Personal Essays Galore, PLUS Some Great Workshops and Calls for Submissions...
Including: Workshops from Writing Co-Lab, Alexander Chee, Narratively Academy, and Melissa Petro; and calls for submissions from Blaise Allysen Kearsley 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’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.
*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 this and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
Memoir Land is on Substack Notes and BlueSky.
Essays from partner publications…
My First Lover Was the Bathtub Faucet
by
“My first orgasm was to the movie Valley Girl, starring Nicolas Cage, during which my grandmother lay asleep behind me on the sofa, but my first lover was the bathtub faucet. How did I even think to position myself under it, feet flat against the wall on either side of the hot and cold knobs? It wasn’t a natural position; it was a natural inclination.”
In Defence of Big Women Who Take Up Space in the World
by Susan Swan
“My friend is tall too, and in the past few months, she has grown a respectable one and a half inches; now she stands five foot nine. But I’m six foot two, and I’m only twelve. My mother is also tall—she’s five foot ten—and she often tells me to stop slouching. She doesn’t understand that there’s a world of difference between our heights.”
Remembering the Worst Book Signing Ever
by
“When my publisher’s in-house publicist Annie called to say she’d set up a booksigning for me at Sam’s Club, she said, ‘Don’t snark. It’s a good opportunity.’ She said, ‘It’s not just any Sam’s. It’s a Grand Opening.’ She said, ‘Sam’s moves a lot of books.” She said, “Sedaris does Costco all the time.’”
Too Old to Rock n’ Roll?
by
“Make no mistake: When people scoff at older performers, they’re making fun of us oldsters in the audience, too. But I ask you: Are you too old to rock and roll? Is anybody? As long as we’re still breathing, still reliving memories, and making new ones, I say: Rock on.”
Essays from around the web…
Pee-wee and Me
by Matt Wolf
“The film I made, Pee-wee As Himself, was four years in the making, and it almost broke me. Paul never fully ceded control. He refused to complete a final interview about the arrests that destroyed his reputation and held up our production for long stretches of time. For a while, he stopped talking to me, and I feared the project would never be completed. It would be Paul’s last private act, however, that allowed me to finish telling his story.”
In Search of My Mother's Garden
by
“I called ma to ask for advice. Our relationship was tenuous, as always, but she answered, giving me specific instructions on how to grow and harvest green beans. She even bought me a hydrangea, telling me it was one of Abuelita’s favorite flowers. I thought I’d finally found something to connect us.”
Jeremy Spoke in Class Today
by
“In the fall of 1989, my senior year, I bought a handgun in the lobby of my high school library. It was a cheap .25 caliber, small enough to fit in my front pocket. The guy who sold it to me, a fellow student, said it was unregistered. He said it was something I didn’t want to get caught with. For several years, I kept the gun in the glove box of my truck. Each morning, before I drove to school, I would check to make sure it was there. Each afternoon, driving home, I would suddenly recall it, like a harbored secret. It mostly stayed in my truck. I took it out occasionally to aim it. As far as I can remember, I never fired it.”
What I Learned About Endometriosis by Being a “Difficult Woman”
by
“I learned to brace myself for the question I was asked at every appointment. “What do you do for a living?” Sometimes it came first, sometimes wedged between two others, but my answer always seemed to confirm what the doctor suspected. Instead of asking me what I could no longer manage to do because of my symptoms, doctors were quick to figure I must be extremely stressed and anxious as an ambitious young woman pursuing her Ph.D. I’d hear myself beg for surgery, yet I’d leave the clinic with a prescription for narcotics and hormones.”
Writing on the Wall
by Kelly Caldwell
“We lobbied hard to stay, but the administration rejected all our appeals. To the university, I suppose, one set of rooms was as good as another for the scruffy loudmouths who published the student newspaper. No doubt they thought we were being overly sentimental. It was so much deeper than that.”
The Fuckitall
by
“Barb knew I wanted long hair more than anything. I shrank in the chair. Regardless of whether she was right or wrong, she used her adult power over me as casually as she played with a display of wire and felt animals near the counter. Her callousness had a Firestarter quality, like torching what you think is a pile of chaos because you can. Because it’s easier than kindness. Barb’s thoughtlessness told me I was worth less than the strays she rescued by the side of the road.”
Generational Healing at Universal Studios
by
“By age twenty-five, we never spoke again. Rage eclipsed my need for her love at that point and I stopped trying. But the need never left, a stark truth that cleaved me in two at her final departure. The psychological term for this splintering is ‘complex loss’ but language often falls short. No matter how much we were hurt by them, few of us stop yearning for our mothers to return to us. Like a wound we circle, prod, and lick into scar tissue over the years. We can't help ourselves. Such buried longing snatched me whole, took me for quite a ride. No matter how much we relinquish our expectations, our dreams, they lie dormant, and once stirred by tragedy, take us with them.”
If/Then
by
“Eleven months after my father chose to kill himself, I sat with another man who, in some ways, had also chosen to die. “I don’t want to get off death row,” the man said, the number on his prison uniform graying down his pant leg. The man was not named Alan, but that is what I will call him. Alan was one of my clients in my job as an investigator helping people who had been sentenced to death with their legal appeals. He wore heavy boots and a clean white t-shirt and a watch with a broken face. He was angry with me.”
