One Week Until the Fall Memoir Monday Reading! Plus, 10 great new 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 — and now many additional publications. Beginning in January, 2022, there’ll occasionally be original work as well—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish, so if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!
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One week from tonight!: The Memoir Monday quarterly reading series hosted by Memoir Monday founder Lilly Dancyger is not only back, it’s both in-person, and over Zoom. The fall edition features Alisson Wood, Jordan Kisner, Erin Khar, and Larissa Pham. It will be held Monday, November 8th at 7pm at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn.
Replace Me
by Amber Husain (Image © Agustinalvia)
"My first experience of ‘permanent’ employment – a coveted job in publishing – was depressing for a number of reasons. I’d had jobs and been depressed before, but this job was special. It was the first on which I was able to rely for my subsistence, the first in which my contract wasn’t built around the word ‘casual’, and the first which felt causally connected to my growing doubt about the beauty and meaningfulness of life. The most obvious source of this malaise was the job’s disappointing mundanity. The industry, its structure having calcified around a self-perceived fragility, had seemingly long since transformed editors into book production administrators, their interests in literature obsolete, imagination broadly shunned."
At the Tired Horses
by Sara Gelston Somers (Art by Ciera Dudley)
"In the hazy first weeks after my daughter’s birth, the only song I could think to sing was the simplest. At just two lines long and repeated for almost three minutes, it’s the first song on Bob Dylan’s unpopular 1970 album, Self Portrait, and the song my husband and I got married to the summer before.”
Gettysburg
by Kirtan Nautiyal (Photo by ninniane via Flickr.)
"Yet I wanted something deeper, earlier. I wanted brown people in cravats and frock coats. I wanted brown abolitionists, railroad tycoons, and transcontinental explorers. I wanted brown people in uniform firing relentlessly at this nation’s enemies, foreign and domestic. I wanted us in every corner of America’s history, all the good and the bad, hidden somewhere in the background like we always were."
How Do We Survive Suicide?
by Arianna Rebolini (Photograph via Anchor Books)
"When I look back on journal entries from those worst days, I don’t see sadness as much as I see existential panic: Who am I, really? How much is a matter of pathology? How much does my fear of owning this darker voice hinge on a cultural insistence that it’s unhealthy, even unnatural? What if I’m all of it?"
I’m the Oldest I Have Ever Been
by Verna Gillis (Photograph courtesy of the author)
"Just because I don’t remember something, doesn't mean it didn't happen. And just because I remember doesn’t mean it did…I often have no memory of yesterday. I do, however, have proof it happened: It is now today, and today always follows yesterday."
This is How I Remember Them
by Lanre Apata
"They had all disappeared before I arrived. Death. Distance. Disconnection. And discontent… Mother said her mum jubilated when she conceived me. But earth had taken her in, folding its arms around her still body before I became too big for her belly, while I exerted my readiness for a life outside her womb. Mother mourned her departure for months, months after my birth. I cried every time nursing you drained me, every time I needed someone to tell me I will be fine, every time sleepless nights send migraine to split my head open, she told me later."
When a Blood Mobile Passed By
by Abby Manzella
"I agreed on the title, and we both agreed on the possibilities of our newly imagined story. Such ponderings were part of how we enjoyed our time alone together. We narratively inoculated ourselves from what was out there by envisioning apocalypses beyond our current apocalypse. Our stories about the undead kept at bay the newly dead who haunted our thoughts and our streets."
Missing the Boat
by Sejal Shah
"When I first moved to Manhattan, so many people ended up staying with me it felt as if I was running a bed and breakfast on my living room couch. They were friends, but none of them were there to see me. They were there to visit New York City. If someone visits you in Rochester, New York, it means they love you."
The Wind is Not Random
by Dian Parker (Black Walnut Ink painting by Dian Parker – “Wind”)
"Today there are shafts of clouds scudding across a pastel sky. One could ride them in all their finery, softly cushioned, to Algeria if so desired. Even the shadows seem luminous…Yesterday the sky heaved. The wind smoldered, stirred the stagnant stuff, alerted buried fury… Nothing is exempt from the wind. Not you nor I, nor trees, animals, insects, microbes, atoms. You can’t fight against its will, rail as you might. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks.” Keep your rage close lest it loosen and you burn."
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
The artwork and the appropriate credits.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions.
Writer’s Corner:
Catapult’s wonderful “Don’t Write Alone” series features many great writers on various aspects of the writing life. This week, don’t miss Zeba Blay’s wonderful essay, “Reading My Audio Book Was an Act of Letting Go.”
Zeba writes: “I had hoped that by writing candidly about my pain, I could heal it. And I thought healing would mean feeling no connection to the words I read out loud. I thought healing would mean being able to say, “And she lived happily ever after, and she let go of the sadness, and she truly became carefree.” I wanted, so badly, to not be the person I was when I wrote the book.”
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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