Make Time for these Fourteen Stellar Personal Essays...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus—and this week, we are thrilled to welcome Electric Literature aboard!
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular. A new essay is coming later this week.
***Submissions for First Person Singular are now PAUSED. An overwhelming number of new submissions have recently come in. There are more essays in my inbox than I could publish in two years. And I’m too overwhelmed to keep bringing in more to read before I go through all those already in there, even with help from recently appointed contributing editor Katie Kosma.
*Going forward, there will be a Submittable account and specific submission periods, which I will announce here. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page, but, again, submissions are currently PAUSED.
In other news, recently I launched “The Lit Lab,” a new section of this newsletter dedicated to interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Last week I published an interview with The Secret Lives of Church Ladies author Deesha Philyaw.
Clockwise from top Left: From LitHub, a White House interior; From The Rumpus, art by Iris L.; From Oldster Magazine, the author in her costume as a Bobcat, the mascot for an NYU sports team; From Granta, Artwork by Matthew Kentmann, Magpie, Garru, Messenger Bird 4, 2020 Courtesy of PIERMARQ; From The Walrus, illustration by Mariana Yatsuda Ikuta; From Orion, art by Linda Alterwitz; From Electric Literature, Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash; From First Person Singuarl, photo courtesy of the author.
Essays from partner publications…
The Complicated Emotions of Reading a Poem at the White House
by Joshua Bennett
“When my White House moment arrived, I was announced by a voice without a face, soaring through loudspeakers I couldn’t see: “And now, the spoken word poet Joshua Brandon Bennett.” I ascended the stairs to the stage, barely breathing. I looked out at the crowd, smiled to my mother, and unbuttoned the black suit jacket she had bought for me the week before. I closed my eyes and focused on the image of my sister’s face.”
Psychic Cartographies
by Elda María Román
“I think about how the wars we fight on the inside might perpetuate the violence we’ve experienced on the outside, so I lie still and speak to my body in the hope that it can be a way of moving forward. I’m trying to develop ways to not be at war.”
Letter to My Younger Self #4: Hungry Like the Wolf
by Helene Stapinski
“What you most want is to become a writer. You tell Sister Peggy this and she laughs at you. ‘No, becoming a writer is too hard,’ she says, chuckling. ‘You should be an engineer.’ You have no idea what an engineer even is. As far as you know, it’s a man in a puffy hat who drives a train.”
Reproducing Paul
by Des Fitzgerald
“For a year or two after my brother Paul died, my parents would see a bird – maybe a magpie or a blackbird or another well-known species – that was behaving strangely. This bird (they would report later) would seem to follow them, or would reappear a few times over the course of a day, or else it wouldn’t fly away when one or both of them approached. And, half joking, they would associate the presence of this bird with the absence of their son, Paul, as if the creature was somehow also Paul, only now in bird form. This annoyed me the few times they told me about it, though I didn’t really know why at the time, and I’m ashamed now of how priggish I was.”
Don’t Be a Prude: The Benefits of Public Nudity
by Nicole Schmidt
“The first time I noticed nudists was during a walk through Berlin’s largest park. There were dozens of them, sprawled out in the sun, sipping beers and grilling wurst on portable barbecues. I’d moved to Germany from Toronto hoping to experience a different way of life. It didn’t take long to learn that, over here, encountering a nudist is about as ordinary as spotting a squirrel. It made me wonder: Could I, a stuffy Canadian with lifelong body hang-ups, be brave enough to join the sunbathers? Two months into my new German life, I decided to get over my fear.”
Night Sift
by Luis Alberto Urrea
“All my life, I have found myself in these borderlands, these wasted landscapes on the edge of the world. I was a poverty child, caught between barrio and ghetto, and I learned about nature in dirt alleys, abandoned gravel lots with one dead truck in the corner, in the wars between red ants and black ants on the cracked concrete slabs between humanoid race wars in the apartment blocks. The ruins comfort me somehow.”
