Personal Essays Galore (Including One by Annie Ernaux!), Workshops, and Calls for Submissions
Workshops from Narratively, Anne Liu Kellor, Margaret Juhae Lee, Paulette Perhach; and calls for submissions: essays on Sinéad O’Connor, infidelity, and Literary Liberation.
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, 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.
*While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. 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…*
Hot tip for those in NYC: Attend the launch for
and ’s anthology Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us, the at Books are Magic’s Brooklyn Height’s location tomorrow, , Jul 22nd, 2025 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM in Brooklyn. Featuring: Sharbari Ahmed, Zoe Zolbrod, Porochista Khakpour, Millicent Souris, & musical guest Monique Bingham.
Essays from partner publications…
The Other Girl
by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer
“It is a sepia photo, oval-shaped, glued inside a yellowed cardboard folder, showing a baby posed in three-quarter profile on a heap of scalloped cushions. The infant wears an embroidered nightdress with a single, wide strap to which a large bow is attached, just behind the shoulder, like a big flower or the wings of a giant butterfly. The body is long and not very fleshy. The legs are parted and stretch out toward the edge of the table. Under the brown hair, swept up in a big curl over the protuberant forehead, the eyes are wide and staring with an almost devouring intensity. The arms, open like those of a baby doll, seem to be flailing, as if she were about to leap from the table. Below the photo, the signature of the photographer (M. Ridel, Lillebonne), whose intertwined initials also appear in the upper left-hand corner of the front cover, which is heavily soiled and coming unglued.”
The Man Who Betrayed Me Was Also the Man Who Loved Me
by J. Martin
“We met at Hanoi, one of Madrid’s most exclusive nightclubs. His dark hair was swept left, and he moved through the crowd with a quiet elegance. That night he said, “Let me show you the real Madrid.” I was supposed to return to the U.S. for business school that fall. But instead, I stayed — for another two years.”
Grifting My Way Through the Influence Economy: An excerpt from You Have a New Memory
by
“In places of great wealth or beauty, I always felt like a fraud. I have short legs and buccal fat, and walking past the Jeep I was struck with panic that I would be tested on my wellness. Anyone could walk up to me at any time and ask me to do the splits. This was something I admired about my influencer peers: their ability to show up and fit in, to audience-test parts of themselves until they landed on something profitable. One girl’s main account was the most successful of several exercises in identity, and her lesser projects remained public out of pride or apathy: a page devoted to a cat that she later relinquished in a bad breakup; a podcast page that hadn’t posted in three years; a cooking vertical with a smattering of shots of meal-prepped shrimp tacos, the plates angled on a dark and unclean sofa and encircled in portrait mode migraine auras. She didn’t seem to consider these abortive endeavors failures; instead, she used them to comment emojis on her main account. An outsider might say she lacked depth or integrity, but she’d never asked for depth and integrity. I, however, had asked for wellness and attractiveness and influence, and came up lacking.”
Girl You Better Try To Have Fun
by
“I cried because Sinéad O’Connor was dead. I cried because Joan Didion was dead, and Tina Turner, and all the artists I hadn’t grieved because apparently I was a vampire and somewhere in 2020 I’d turned myself off and now that I was on again I couldn’t stop. bell hooks was dead. Milan Kundera was dead. Valerie Boyd was dead. Don’t tell me it’s silly to mourn people we don’t know personally—those artists let me feel. They help me access my own heart. They keep me from remaining numb, complacent, complicit.”
Essays from around the web…
: The Poet Who Advocated Radical Tenderness
by
“In the dark of the dance floor, Andrea grabbed my shoulders and hugged me close, and said into my ear: ‘I want you to know it’s OK to not be OK right now. You’ve done a huge heart thing, and I see you.’ I began to cry, letting myself go in Andrea’s arms as Britney Spears blared on the speakers above us about how loneliness was killing her…This was the Andrea I knew for close to 20 years and the person the world is grieving after they died on July 14 at the age of 49. Andrea, who was nonbinary and used they/them pronouns, was the ultimate empath, someone who knew how to give you exactly what you needed when you were least expecting it, both in their relationships and their writing.” (Gift link.)
