Sacred stories, fake birthdays, and multilingualism
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
Sacred Stories
by Sarah Kasbeer (art by Dara Herman Zierlein)
By seventeen, I began to struggle emotionally, and my father completed my college applications for me. He applied only to programs that didn’t require an essay—and his safety schools became my salvation. Back then I planned not to go to college. I was spending more and more time with Jack who was dealing weed. My parents disliked him based on the fact that he had a criminal record, but they weren’t aware of the level to which they should have been concerned. Neither was I. But then again, my father was the only man I really knew.
Why I Stopped Celebrating My “Birthday”
by Steve Haruch
For the purposes of this form, the child is born retroactively—in Seoul, because the woman is sitting in an office in Seoul. The form for a relinquished child certifies that he belongs to no one. He was born, he was given up, he was found. But even a relinquished child, a child with no name, must have a name, and must be born in a place and on a day.
Cooking from Memory
by Barclay Bram
Chengdu was one of the most food-obsessed cities I had ever been to, but it was also, it seemed, hungry for a golden age that had passed. People would rhapsodise about certain dishes and flavours but then remark that they were now long gone. But this posed a challenge to me as a recent immigrant to the city eager to learn about local cuisine. I had no reference point; none of these flavours existed in my childhood. They were all new to me. Worse, I was trying to learn how to make them myself, so I was always trying to produce dishes against an illusory scale of flavour that existed somewhere in the past. In over a year of cooking Sichuanese food for my friends in Chengdu, no one ever told me I made a dish that tasted like the flavour of their childhood.
The Wound of Multilingualism: On Surrendering the Languages of Home
by Sulaiman Addonia
English soothed me. It was a stream inside me, running between the pockets of wounds, the breeze lifting from its phrases casting like silk over the bubbles of fire under my skin. It enabled me to express myself, allowed this foreign born immigrant to come to it, gave him the chance to remold it, to feel safe in it, make it dance, have fun, and suffer with him, lose itself in him and him on it.
Writers’ Resources
This crash course on “Staying Savvy Before Your First Book” from Blue Stoop sounds like a great resource for writers building their publishing careers.
The next Memoir Monday reading is one week from today! Register here and join us for an evening with Athena Dixon, Sarah Kasbeer, Angela Chen, and Melissa Faliveno.
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