Make Time for These 11 Stellar 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 — plus many additional publications. And last week we welcomed Orion Magazine as a partner publication.
You might have noticed we also have a nice new logo, thanks to Ian MacAllen of Design is the Message!
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The ninth original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in October, is “Close the Cabinet” by Starina Catchatoorian. The tenth original essay is coming in a few weeks. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Our first in what will be a series of seminars was Publicity 101 For Writers with book publicist Lauren Cerand, was held October 8th. Paying subscribers can view the resulting video here.
Essays from partner publications…
What I Write in My Journal is Just for Me (It is Not My Memoir)
by Jeanna Kadlec
“Journaling kept me sane through the years that are chronicled in my forthcoming memoir, Heretic: through the crisis that was coming out and leaving the church, through the catastrophe of the cocoon. The process of journaling allowed me to write my way into a new consciousness after I had stripped myself down to the studs, outside of the confines of evangelical Christianity.”
Constraints: A Hometown Ode
by Anne P. Beatty
“Greensboro, North Carolina, is a city that doesn’t want to climb the summit or see its name on a book jacket. It’s a city that likes to be in the back room, laying out the tablecloths. Local closets house Civil War rifles, their bayonets spearing the dust beams. Street signs bear the names of old, revered criminals. Half the people here believe this place has changed too much, and half the people believe it hasn’t changed at all. Most of us are wrong.”
Reading Stephen King's "It" As a Child Confused My Sense of Justice
by Sydney Hegele
“I saw myself less and less in the children of Derry and more in their tormentor: Pennywise the Clown. I was a kind of adult among my child peers, reading and conversing at a level beyond our years. I too was stealing childhood from those who had more of it than I did. My father had said that my classmates probably deserved it, and on some level, I think that I believed him. I wondered if, perhaps, Pennywise felt the same way.”
She Used to Sing Opera
by Imogen Crimp
“Now that years have passed since I stopped, I don’t mind telling people that I trained to be an opera singer. I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful – the admission that I’d once wanted to be part of that world or the fact that I’d failed. Even now, I’m careful always to say briefly – I briefly trained to be an opera singer – because I want to make it sound like it was all a very long time ago and didn’t mean much to me anyway, and I often find myself putting on an expression of generic self-deprecation when I say it too, like, yeah, mad I know.”
Thunderbitches and the Whores of Folk
by Alicia Dara
“I knew that Grunge music (at least the mainstream radio kind), which occupied most of the clubs and venues, was basically womanless. I was 21, wracked by social shyness, and lonely to the bone. I had no interest in playing that genre, but every Seattle musician had to travel in Grunge territory. Women had few choices for navigating the male-dominated hierarchy: you could melt yourself like honey and butter and attempt to flow around them, or you could crank up your amp and try to blast your way through.”
Living with a Skinhead, While Living in My Brown Skin
by Anna Grundström
“In the car on the way home, I told my mom that I felt like people had stared at me because they thought I wasn’t Swedish. ‘You’re overreacting, Anna,’ she said. ‘They just think you’re pretty.’ Her response reminded me of the time when I was 5 and told her I believed there were ghosts living in my closet.” *This essay was a finalist in Narratively’s spring essay contest.
Close the Cabinet
By Starina Catchatoorian
“A 70s duplex loft with wall-to-wall turquoise carpeting, sliding mirrors, and a naked mermaid silhouetted on the shower door, our house defined Geoff. Other than the excessive amount of records and guitars, nothing in our apartment reflected me—a fledgling singer-songwriter who was raised by Thai and Armenian immigrant parents, and taught to never trust bad boys like Geoff. I was the compliant partner who silently grieved as he trashed my chintz loveseat because it didn’t fit his rocker decor. Now, sitting in its place was a life-sized aluminum shark.”
Essays from Around the Web…
My mom taught me to spend money on joy even when you can't technically afford it, and that lesson has been a lifeline
by Brijana Prooker
“If you're worried about saving money, buy yourself a snow cone. I only sort of mean that metaphorically…When I was a child, if I spotted carnival lights on the way to run errands, my mom would always postpone our chores so we could ride the tilt-a-whirl. We had zero disposable income, yet we'd play games until our arms brimmed with prizes and buy cotton candy neither of us actually liked — just for the joy of walking around with pretty pink and purple puffs.”
The Wanderer: A Black Woman's Search for Her Place in White, White Vermont
by sheena d.
“There’d be other times I’d hope for an escape. Like in December 2016, in snow packed Vermont, when a turning vehicle knocked me over. I was walking downhill and looked before crossing. I did not look behind me, though, before taking four or five steps into the crosswalk. A truck was breezing down the same street, and the driver surely looked to the left before he turned to the right, noticing the big blob—that was me—only too late. As the metal sent me facedown into pavement, everything went silent. My first thought was that I was being run over. The second that I was going to die. The third that I was going to have such a stupid death in such a stupid place.”
White Out: A Father/Son Story for the Days of Awe
by Albert Stern
“But you true fans of family dysfunction, especially those with a philosophical bent — you aficionados — will understand how my father’s unfathomable, unanswerable two-word question, ‘Why not?’, still lurks near the core of my psyche the way the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* exists at the heart of the Milky Way, a region of darkness where gravity is so strong that no light can escape from it.”
Probably Benign Alien
by Liz McCrocklin
“The lump in my breast was benign in the end, but it felt like being sideswiped by midlife. One day you wake up and realize that the perfectly good body that you have taken mostly for granted for the last 40 years is not indestructible. I realized it wasn’t just the lump I was struggling with, but middle age itself. It was the sudden full-body knowledge that my body is fragile and my time is finite.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Memoir Monday founder (and reading series host) Lilly Dancyger is offering a workshop:
Essay Revision Intensive, 12/3
📢 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. 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!
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