevation
by Helena de Bres
"There’s something undeniably erotic about elevators. I’m not pointing to the obvious reasons—the opening doors, the dark passage, the rising car, the in and out, the sudden ejection—let’s not be crass! I’m talking about what I consider a central spiritual principle of elevators: the laying down of order, intellect, and civilization over chaos, animality, and death.”
Resettling the Mind
by Jessica Gigot
“I guess that is how I ended up at that meditation retreat. I was trying to tame my monster monkey mind which had somehow overgrown my out-of-shape, not quite middle-aged body. The process of meditation, as I realized by the end of the retreat after the constant commentary subsided, reoriented me to my animal self that knows and sees and is a part of the landscape too. I was resettling my own mind.”
📢 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.
Announcements:
🚨If you were unable to attend last week’s Oldster Magazine virtual reading hosted by HelloRevel, with a theme of “The Women Who Came Before Us”, you can now watch a video recording of it! Hear Abigail Thomas, Naz Riahi, Emily Rubin, and Blaise Allysen Kearsley read from their pieces.
🚨Memoir Monday founder Lilly Dancyger is launching a new series of virtual nonfiction writing courses! Subscribe to her newsletter to learn about her courses on Writing and Publishing Addiction Narratives, Memoir as Detective Novel, Women's Anger in Memoir, and an Essay Revision Intensive.
🚨To raise funds for its work during National Poetry Month, The Rumpus has tee shirts and sweatshirts for sale.
🚨Tomorrow, Tuesday, 3/15, author Melissa Febos launches her craft memoir, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. It is essential reading for anyone writing essays and memoir, and highly recommended by Memoir Monday.
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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