Make Time this Week For These Excellent Personal Essays...
Plus, Southern Vermont Writer's Conference scholarships, Electric Literature's Masquerade, Raising Mothers' open submissions, Narratively Academy's social justice writing class with Kavita Das...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals:
Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published
“Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces,” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also week writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #40: Elissa Altman, “The Prompt-O-Matic #33,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #41: Marian Schembari”
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I reprinted “Minnesota Nice” by Cheryl Strayed, which appears in both editions of Goodbye to All That. On Wednesday there’ll be a new essay in the series by
.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Swimming My Way Through the Pools of Paris
by Colombe Schneck
“When I am not in the water, the air, its sharp wintry bite or its summery languor, reminds me of last year, when we were together. When you do the crawl, the shoulder comes forward with the arm extended as far as possible, the hand stays loose — the principle is to make no unnecessary effort; when the arm is in the air it isn’t helping you move forward, it’s at rest, refueling, ready to move when it is back in the water, when it will propel the body forward. I am learning to let go.”
Possession
by Charley Burlock
“I had starved myself, casually and intermittently, throughout my childhood, but a few weeks before starting work at the mental hospital—with high school waxing, my prepubescent metabolism waning, and my body rapidly growing—I made the decision to cultivate my hunger into a proper disorder. I stood, naked in June, before my parents’ full-length mirror and ran a diagnostic assessment. I wanted to be popular my freshman year, which meant that I had to be beautiful which meant I had to be, in some way, exceptional.”
I Wrote a Trans Memoir Without Even Knowing It (at First)
by Oliver Radclyffe
“I was young when I first started using words to avoid reality. The earliest examples can be found in my teenage journals which, while not quite fiction, display a decidedly ambivalent relationship with the truth. I wrote around the subjects of my sexual orientation and gender identity as if I were doing an intricate dance through a field of landmines whose existence I was refusing to acknowledge. I wanted to be like everyone else—a girl who was into boys—so I wrote copiously about being a girl who was into boys. Any indication that I was the exact opposite is notably absent from the thousands of pages I wrote. Scribo ergo sum. If I didn’t write it, it couldn’t be true.”
The Problem with Nostalgia
by
“Two or three decades after any era, the culture tends to start aggressively looking back at that period, raiding cobweb-laden coffers in order to appeal to people’s memory banks and bank accounts. I’m often called upon to appear in docs about the ‘90s, but that decade — which brought us O.J. Simpson, Jonbenet Ramsey, Andrew Cunanan, John Wayne Bobbitt, the club kid murder, the Menendez brothers (who were apprehended in March 1990), Woody Allen/Soon-Yi Previn, and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair — is nothing to lust for that enthusiastically.”
Essays from around the web…
I Sang at Hundreds of Funerals. This Is What I Learned About Grief.
by
“The more I sang at funerals, the performances reinforced the notion that grief is an energy that wants to move through the body, and in our loss-avoidant culture, we’re prone to fight against it. Singing not only helps allow for this process but it alchemizes what grief can become.”
We Are Each Other
by
“Grandma Pearl taught me that if I want you to be free, I am required to do more than just acknowledge your existence. I must note how your eyes twinkle when food comes from the skillet instead of the microwave. I must warm the wool blanket before we cuddle up to watch cartoons.”
How to Tell Your Kid That You're a Drunk
by
“Earlier this year, my ex-wife and I talked in person, alone, for the first time since 2019. She asked me to research how to talk to our son about my alcoholism. He's not old enough to understand much more than "When daddy has wine or beer he acts crazy" and compare it to his classmates' peanut and strawberry allergies, but, even at six, he's not far off from experiencing alcohol as a chemical that interacts with his blood and brain, and he won't know what it means.”
An Atheist's Prayer for the High Holidays
by Alexandra Moss
“God opens the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and seals it on Yom Kippur. Or so I was taught. I've been an atheist since before my bat mitzvah. I bristle at the misogyny and the miracles of the Torah…Still, as the Days of Awe approach I slip into old patterns: the prayers, the food, the sacred time with family. These 10 days are another sort of opening, a lure back into the traditions of my childhood, my ancestors. A temptation no less powerful than the apple was to Eve.”
