Ready, Set, Read...All These Great New Essays
Plus, workshops, open submissions, and more in the announcements section at the bottom...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, 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
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also week writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #38: Charles Jensen “How My Book Came to Be: #1 Alice Driver,” “The Prompt-O-Matic #32,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #39: Jennifer Case”
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 reprinted “Minnesota Nice” by Cheryl Strayed, which appears in both editions of Goodbye to All That.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Blood & Oil
by Nemonte Nenquimo
“I was mesmerized by the giant, long-necked machine, craning up and down, up and down. So that was what it was sucking up. Our people from long ago, from the beginning. It was sucking up our past…Walking on, Dad now left the oil road for a narrow trail that passed beneath the pipeline. ‘My sister lives this way.’”
Despite her Admitted Vanity, “Madame Novary” Yearns for Old Age
by Rachelle Bergstein
“I wanted to live a long, healthy life and I didn’t want tiny telomeres tripping me up. But I was also concerned about my looks and what chemo would do to my hair — which I always wore long, wavy, and wild — my body, and my face. Sometimes, I wonder if our collective anxiety around aging has evolved as a culturally acceptable way to talk about the fear of death.”
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
by Thea Lim
“A few weeks after my book release, my friends and I and our little kids took a weekend vacation. They surprised me with a three-tiered cake matching my book cover, cradled on laps, from Toronto, through a five-hour traffic jam. In all the photos from that trip, I’m staring at my phone.”
Our House Will Flood Again. And Again. Here’s Why We Refuse to Leave.
by Jared Bilski
“Eventually I settled in at the top of the stairs — staring at the ‘Good Things Are Going to Happen’ wall art — watching to make sure the water didn’t make it up to the step that my wife and I had decided would force us to wake the kids and ask one of the neighbors we barely knew to take us in. I spent most of the night there, listening to the crashing, banging and shattering sounds of water destroying the first floor of our home. By sunrise, the creek had receded significantly and what was left of our downstairs was a mud-covered shell of what had been there the previous day — complete with snakes, crayfish and other creek-dwelling creatures. Based on the marks we saw on the walls, the water had reached a peak of about four and a half feet.”
September
by Neesha Powell-Ingabire
“I’ve had conversations with my Rwandan spouse where they say, 'African people are always left out of conversations about indigeneity in the United States, but we are Indigenous, too. We are indigenous to our different regions of Africa.' I may be an Indigenous African, but still, I have no claim to the native dances, songs, food, and customs of my ancestors. I am indefinitely unmoored. When I wear the mushanana of my wife’s culture for special occasions, a sash draped over one shoulder and a wraparound skirt, I’m not sure if it’s an act of appreciation or appropriation. But I am sure it makes me feel beautiful and makes my wife happy.”
Body All the Way Down
by Alexandra Middleton
“February 13th is the day before Valentine’s Day, and her father has an idea. He tapes together pieces of newspaper into a giant sheet, covering half the bedroom floor, and lays himself down on it, arms and legs prostrated like the Vitruvian Man. He asks her mother to trace his outline with a giant Sharpie. On the left side of the chest, the trace of a heart.”
Essays from around the web…
Learning to Connect With Friends — Without Alcohol
by Lilly Dancyger
“There are studies that confirm what I — and anyone else who has ever made friends with another drunk woman in a bar bathroom — have always known: Drinking can help build social bonds. It lowers inhibitions and fosters feelings of connection. But what happens when you’ve come to rely on alcohol to establish and reinforce those connections?”
My Mother’s Envy Will Outlive Us Both
by Tara Ellison
“sometime last year things started to dramatically change and it was clear she needed help. She became confused and anxious and called me sometimes seven or more times in a day, forgetting that we had talked and repeating herself. Once she called me frantic because she had been driving somewhere and forgot where she was going.”
A Failed Marriage, a Heartbreak of a Rebound—Was the Answer to My Relationship Woes in a Self-Help Book?
by Sarah Kasbeer
“‘I don’t remember ever seeing you cry over a boy before,’ my sister said in June, when I went to visit her in Illinois. Dried-up cicada corpses were strewn about—the aftermath of their early summer orgy. ‘I know,’ I said. My marriage ended during the pandemic, and I had spent a week sequestered at my parents’ house in California, crying in a robe and drinking Chardonnay. On many levels, this more recent breakup was so much easier—I wasn’t losing a life partner. But it also felt like a rebuke to the whole reason I got divorced in the first place: I thought I deserved someone who could connect with me deeply, on a physical, intellectual, and emotional level.”
