Sailing, head lice, and imagination as a Black and queer tradition
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.
Writing Myself Back Into My Body and Into the World
by Shayla Lawz (photograph by NASA and Modestas Urbonas)
On a trip back to Jersey City, an event changed the trajectory of the poems I was writing. It was just past midnight and I had gone to sleep. I was awoken by the sound of a single gunshot, a sound that my body heard before me. My mother ran to the door instinctively, as she always does, because it could be my brother, could be someone else we know and love. This was not a new sound or new image to us; it was nothing we had to try hard to imagine. It was just a familiar disquiet in our lexicon of sound and images, one that is a part of our world, our reality. Thankfully, it was not him. Yet this time, for the first time, I cried out of a strange grief, out of the feeling that it could have been me. And this water was something like blood. It was for the first time that, after now having lived in all of that quiet, I truly heard the sound.
Heat
by Shaan Amin
I got to know The Redhead as my teaching assistant, though I’d first been introduced to him a year earlier. We met up in the student center, a great room of wooden rafters and a massive hearth, where I could pin him down and ask questions about abstract algebra. He helped me again and again, until all I knew of him was warmth. Discussions of math became conversations about theater, art, and movement. He spoke in hurricane bursts and clips: chaotic but inevitable, shy but energetic, so much intelligence straining against the levees of his lips and racing tongue.
Lice
by AK Blakemore
By the time I was nine or ten years old, the de-lousing process had become either too frequent or too uncomfortable to tolerate on behalf of my entomophilia, and one afternoon I locked myself in the bathroom and cried and told my mum that I wouldn’t let her do it anymore. If it meant I had head lice for the rest of my life, so – my thinking went – be it.
When You Take a Sailing Trip for Novel Research and It’s a Total Disaster
by Amity Gaige
I considered including “Xanax” in the acknowledgments for my latest novel, Sea Wife; maybe I had pushed myself a little too hard researching. It all started back in the winter of 2017, when I signed up for a ten-day sailing course that took me to Grenada, an island nation in the Caribbean. I was stuck on my novel, partially because I was hellbent on setting it at sea. Why I chose to write a novel set at sea remains unknown, even to me. I grew up in urban Pennsylvania; I have no sailing background; I am neither brave nor handy. I am useless on a boat. I knew that writing a nautical novel would require months and months of research, as well as learning a new vocabulary of nautical language, and after that, the hard part would begin—writing the thing, inventing a narrative from the ground up.
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