I Thought an Empty Nest Would be Great for our Marriage. Then My Husband Found Pickleball
by Sheryl Berk
“As an adult, I read and wrote mostly in English. I thought I was comfortable with it. But when it became the only language in my mouth, I felt like spitting it out. While I savoured poems and essays in English, I needed my languages for banter. For comic relief. It felt hard to help and ask for help in English. So I didn’t…One morning, in the Zoom class, I confessed to my students, ‘I know I am your English teacher but I must tell you this. I don’t like English.’ Shocked face emojis popped on their windows. ‘I love you guys more than I love English,’ I added. The emojis turned into red hearts.”
How I Keep My Love of Music Alive as a Deaf Person
by
“There are other ways I enjoy music as a Deaf person. After I bought my youngest child a guitar, he suggested I place my hand on it as he played. I did and was surprised at how strong the vibrations were. It wasn’t a normal “shaking” kind of vibration I felt as he played, but more of a musical kind of sensation. As though the music was playing and I felt the music through my fingertips. I’ve also done the same while he played piano.”
No ‘Happy Endings”
by Lester Fabian Braithwaite
“Love feels and has always felt impossible to attain for me, so I tend to resent queer love stories because they don’t, or can’t, portray the reality and the complexity of my love life, or of queer love in general. So I felt the need to preserve this one beautiful, perfect New York August night-turned-morning, so that I can always reference it and remember it. And maybe to remind myself that if I took a chance every now and then, maybe love wouldn’t feel so impossible. ”
My Family And I Were Trapped In A Financial Prison. Then I Received A 6-Word Letter That Changed My Life.
by Mona de Vestel
“I stood in my mother’s bedroom, watching the smoke swirl from her cigarette as she sat immersed in one of the many classic novels she read on her days off. It was at that moment, as I gazed at her and the literary world she was trying to escape into that I made a promise to myself: I would break this cycle. I would rise above the generational poverty that had weighed on my family for as long as I could remember.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 I’ll Be Leading a Workshop at Southern Vermont Writer’s Conference Next March and There are Scholarships…
I’m thrilled to be leading a personal essay/memoir workshop at the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference March 30-April 4 2025. The conference has announced some scholarships:
1) The Third Act Scholarship is for a Writer 65+ who now has more time to devote to their craft. Sponsored by a wonderful group of supporters in the Dorset/Manchester area, this scholarship covers the conference fee.
2) The Yvonne Daley Memorial Scholarship is designated for a Vermont Writer. Sponsored by Consie West, this scholarship covers the conference fee.
3) The Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Scholarship is for an Indigenous writer to come and write in their ancestral homelands. Sponsored by Mary-Anne Van Degna, this scholarship covers the conference fee, lodging, and transportation.
“Applications are due Sunday, October 20, and we’ll make a decision by early November.”
📢 Here Comes Electric Literature’s Annual Masquerade, October 18th…
Calling all readers, writers, and book lovers: Electric Literature is hosting our literary masquerade, and this year we’re celebrating our 15th birthday! Join our hosts—authors Emma Copley Eisenberg, Vanessa Chan, Deesha Philyaw, and Clare Sestanovich—as well as EL’s editors, for an evening of drinks and dancing. Ticket price includes an open bar, free books and masks, a photobooth…and maybe some birthday cake, too!
📢 Raising Mothers is open for submissions!
Raising Mothers publishes experimental and traditional fiction, micro and flash, creative nonfiction, interviews, book reviews, photo essays, and comic/graphic narratives written exclusively by the global majority. We are particularly interested in unique column pitches, serialized fiction and our Books on Books section.
📢 Narratively Academy’s “How to Write About Social Issues” Workshop with Kavita Das
Explore how to write compelling first-person pieces, op-eds and more in Narratively Academy's 6-week workshop How to Write About Social Issues with Kavita Das, author of the book Craft and Conscience. Starts Thursday, October 10.
📢 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.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised 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.