Make Time for these 11 Fantastic 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 in October. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Essays from partner publications…
Watching the Clock: On Parenting in the Climate Crisis
by Kaitlyn Teer
“I try to contemplate deep time, but I keep getting interrupted. Geologists may speak of epochs, yet parenting has so contracted the timescales by which I measure life that I speak of it in much smaller increments. It’s hard to hold in mind the immensity of planetary history when the demands of the present feel so immediate and overwhelming, and thinking about the uncertain future my children face is almost more than I can bear.”
Malaka Gharib on a Summer in Egypt and Learning to Love Her Stepmother
by Malaka Gharib
“We tried to find new ways to spend the day…like watching TV. Usually the only thing to watch was CNN. And sometimes we talked, trying to communicate as best we could. She told me about herself. She grew up in a smaller city called Ismailia on the Suez Canal.”
Body Politic
by Adrian Van Young
“When liberal men express outrage at the naked anti-abortion rhetoric and barely constrained misogyny of the American conservative movement, is it sympathy or empathy that we are expressing? If sympathy, why does our outrage stop there? If empathy, what are its limits?”
What I Learned From Doing Amateur Porn in My 20s
by Nancy Jainchill
“Scurrying beneath the worn cotton sheets, I crossed my arms over my chest to cover myself, and staring up at the ceiling, I couldn’t believe that was me, lying there, with two strange men about to film me. Were they going to use my real name on the credits? I hadn’t thought about that. Who sees these movies?”
Essays from around the web…
An Alternative Atlas
by Aastha D.
“The thing about desire is that it is messy. It destabilises the heteronormative obsession with neat binaries. Desire moves through the body, craving to redesign it, caress, or shun it; moving out into a world that insists on harnessing it, defining it, and domesticating it. This book validates the glorious disorder of desire. It is an archive that speaks of queer precarity, as history and a continuous reality. It reclaims queer spectatorship from a world that insists on imposing order. ”
Running an Olsen Twins Fan Page Taught Me to Craft an Online Identity
by Anna Rollins
“We divvied up the twins and mimicked plot lines from their direct-to-video mystery and You’re Invited! series, pretending to solve crimes in our neighborhood cul-de-sac, planning occasion-less parties in the garden. Everything the twins marketed was rooted in a reality that could theoretically be replicated – a reality more exciting and beautiful than the mundane life of a rural West Virginia girl.”
I Got A DM About The Man I Was Dating. It Changed My Life In Ways I Never Imagined.
by Paulette Perhach
“The best thing about him was he wasn’t going to hurt me. After that last slice to the heart, I needed to know there wouldn’t be an exit wound.”
'Shtisel' Helped Me Grieve My Father's Death
by Becky Band Jain
“On Tuesday my father didn’t pick up the phone. On Thursday night, I had the doorman go check on him. He discovered my father lying on the floor of his apartment, unconscious. After 20 minutes, I received a call from the local police who’d been called to the scene: pronounced dead. I trembled in panic when I heard the news, aftershocks coursing through my body. My dad had probably been dead for several days before we found him. Alone. Undiscovered. Unbreathing. The coroner said he died of a heart attack. In the aftermath of his death, like Dad, I turned to the TV for solace.”
Cherry Tomatoes and Friends
by Camille Beredjick
“Too often I have tried and tried to force something to be good for me when it simply wasn’t. It is easy for me to crumble under my own weight, to aim too high and too big. It is easy for me to sacrifice myself. I am tired of wasting fruit.”
In the Wal-Mart Parking Lot
By Hadley Griggs
“Eight-seater Suburban parked deep-deep in the Wal-Mart lot, legal twenty-four hours or so they say, though every time we see a car coming too close we pull the sleeping bags up, stay strict-still and make like a backseat of junk.”
Transfiguration
by DW McKinney
"I ate collard greens at the kitchen table while my grandfather spoke about the possible haunting of our lives. He gobbled and slurped, juice spattering his plate, while he told me about The Ol’ White Woman who lived underneath my grandparents’ house. Her home was right below one of the guest bedrooms. Standing in the shade of my grandparents’ lone plantain tree, I would stare at the small door built into the house’s foundation.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Los Angeles-area readers: Tuesday 9/27 from 6-7:30pm, I’ll read from and sign my memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo at Gloria Delson Contemporary Arts.
📢 Publicity 101 for Writers with veteran book publicist Lauren Cerand and Sari Botton on 10/8/22 is sold out! BUT…the resulting video will be a perk for paid subscribers to Memoir Monday!
Are you a writer struggling to effectively publicize your work? Are you looking to grow the reach and visibility of your published writing, and find more publishing opportunities? Do you shy away from putting yourself out there because you’re not sure of the best ways to do so—and because you’ve been persuaded to believe self-promotion is shameful?
You’ll want to watch the resulting video from this seminar/interview! If you’re a paid subscriber to Memoir Monday, you’ll have access to it.
📢 Proposing & Editing Anthologies Workshop at Catapult, beginning 10/13
I’ll be leading my anthology editing workshop at Catapult once again. Only 12 spots. Sign up!
📢 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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