A Tree Grew in Brooklyn
by
“It’s disorienting when a city tree is felled: The light is all wrong, and then you realize what’s missing. Neighbors reported that the city workers who removed the tree had been “proud and excited.” They called the oak the “matriarch of the block.” One forester put her age between 250 and 300 years old, in which case this tree saw not only the Civil War, but also the American Revolution.”
I counsel women going through a divorce. Here's what they tell me…
by
“Many women who initiate divorce tell me their spouse was more like an unreliable assistant than a true partner, writes psychotherapist Oona Metz, who specializes in treating women navigating divorce. In this essay, Metz explains the way couples divide unpaid labor seems to fall into one of three categories — and how those imbalances can topple a marriage.”
I Went to Live Aid
by
“Armed with nothing but a small bag of the barest essentials, my dear friend Moe and I made the pilgrimage to JFK Stadium in Philly for the occasion. Getting there required an immaculately woven tapestry of white lies: She said she was crashing at my aunt’s house; I said we were crashing at her aunt’s house (I did have an aunt Martha in suburban Philly, but she was none the wiser to this entire operation). It must’ve been an ungodly hour, but Moe somehow convinced her dad to deposit us at South Station in Boston, where we caught the Amtrak and set off to our version of Mecca.”
I See Your Horror, and I Raise You
by
“We are ten years apart, my brother and I, which mattered for most of our lives. When his life was first starting to implode in high school, I was in kindergarten. When I was in high school, he was trying to manage adulthood and get clean and sober. He was better at the latter than the former, but his struggles with the former were more visible to me, easier to compare to my own striving. I was working steadily towards graduating, whereas he’d dropped out— of high school and then the military. I was driving back and forth to school, jobs, and eventually the ten hours to and from Indiana for college, while he was still riding the bus because on the rare occasions he had a vehicle he wrecked or broke it.”
My Body Went Through A Massive Change In My 40s. I Didn't Know What Had Really Happened Until Much Later.
by
“This can’t be right, I thought. Sure, I had a hysterectomy, but my gynecologist assured me that it wouldn’t speed up my menopause timeline because my ovaries remained and that I likely had many years before I had to worry about menopause. However, the numbers sitting in my patient portal didn’t lie. I had unknowingly gone through menopause and was already on the other side.”
Hollows
by
“We are alone in the near dark, the three of us, and we wonder where to go. The woman opens her box, dips her hand inside, and scatters a fistful of ashes into the river. Sadness flows through me. Dead mothers are present in the stone curves, the hollows filled with water. I back up, embarrassed, giving the woman space for private goodbyes.”
My Life Sentence
by
“Knowing who infected me wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t make the infection any easier, or harder, to bear. But Jason was dying. He watched as his face, his body, his very existence slipped away. To be trapped in limbo, in a body that could barely hold itself upright, closer to death than life, must be the worst fate a person could endure. I couldn’t let him die knowing he had condemned me to the same fate.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Trauma Writing Workshop at
Starting on Saturday, August 9, Rebecca Evans leads a 3-part workshop, Untangling the Traumatic Narrative: Using Words to Access Our Wounds.
📢 Yearlong Creative Nonfiction Manuscript Program with September 2025 - August 2026
Are you working on a book-length memoir, collection of essays, or hybrid nonfiction project? Do you seek more support in committing to a regular writing practice, engaging with diverse readings and prompts, outlining your book’s structure, understanding the world of publishing, and connecting with literary community? Then this Yearlong Creative Nonfiction Manuscript Program for 8 women and nonbinary writers may be for you.
Together, cohort members will embark this fall on a journey of sharing their writing, stories, feedback, and questions with each other in community. We will hold generative and craft-based workshops twice a month on Zoom, and share writing, resources, and feedback weekly on Slack. One-on-one coaching calls, seasonal intention-setting, accountability check-ins, and examining our own deep-seated patterns and processes are also fundamental parts of the program, as well as a manuscript review of up to 80k words.
