Missing heroes and writing into the unknown
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
Dear Daughters
by Lillian Giles
They tried to kill us. They tried to murder our gods, tried to drag them through beautiful emerald green forest. Unentered pristine forest; the moist black soiled, bird-singing, dead body weight pulled through forest. The heavy-breathing, barely-able-to-capture-our-plumeria-scent forest. They called us witches, tried fire, earth, sky, and water on us.
Mother-Wit
by Jeffery Renard Allen
It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being. As a survivor of the segregated South, she had already seen it all. More than one man in our family had been lynched in Mississippi.
My Chemical Hormone Therapy Romance
by Lio Min
Yearning for the language to give voice to this thing that, once named, slowly curled itself into the column of my throat and made a nest there. I’ve been taking testosterone for nine months, a heavy-handed metaphor of gestation. The eggs have yet to hatch, and it’s finally time to shine a light on them to see what is forming inside them.
How Do You Write a Memoir of the Unknown?
by Rose Andersen
I filled up a legal pad with notes about the unknowns of my sister’s life. I went to great lengths to resurrect her; I read her diaries, attempted to hack into her email, collected newspaper clippings, studied articles and records, sifted through our family history. I examined each memory and replayed every shared moment, but I could not summon a story that can be told with certainty.
The Dangerous Undersea Search for Missing Military Heroes
by Brant deBoer
At the time, I had just stepped down from active duty with the explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) community, which has one of the highest casualty rates in the military. Since I joined the service, a few months before September 11, 2001, 135 American EOD technicians have died in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, and many more have suffered life-altering injuries. That kind of chaos, the constant grim anticipation of death, was supposed to be behind me. Unfortunately, we would discover that the English Channel, which has witnessed an immense loss of life dating back to at least 55 B.C., when Julius Caesar’s Roman forces invaded the British Isles, would not leave us unscathed.
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