Colorado, You Need to Look at Transgender People
by Kaia Ball
“As an out trans person in rural Illinois, I got a decent handle on what hate looks like. It was hurled at me from lifted trucks, spat at me from coworkers chapped lips. It found me on a walk around my neighborhood, once with a small mob forming to chase me home, a group of grown men screaming ‘mangirl’ after a single young adult…It was explicit, loud, and visible.”
Ditching Perfect for Joy
by
“Did back-to-normal mean reverting to a prioritization of Almighty Work above all else? Back to a never-ending hamster wheel of tasks on a to-do list? I felt hopeful when I read about people envisioning their own versions of a post-pandemic ‘new normal.’ Was there some version of a new normal out there for me…?”
Essays from around the web…
City of Poe: Baltimore, 1979
by Michael A. Gonzales
“…the phone number she gave me simply rang and rang and rang. It was as though she’d vanished, disappearing in a puff of smoke. Part of me began to question Linda’s existence. It wouldn’t be the first time a lonely boy created an imaginary friend. I cursed myself when I realized I didn’t even know her last name or address, which made looking for her a lost cause.”
Scarification
by Nell Smith
“Quiet hands and paintbrushes are how the watchman’s recovery population is pollinated within climate-controlled greenhouses. Researchers tweeze open the mouths of each flower and softly brush golden pollen from the stamen and some part of my body offers itself up, yearning to know that you are not special. Sex, after all, is sometimes just shapeshifting.”
The Taylor Swift Fix
by Ellen Friedrichs
“After Joe’s death, we would join his mom on the anniversary to light candles and toast his memory. Her apartment had only been two subway stops from us, and she was an everyday part of our lives. But she had left Brooklyn during the pandemic and now lived in Massachusetts where she was dealing with a second round of cancer and was currently mid-chemo. So we weren’t meeting up this year. And in all honesty, the last few times we observed the date together, I was left unsettled, wondering how long we would continue the tradition and whether the day of someone’s death was really the best day for such a meet-up.”
The History of Color
by Beth Kephart
“The ants, as if from a candy dish, spill out across the wooden horizontals of the deck and sweep me from now to then, back to the cracked pavement of Ashbourne Hills, where I sit naked-kneed in the sun, wearing the short pixie hair of a girl who has not yet come into all her moods.”
I Hid the Truth About My Mom's Bipolar Disorder
by Lisa Mazinas
“‘I can't talk,’ my mom whispered on the phone one day in 1992. ‘There's a green martian standing here.’ After she hung up, I listened to the dial tone. Shocked. At 19, I was a college sophomore 1,000 miles away in Florida. I felt completely alone and terrified.”
I’m Trying to Be a Good Mom, but My Intrusive Thoughts Are Haunting Me
by Sarah Michelle Sherman
“Sometimes, I’m right there — with my mind as much as every other part of me. I’m right there with my son, who is the first human whose breath I’ve ever loved the smell of and my all-time favorite dance partner. He fills my chest with a heavy heat, but hollows out my stomach — and he gives me the deepest sense of belonging I’ve ever known. And when I’m focused on all this, and all of him, I forget about my mental illness. But when I’m watching my mom give him a bath while also envisioning myself typing her eulogy at our kitchen table, I’m well aware that something is wrong with me, well aware that I’m broken.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Narratively is currently accepting submissions for their 2023 Profile Prize contest. They are looking for profile pieces that tell the story of ordinary people or communities doing extraordinary things. The grand prize winner will receive $3,000, and the two finalists will receive $1,000 each. Guest judges are renowned journalists Gay Talese, Lisa Lucas and Rebecca Traister. For more information and to submit a story, use their pitch form. There is a $20 entry fee and the deadline to submit is April 14.
📢 Lilly Dancyger also has a few new workshops on offer, plus manuscript and essay consultations. Lilly is a talented writer, editor, and teacher who will help you improve your work. Check out her offerings…
📢 Thanks to everyone who came to the personal essay panel I moderated at the Woodstock Book Fest, featuring Alexander Chee, Carolita Johnson, and Gary Shteyngart! Here we are with festival founder Martha Frankel.
📢 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!