Personal Essays Galore
Plus, some great workshops in the announcements section...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, 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 “War Creates Many Orphans” by
and guest edited by . A new essay is coming soon.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #8” the latest in that series for paid subscribers.
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 published “It’s Not Over Until the Bride’s Father Sings,” my own story of eloping to Manhattan’s old, no-frills marriage bureau.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
What Happens When We Stop Remembering?
by Heidi Lasher
“The diagnosis was clear. At the end of the appointment, the doctor looked our dad in the eye and said, ‘You have Alzheimer’s dementia. This form of dementia is terminal; there is no cure, and it will get progressively worse.’…Earlier that week, a heat wave blazed through my town, breaking Spokane’s temperature record for the fourth time in May. In the space of three days, the snowpack in the Bitterroot and Selkirk Mountains melted from just above normal to 50 percent below normal, anomaly enough to nudge fifty years of data into a new normal that my kids will remember as simply normal.”
Generation Gap
by Allen Bratton
“At the entrance K requests two tickets and the cashier asks if that’s one adult and one child. K, grey-haired, is obviously the adult. I am the one who looks like I might be under thirteen, though occasionally when I’m out with my father strangers assume he’s my husband. ‘No, no,’ K says, ‘two adults.’”
When I Met My Husband, We Didn’t Speak the Same Language
by Sheena Rossiter
“‘Próximo!’ Next! A member of Brazil’s federal police waved me over to her window. With an official stamp in my passport, the clock officially started ticking on my visa. We had to organize our marriage paperwork immediately or I’d run the risk of having to leave the country. We knew that getting a marriage licence would take months, so we had no time to spare. My rush to the altar had begun.”
The Club
by Jarek Steele
“I didn’t look cis, but in a dark room, I might be okay. The bigger truth, though, was that I didn’t just want to be okay. I wanted to be wanted. I thought about the guy in my rearview mirror. I wondered if we’d recognize each other in the dark. I wondered if I’d want to make out with someone. I wondered if I’d feel anything at all.”
Monster-in-Residency
by
“The next step was to persuade myself that all it would take to turn what looked like a career and soul-destroying surrender into a good thing for me, too, was perspective. If I squinted, I could see my current living situation as the residency I’d long desired. Living at my mother’s house, I had no rent or utilities to pay, and there was a train station right across the street if I needed to head into the city to visit a museum or use the library for research.”
Imaginary Homelands: Lauren Markham Returns to Ancestral Landscapes for the Very First Time
by Lauren Markham
“It was the summer of 2019 and I took a trip to Greece, a place that meant a great deal to me and yet a place I’d never been. I went in pursuit of fact: to report on the refugee crisis and to research my family’s history. But in the process I often found myself slipping into the territory of mythmaking, as if via hole in the ground. For what is travel—and for that matter, what was my family’s migration story, or even my choice to become a journalist—if not the pursuit of some mythic idea?”
Essays from around the web…
I Was Told You Were Good at Giving Bad News
by Kera Bolonik
“I’d chosen her as my doctor almost 25 years ago, in part, because I’d always expected to be in this situation. My paternal grandmother and my mother’s two sisters had breast cancer — one has the BRCA gene, the other died before such tests were available. I, like my mother, tested negative…I also have a complicated relationship with my breasts, with my body in general, and initially attributed the unease to my being a queer person who didn’t relate to socially ascribed gender roles.”
No Place to Go but In
by Amanda Bray Hinton
“When I think back to my grandmother and the coping mechanisms she developed from her experiences in WWII, I can’t help but reflect. I wonder if we all have grappled enough with the fact that living through the pandemic could have easily procured the same invisible coping mechanisms as a years-long, horrific war. (Anybody still hoarding hand sanitizer “just in case?”) I can’t help but wonder, even though most of us are wired for resiliency, who among us can ever reasonably be expected to feel the same again. And are the readily available talk therapy resources enough to support us as we make our way through the world again?”