You might not finish a full draft in a year, but you will understand more deeply what your book is about, why you need to write it, and what it will take to stay the course. At least half of the spaces are reserved for BIPOC. Payment plans are available. Learn more at anneliukellor.com, then reach out to Anne you the application or to set up a discovery call. Applications are due by August 4, with the first workshop on Saturday, 9.27.
📢 “Nuts and Bolts” Seeking Sinéad O’Connor essays…
To celebrate the July launch of the anthology Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us (One Signal), with contributions from notable essayists including Lidia Yuknavitch, Porochista Khakpour, Rayne Fisher-Quan, Megan Stielstra, and many more, anthology editors Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne will be running a series of additional essays about Sinead on the Substack "Nuts and Bolts." To celebrate and explore the legacy and impact of Sinéad O'Connor's music, protest, spirituality, and example of living her truths. Please send pieces of 2,000 words or fewer to sineadanthology@gmail.com, with a deadline of August 31, 2025. Pieces selected will appear in Summer 2025. All rights revert to the author after publication, and previously published essays are acceptable as long as the author holds the rights. Compensation for those chosen for publication will be one copy of the hardcover anthology.
📢 Eliciting Stories: how to talk to your loved ones about the past with Margaret Juhae Lee via Corporeal Writing
Workshop Sunday Aug. 17, 2025, 11 am to 1 pm (PST) over Zoom (a recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period)
In this workshop, we will explore how to approach and speak to loved ones about the past, especially when painful memories are involved. Designed for writers in all genres, we will delve into creative approaches to opening up real (and imagined) conversations with family members, in particular, reticent elders—and even those who are no longer with us. A combination of writing exercises and practical advice from a seasoned journalist, this offering focuses on eliciting stories from those who might not want to remember, including ourselves.
📢 Call for Contributors to an Anthology about Infidelity
Tentative title: Stepping Out: Writings on Infidelity
Editors: Susan Ostrov Weisser, author of LOVELAND: A MEMOIR OF ROMANCE AND FICTION and Nan Bauer-Maglin, editor of GRAY LOVE and LOVING ARRANGEMENTS
This essay collection explores the enduring and complex issue of infidelity in romantic relationships, a topic that remains taboo and emotionally charged despite the evolving norms around love, commitment, and sexuality. The book will feature personal essays from those with direct or thoughtful insights into infidelity, whether as participants, victims, or observers. Analytic essays approaching the topic through psychological, sociological, historical, or literary lenses are welcomed. Reprints will be considered. Please send inquiries or a 1–2-page description to both Susan at weisser@adelphi.edu and Nan at Nan.Bauermaglin99@ret.gc.cuny.edu by August 31st. Be sure to include a short note about your previous writing, your profession, and any other relevant information about yourself.
📢 Paulette Perhach’s Harnessing ADHD’s Wild Horsepower program
If you’re a writer with ADHD, you know the struggles. You can now learn more about how to work with your mind to get your writing done with the upcoming class, Harnessing ADHD’s Wild Horsepower, taught by Paulette Perhach. Paulette has had 20 pieces in The New York Times, wrote two essays that went viral to millions of reader, and authored Welcome to the Writer’s Life, one of Poets & Writers’ Best Books for Writers. Her class will help you find community, a structure that works with your mind, and a system for finishing your work that will last you the rest of your writing career. Use the code OLDSTER to get $50 off.
Wednesdays, 12 - 2 p.m. EST Starts: July 23, 2025 Ends: Oct 15 Skip week: Aug 13
12 sessions total. $1,195.00
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and Literary Liberation will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.
📢 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.
Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!
Amazing selection as usual, Sari! Thank you for starting my week off this way - MM keeps me going.
Thanks so much for sharing my HuffPost essay! Can’t wait to dive into the others!