Confessions of an English Teacher
by Raju Tai
“As an adult, I read and wrote mostly in English. I thought I was comfortable with it. But when it became the only language in my mouth, I felt like spitting it out. While I savoured poems and essays in English, I needed my languages for banter. For comic relief. It felt hard to help and ask for help in English. So I didn’t…One morning, in the Zoom class, I confessed to my students, ‘I know I am your English teacher but I must tell you this. I don’t like English.’ Shocked face emojis popped on their windows. ‘I love you guys more than I love English,’ I added. The emojis turned into red hearts.”
Contraband Marginalia
by Kasey Butcher Santana
“The chain of command valued the jail library where I worked as a civilian staff member and issued us a generous budget. People with an outlet for their imaginations are less likely to get into fights or make toilet wine.”
Struggled With Not Wanting Kids—When My Husband Died, the Decision Was Made for Me
by Nicole Starker Campbell
“I was 24 and head-over-heels in love when I married Mike. When we were first together, he was in the military. I told him I wouldn’t want to have kids while he was a soldier; I wasn’t someone cut out for solo parenting while he was away for months at a time. He happily agreed. When Mike left the military a few years later, we both thought the urge to start a family would come.”
I'm in Bed With a Man and a Cat Named Hussy and I Miss My Wife
by Asya Graf
“I could use neat identity words to try to tell you a true story. Bisexual, androsexual, homoromantic, subby. Would that be clearer? Or I can tell you a story in a different genre, in the language of psychotherapy, my profession, about growing up a fatherless girl, about my unresolved, ungrieved longing for Daddy. Or I can say, it’s just that I missed dick. Or that I never really dated men and had to try, to either walk through that open door or close it for good. I could say, I was about to turn 40 and had to find out. But each of these stories leaves something vital out, something to do with my confusion about desire and home.”
ABBA, Saturn V, and Your Own Personal French Revolution
by Patrick Cole
“I used to imagine that the moonshot helped me situate myself in time. But I learned that you never can situate yourself in time, it’s always too late. You are already being raised in an era different from the one into which you were born. At least one historian has posited that French people born after the Revolution were cut off entirely from their past, so great were the changes to society. They were adrift in a new world. At least they understood the reason for their discombobulation.”
Bleeding
by Jane Myer
“YOU DIDN’T THINK YOU’D BE ABLE TO, not because you had been told you couldn’t but because of where you came from. You felt defective growing up—father abuse, mother neglect, sister abuse. You thought you were the one to blame because the people you loved the most shit on you. It must have been you, you thought, and the wires in your brain permanently rewired themselves. If you were defective, your womb must have been, too. This is really what you thought.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Electric Literature is accepting applications for its first-ever writing workshop, led by Executive Director and Founding Editor of Recommended Reading Halimah Marcus.
This intimate six-week workshop will be held from 6 – 8 PM on Tuesdays beginning November 12 through December 17, 2024 in Kingston, NY. The cohort is limited to 12 participants, with two writers workshopped per class (each student will be workshopped once). The class will also discuss a selection of iconic and influential short stories, as time allows. Tuition: $625. (Electric Literature members receive a 5% discount.)
📢 Literary Liberation Writing Class Registration Closes Sept 25th!
Sunday, September 29, Natasha Thomas will lead Women, Writing & Resistance—a three week course where you will explore the literary works of influential figures such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and others, understanding how these writers used writing as a tool for societal change and liberation. To sign up for WOMEN, WRITING & RESISTANCE and to learn more about our courses, visit our workshop calendar. We have space for a few more folks! Payment plans can be made available.
📢 Raising Mothers is open for submissions!
Raising Mothers publishes experimental and traditional fiction, micro and flash, creative nonfiction, interviews, book reviews, photo essays, and comic/graphic narratives written exclusively by the global majority. We are particularly interested in unique column pitches, serialized fiction and our Books on Books section.
📢 Introducing IN A FLASH Magazine
This new flash magazine comes from five writers who love working in flash form and whose work you may have seen here in Memoir Monday: Leanne Sowul, Nina Lichtenstein, Cynthia Allen, Casey Mulligan Walsh & Kate Lewis. These writers are excited to celebrate flash as a literary form - the electric way a single sentence, a single short paragraph, a single phrase can change the way you view yourself and the world in the span of a moment. IN A FLASH is excited to create more opportunities for short flash nonfiction in the literary world, and you can learn more here:
📢 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.
Thank you, Sari, delighted and grateful to be here. 💜
Belated thank you, Sari, for including my essay here!