Memoir Monday Roundup 3/30/26
A compendium of stellar personal essays. PLUS: Scroll down to the bottom for so many great workshops, calls for submissions, and a conference....
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.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.
Goodbye to All That, where I continue 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.
***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
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Essays from Partner Publications…
I Found Out the Truth of the “Most Haunted House in Canada”
by Ann McDougall
“Ghosts have been with us for at least 3,500 years. And in all that time, human interest in them has never waned. A few months after I began working at Todmorden Mills, a newly hired manager called me in for a meeting so we could get to know one another. We chatted about our backgrounds, our skills and interest in museums, and of course, ghosts. I told her about my very vague feeling of being watched in the grey house and about the stories others had told me. She nodded seriously. “So . . . have you heard about Mackenzie House?””
Big Sis
by Michael A. Gonzales
“Having never been “a boy’s boy” who liked being out in the streets playing stickball or skelley, or throwing soda bottles at water rats on Riverside Drive like my brother, I always preferred the company of girls (and later women). They never teased me for being chubby, would rather talk than fight, and weren’t trying to watch baseball, Westerns, or war movies on television.”
Instructions for Repairing a Robot Black Boy
by Martheaus Perkins
“Do you think they cried? All the disappeared Black men who share my round cheeks and songful eyes. Or do you think they swigged their lives down like Irish car bombs with stoney faces? According to my family’s women, they’d often leave in autumn when even the trees were indecisive about what direction to die in.”
On Feeling Left Out of the Anthropic Settlement (Because They Ignored My Book)
By Mary Childs
“So…my work was in LibGen. But it’s not in the Works List. I can only conclude that Anthropic COULD HAVE downloaded my book but…somehow chose not to? Is this human discretion? Does this mean someone at Anthropic was clicking through different PDFs, looked with human eyes at my book’s cover and description and said, no, we won’t be needing a riveting and vivid account of the creation of the most important part of modern finance, and the fascinating, quixotic character who drove it. That doesn’t sound very contributive to the sum of human knowledge. …That’s so much worse.”
Essays from around the web…
Whitney and Me (An Excerpt of Phases: A Memoir)
By Brandy
“Watching how Whitney wielded her instrument, how her voice reached into people’s chests and rearranged things inside them, flipped a switch deep within me. I knew with bone-deep certainty what I wanted — no, what I was born to do. I was born to sing like Whitney. I was born to make people feel the way she made me feel. ‘Mom,’ I whispered that night as she tucked me in, my heart still racing with revelation. ‘I’m gonna be just like Whitney Houston when I grow up.’”
Life isn’t about what we lose. It’s about what we keep
by Meghan O'Sullivan
“The first time I held the black-and-white photograph of my mother feeding my father a piece of their wedding cake in 1949, I was hooked. Right then I knew I was destined to be a keeper — a collector of artifacts and stories. I should clarify that I’m not a hoarder. But I do have boxes and boxes of photos, old wedding invitations, college term papers, playbills, and children’s drawings. I have dozens of telegrams, postcards and birthday cards from family members long gone. I have stacks of handwritten letters from high school and college friends; page after page of long updates about nothing.”
Soy Yo — Soy Ustedes
by Judy Bolton-Fasman
“I am the Pesah Seder during which my mother and aunt invite the hungry, the stranger, in Ladino. Todo el ke tiene ambre, venga i coma; todo el ke tiene nesesita, venga i koma del Pesah. I am the Kol Nidre prayer my hunted and haunted Spanish ancestors whispered – consumed by the guilt of conversion or the prospect of burning alive at the stake. I am The Star-Spangled Banner, for which my father placed his hand over his heart and sang out proudly. I am Guantanamera, the passionate version my mother sang at one of my parents’ parties”
Burn This
by Stephanie Feuer
“My arm has a topography all its own, a map of suffering rendered in flesh. A mottled and discolored amoeba-shaped scar along my bicep, and its companion down the length of my forearm, are souvenirs of a morning that started like any other. I was dressed for breakfast in the blue plaid bell-sleeved shirt, soft like a baby’s bunting. I leaned in to smell fresh ground beans in the cone of the Melitta pot on the gas range. My shirt grazed the gas burner.”
My Adoptive Father Abandoned His Other Children. Understanding Why Changed Everything for Me
by Leslie Vooris
“Growing up in a foster home and being adopted already made me feel like an outsider, and I wanted to feel a sense of normalcy, so I preferred to imagine my father just starting his life with us—even though I knew about his other kids. He’d been married once before, and he had two grown children: a son who lived back East, and a daughter, who also lived in California. I would soon discover that my father had even more lives and habits that belonged to his life before me.”
The Perfect Temperature of Coffee
By Abby Manzella
“My husband is grading in the other room; I’m reading on the sofa. My own grades have just been submitted. In this free moment, I have no interest in turning on the news to be bombarded with the fear and turmoil it will bring into my space. I miss informational news; I miss the feeling that you’ve acquired something anew about the world. Instead, I listen to my husband typing, and later I hear him laugh. The sound is short and brisk, but true. It is the joyful sound of a professor whose student has learned a lesson well.”
