Pokémon, Social Work, and Hardcore
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and monthly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Tin House, Granta, and Guernica. What better way to enjoy a long weekend than by curling up with some great new personal essays?
When Your Social Worker Thinks You’re Ungrateful
by Dina Nayeri (art by Dola Sun)
Minoo and I met two years ago, when her church contacted me to befriend a new refugee who was at risk of depression. She was my age, a mother, like me, and came from my hometown in Iran. We had fled for the same kind of apostasy, though I had been a child and she was in her 30s. We met for coffee. She was bedraggled but smiled for my sake. She insisted on buying my coffee. She had sad, kind eyes, with a drop of something, like a tear, lodged near one iris. To bridge the class divide, and to put her at ease, I made a clown of myself, and soon she opened up to me. “We can’t breathe,” she said. “My son is almost a teenager. My daughter is suffocating.”
Lemons in Winter
by Mika Taylor
It’s January and I am visiting California’s Central Coast because my husband is leaving me. Has left me. I have never been this sad before. I am forty years old and my marriage is, was, the center of my life. My husband and I have been together almost twelve years, married eight, and separated less than six months. I am not over it. I am not OK. And I do not really see a path through, though therapists and friends assure me that time will help. I know this type of loss is common enough, but I am in no way prepared. At least in California there will be sun, I’d thought. But right now, it’s raining.
In Immigrating from Japan, I Lost Language, Home, and Pokémon
by Nina Li Coomes
Maybe, I thought, even if I couldn’t quite find the right words, I could play Pokémon with my peers and bridge the cavernous gap of being an immigrant in an all-white classroom. I would show them my Japanese trading cards, they would show me their English ones, and we would laugh and feel that same mix of curiosity and adventure together. I believed that this might be it, that Pokémon would be the diplomatic maneuver needed to secure my place among my peers.
The Mania of Queer Desire: In Praise of Fever Ray’s Plunge
by Logan February
I have read that it is not uncommon in situations of prolonged loneliness, to imagine a sense of familiarity with the thoughts of animals in one’s surroundings. I—we—project these thoughts as a way of not feeling like we have to process all this, alone.
In writing about the mockingbird, I realize what Fever Ray did to that poor creature. It was as though she said, I know you think of yourself as an animal, but look here, look at this. This is what it feels like to desire, to want. The drumming noise in your head, the distorted pitches. She set a napalm fire on its head.
Or perhaps I am anthropomorphizing again.
Anthems for the Anthropocene
by Mario Reinaldo Machado
For many people, hardcore music is esoteric at best, alarmingly unpleasant at worst. But for those who produce, perform and listen to it, hardcore music has long been an outlet not only for extreme emotions, but also extreme political ideas. On one hand, right-wing political groups, including white nationalists and neo-Nazis, have a history of using heavy music as a tool to spread their ideology. This is one issue, in particular, that some hardcore groups are fighting back against with explicitly anti-fascist music, representing a central tension in the hardcore music scene. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, hardcore music has become a means of grappling with the existential realities of climate change and environmental destruction—a reverberant tool for navigating the dark, uncertain waters of the Anthropocene.
Writers’ Resources
Register for Barrelhouse’s Conversations and Connections conference in Pittsburgh, PA (October 26)
Come brainstorm personal essay ideas at Catapult’s 2-hour idea generator—with me—in NYC, next Monday (September 9)
Don’t forget to RSVP for the fall return of the Memoir Monday reading series!
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Until next Monday,