The Lure of Divorce
by Emily Gould
“In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind…When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.”
An Immigrants Journey Through Corporate America
by
“The compliant Asian-American immigrant in me—the one brought up in a culture insisting on humility being a virtue—wrote “EXECUTIVE PRESENCE” in block letters in my notebook, with a pen that felt warm from being held for too long…The gritty, hard-working business leader in me screamed silently: Executive presence? You mean I need to be white and put on a suit?!”
In Pieces
by Kevin Wood
“Grandma and I have a special relationship, my aunt once said. But now, I hardly recognize her. Grandma looks up. Steely eyes so direct they pierce me. She doesn’t say anything, just bends over the table, abandoning perfect posture, and continues ripping into her lunch special. The fried foul is helpless in her clutch. And I see something else for the first time—the beauty that exists in breakdown.”
My Son Is Homeless, and This Is the Last Time I Saw Him
by Catharine Cooper
“Two days before I am set to move to Mexico, I see my son walking along the highway. He’s dragging a small black wheeled-suitcase behind him toward a seaside park. His head is downturned, focused on the sidewalk, yelling with and against the voices that torture his schizophrenically damaged mind.”
Buzzcut
by TR Brady
“I left my partner of seven years and started dating someone seven years younger than me. My dad and my new partner’s mom died the same week. A year passed. I want to be in a place and time I’ve been, but differently so. I move to Idaho and shave my head. I shave my head to announce my arrival.”
Life After Caregiving
by Anastasia Jill
“People tell me that it'll be okay, but it was never going to be. Caregiving only ends one of two ways: with a nursing home or a tombstone. The latter follows the former. This was the expected outcome, yet I was still unprepared…I feel like it's my fault, and I've been told as much, according to a few people. It's my fault they got worse, and my fault that they died. To those who feel this way: if it makes you feel better, sometimes I wish it was me instead.”
On Not Keeping a Notebook
by Sarah Fay
“Joan Didion, who wrote ‘On Keeping a Notebook,’ explains why: ‘[O]ur notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”’…I wanted escape my implacable ‘I,’ become someone else, someone I wasn’t, someone (I love this term) mentally sound.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Anne Liu Kellor is Offering her Both/And: Reading and Writing the Mixed-Race Experience 10-Week Class beginning February 28th
Both/And: Reading and Writing the Mixed-Race Experience is a 10-week online writing workshop starting on 2/28/24, from 5-7 pm PT. This class will hold space for mixed-race people to share freely about our evolving identities, as we read and discuss essays and free-write from prompts that explore topics such as: coming of age, messages we learned about race, whiteness, colorism, privilege, ancestors, silence, non-binary thinking, community, and belonging.
📢 Lizzie Simon is Offering a Personal Essay Workshop…
"Detour" author Lizzie Simon is currently accepting students for her memoir and personal essay class, which will take place on Zoom on seven Wednesdays, March 6 to April 17 from 1-2:30pm EST. Her classes teach craft, inspire courage and ease writers into writing for a small chunk of time every day. "I think that writing is good for the brain, and that writing amongst supportive writers can become a kind of paradise." Lizzie also invites authors to visit, and for this session, visiting authors include Kate Bolick, Blake Butler, Athena Dixon, Anya Liftig and Louis Chude-Sokei. The class fee is $550.00.
📢 New Workshops at Narratively Academy…
Coming up this March at Narratively Academy, Claire Rudy Foster will teach Telling Your Trans Story With Candor and Confidence, starting March 10, and Kerra Bolton leads Writing With Your Ancestors: Infusing Memoir With Family History, starting March 14.
📢 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.
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!
This is great. Loved In Pieces by Kevin Wood especially.
"My Son is Homeless..." by Catherine Cooper has a great title and the first sentences drew me in. So, I had to read it. I appreciate personal essay in a social context, and this piece really delivers. Here in L.A., there is a man my sister went to high school with who has been walking the same streets and homeless for more than forty years. The human body is both fragile and yet so strong.