When Our Words Become a Commodity
by Trish McDonald
“Would our words become a commodity, publicly traded, like a stock? Would they yield merchandise like T-shirt sayings, coffee mugs, bumper stickers?…Who do our written words belong to? Once published they become a product—vendible, material, and for a lucky few, evergreen. I’m of the “No Expiration on Dreams” philosophy. I’ve picked out the artwork for Paper Bags greeting cards, sticky notes, and guest towels. They’re embellished with: Thank you for loving me.”
Please Don’t Tell Me How to Feel About My Breast Cancer
by Giulia Rozzi
“What I need, what I want, is my body back. A body that betrayed me after I consciously nourished it, moved it, and self-cared the hell out of it. A body that has been sliced open, divvied up, and rearranged like cuts of cattle. A body that was forced to age prematurely and shoved into early medical menopause because the cancer fed off my estrogen and progesterone—the same hormones that miraculously made my child. When the chemicals that create life try to kill you, reconciling irony becomes a new maddening breast cancer symptom.”
Why Are the Happy Times Sad?
by C.E. Avis
“But when my mind goes back to that drive in 1996, to my father and me listening to Memphis lose to Drexel on the radio, my heart aches in a way I never could have understood when I was young. It is akin to heartbreak but also something worse, because when a woman broke my heart, I healed and found another. When your father leaves, you don’t get another one.”
I was ghosted at 54. Here’s why I choose to think of it as empowering
by Kelly O'Connor
“I’ll never know what happened to him, but I’ve decided my ghost story is a comedy, which feels empowering. I tell it with humor, and people always respond with laughter and empathy. No matter how old we get, one of the best parts of dating is telling friends your stories. I have an amazing group of women from home, whom I consider “million-dollar therapy”. We support each other, deal with life’s absurdities together and laugh about how we are now the same age as The Golden Girls, but with better hair. Looking back after almost a year, I don’t regret what happened. I took a risk trying to connect with someone I cared about, and it didn’t work out. But in the end, I tried to be kind – and there’s power in that, not shame.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Open Secrets Magazine Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on Blaise Allysen Kearsley’s Identity Panel
Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).
📢 From Orion Magazine: Environmental Writers’ Workshop June 14-19, 2026 at Omega Institute
Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop provides an intimate space to connect with writers, artists, and editors, spark creativity, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. This week-long workshop is cosponsored by the Omega Center for Sustainable Living.
You’ll be studying with: Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Erica Berry, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Maria Pinto, Roger Reeves, Nicholas Triolo, and Isle McElroy.
📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions
The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…
📢 From The Shipman Agency: A Book Proposal Generator with Greg Mania
“In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator. Beginning with an overview of the anatomy of the book proposal by looking at several different examples, this generator will be broken up into eight weekly sessions. Each week, we will be discussing and going over one element of the book proposal in detail…By the final session, each student will have a complete book proposal, and will be ready to take the next step on the path to publication.”
8 Sessions: Saturdays, April 4-May 23 12:00-2:00pm ET $500
📢 From Jen Doll and Elizabeth Voetsche: Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30
Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.
Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026
Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY
Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)
Rooms: All private rooms
Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions
Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot)
📢 From Sneaker Wave Magazine: Keeping Your Story In Balance April 16th
Join sneaker wave magazine on Thursday, April 16, at 5 pm pacific time / 8 pm eastern time for a 90-minute live course on “Keeping Your Story in Balance.” All four of our editors will teach from examples in the magazine, their work, and other beloved texts demonstrating how to balance exposition, scene, and summary, and when to break for reflection.
Participants will leave the class with actionable tools for how to revise and structure their own work for greater clarity and impact.
📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania
Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.
At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:
The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?
How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?
How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?
How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?
Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.
The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.
📢 From Off Assignment: “Writing Queerness”
As queer writers, we are often writing against normative narratives…So, what do we want to write towards? What are the constricting stories and expectations that we can release to forge our own queer literary paths? How do we write in alignment with our own power, experience, and desire? How do we resource the queer imagination to create our stories? In this course — led by Joss Lake and with visits from guest authors Benedict Nguyễn, Andrea Lawlor, Zefyr Lisowski, and Denne Michele Norris — we will identify tropes and flattening narratives that hold us back, and examine techniques and strategies towards empowerment on the page. We’ll explore how we can use our own lived experience in our fiction and non-fiction, getting at the texture of our own queer communities and relationships. We’ll look at forces that work on the queer imagination, including elements of myth, horror, and fantasy, and how to weave them into literary fiction. And we’ll dive into bringing queer relationships onto the page in their messiness and eros. The course is an invitation to step into your authenticity as a queer writer.
Dates: Mondays: Mondays: April 6-27 // 7 - 9:30 p.m. EST
Price: $420 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)
📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece
Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.
📢 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.
Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.
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.
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Thanks for this, for an enjoyable time spent reading some excellent work!
Thank you for including me 💕