Sailing, Appalachia, and anti-racist bestsellers
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.
The Thrill and Grief of Being a Singlehanded Sailor
by Piper Anderson (art by Sirin Thada)
The first night, I woke up in a panic. I sat straight up in bed, nearly hitting my head on the ceiling. A childhood spent waking in the middle of the night to mediate my parents’ battles had made sleep difficult on land. Sleeping on a boat, constantly rocked by the motion of the sea, intensified my night terrors. Our sailing adventure had barely begun, yet it was already challenging me in unexpected ways.
American, Not Blonde
by Angie Chatman
After seventeen hours of travel, my husband and I arrive at our destination: Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, the Paris of Africa. It’s hot when we land. Tropical hot. Dense and thick, not at all like the oven heat of summer I left back home in Chicago. As I unload my carry-on, the heat current flows through the cabin along with the smell of moist, loamy diesel and the patois of French, English, and other languages I can’t identify. I’m not worried because Eric has been living and working here for over a year, and I’d visited him in Abidjan. Yet, I’m still uncomfortable, not only because of the sweat dripping from my forehead and underarms. I am a newlywed, in a new country, where I don’t readily speak the language, and this time, I’m here to stay.
About That Wave of Anti-Racist Bestsellers Over the Summer…
by Katherine Morgan
I had multiple customers ask me why their particular order of White Fragility was now backordered, even though it had been in stock when they originally added it to their cart. 'Oh, it’s because white people saw a Black man die at the hands of police, and even though Black people have been talking about police brutality for years, it took seeing him take his last breath as that officer kneeled on his neck before many white people felt as though it was time to finally have that talk,' I wrote as a reply. Then I took a deep breath, erased that message, and simply responded, 'It’s a popular book right now.'
Holding Up the Sky
by Rod Mason, as recounted to Charles Massy
We still got stories of when them White fellas, the Berimba, arrived in our Country, Country we had managed for thousands of years. We still have stories down here on Wallaga, the coastal Country, of the day the giant pelican came. It was Captain Cook’s ship, all white sails, looked like a giant pelican slowly cruising up the coast, no effort, but giant. ‘Musta been made by Dimboola?’ they thought – that bloke, our creator, the All-Fatherer, who made all the birds up there on one of his campgrounds on the Monaro high plains, Bobundara there; where he gave them all different beaks, different legs. But this big white pelican, he turned out to be greedy, him and his giant beak and gullet for scooping everything up, and soon began to eat all the Country, fish, animals up – including us.
Lost in a (Mis)Gendered Appalachia
by Leah Hampton
We can rehabilitate our minds. I know this from standing on the porch of that little white house in Tryon and looking at the world from there. I know it from living in these mountains so long and observing the land and meeting the activists who seek to protect it. I also know how little time we have left, how much has already been lost and erased.
Writers’ Resources
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