Punching Through the Same Old Story
by Alex Poppe
“Unlike the current batch of Hollywood blockbusters, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy excluded, sexing the thirty-six-year-old isn’t a transformational experience towards self-discovery and self-acceptance. I still suck my belly in when my clothes come off. I’m tempted not to wear my night guard and definitely don’t wear my Frownies when Sterling sleeps over. Accepting that I’m closer to 60 than 40 has been a steep learning curve. Although I’m starting to embrace—even feel proud of—our age gap, part of me wants to keep my lacy bras on when Sterling and I have sex because bench pressing only slows gravity, not defies it. But neither my belly nor my saggy boobs keep me from enjoying Sterling’s BDE and soft choking hand.”
What Is it About a Summer Tomato
by
“I was already old enough to like tomatoes but did so mostly as an accessory to something else, say a salad or a sandwich or a burger. My mother’s appetite for them was entirely different, singular. It leapt from her to take a near-perfect thing and swallow it down whole without pause or apology. Clearing the dinner tomato plate, she appeared to me almost like a stranger, as if I were meeting her for the first time. Lost in the meditation of a routine act, she disappeared from our chatter and chaos into her hunger. Even as we clambered around her, she remained unmoved, transported somewhere we couldn’t follow or reach.”
My Mother’s Visit
by Shushanik Karapetyan
“She liked things hot. Sometimes she propped her feet up on the radiator. Sometimes she did a footbath while reading, the teapot on the iron stove next to her which she occasionally poured into the plastic bucket keeping the water comfortably hot for her, first degree burn for most. Often, I would heat up a water bottle and place it under the foot of her blanket before she went to bed. She liked to be wrapped up in her blanket like a dolma, or dare I say – a baby.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 NYC people: Tonight I’ll be on a panel about “Writing Midlife” at Bookclub bar in the East Village
Please join us tonight for an event curated by Ramona At Midlife filmmaker
. This panel will be moderated by Orange is the New Black actor , and features , , , and me. It will be a great conversation, held at one of my favorite NYC bookstores (where I launched my memoir in conversation with Julie Klam!!)📢 Academy Workshop: The Insider's Guide to Writing Personal Statements and Applying for Grants & Residencies
Abeer Hoque, a writer and photographer who has won fellowships from the NEA and Fulbright Foundation, is teaching The Insider's Guide to Writing Personal Statements and Applying for Grants & Residencies, a new session of her intensive Two-day workshop for 8 students at Narratively Academy, June 14 and 21.
📢 Writing Co-Lab’s Summer Camp
Writing Co-Lab’s Summer Camp is a three week online program of generative classes, panels on writing and building a lifelong relationship with your creative self, accountability write-together groups each weekday, and Saturday open-mic events, designed to inspire and motivate you in midsummer. Everything takes place live on zoom and each session is recorded so campers can choose to experience them again or on their own schedule. In addition, campers receive a daily motivational email. If you’re looking to restart and recommit to your writing practice, or if you’re a new and curious writer looking to get work done in community, this camp is for you.
📢 Craft Seminar: How To Write An Essay Collection with via The Shipman Agency
“This is a lecture class in two parts with suggested but not required readings and 6 writing prompts, 3 per class, that I have used to write essays for my next collection. There is no workshop component. Students will be sent a suggested reading list after registration. Reading the collections under discussion is recommended but not required.”
Two Sessions: Sundays, July 13 + 27 1:00-3:30pm ET; $200
📢 Submit to Blaise Allysen Kearsley ’s new “How I Learned” magazine…
The How I Learned Series was a live reading/storytelling/comedy show created by Blaise Allysen Kearsley in 2009. The monthly series ran for a little over a decade with events in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and New Orleans, and included benefits for Emily's List and Housing Works.
Featured guests included Mira Jacob, Alexander Chee, Ayo Edebiri, John Fugelsang, Anna Sale, James Hannaham, Hugh Ryan, Sasheer Zamata, John Wray, David Carr, Starlee Kine, Taylor Negron, Issac Fitzgerald, Aparna Nancherla, Emily Flake, Dodai Stewart, Choire Sicha, Jami Attenberg, Maggie Estep, Rosie Schaap, and many others.
How I Learned has been "on hiatus" since the Covid shutdown. Now, it's being resurrected as an online magazine.
What to submit: Nonfiction essays: 1500 - 2500 words Flash nonfiction: up to 800 words.
Email subject heading: “Submission - How I Learned.” Add a brief synopsis of your piece. Attach your submission as a Word or Google doc. Send to: howilearned@gmail.com
Soft deadline: June 16th Hard deadline: June 20th
📢 Melissa Petro’s Esalen Workshop July 14–18: Writing for Shame Resilience: Turning Shame Into Your Superpower
What if your greatest vulnerability could become your greatest strength? This transformative language arts workshop is designed for anyone ready to level up by unlocking their authenticity.
The curriculum draws from the wisdom in the instructor’s critically acclaimed book, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, which explores how shame is weaponized in our culture to keep us from knowing our worth and achieving our goals. Through reflective writing, shared stories, and guided readings, participants will explore ways to break free from shame’s grip and reclaim their power.
Participants will be invited to:
Learn about their unique shame triggers.
Develop a greater awareness of how shame functions in our society.
Cultivate vulnerability by sharing intimate stories in a safe space.
Practice empathetic listening as others speak their uncomfortable truths.
📢 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!
Basically, I will read anything Paul Crenshaw writes until the end of time, so off I go.
Lovely to see you at last night’s event! I’m so inspired by the creativity and perspective that midlife allows, and everyone on the panel were such bright lights of that. And thank you for including my piece in your list—very honored! <3