Scuba diving, Battlestar Galactica, and poly relationships during a pandemic
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 Pandemic Ruined My Poly Relationship—But Saved My Marriage
by Sarah Lybrand (art by Kailey Whitman)
But a year later, exhausted, I was ready for all my hard work to pay off. I wanted, so much, for there to be hope: that one day, Ethan might fully accept Max into our lives. That my two partners could call each other friends, or maybe even family one day — my heart’s two halves, whole. For now, though, surely, we’d weathered the worst of it. With spring coming, I resolved to make this our best year yet, and it had to be: I’d come to think of Max as the nourishing mortar holding the cracks of my marriage together. Without him, I thought, everything might collapse.
Named After the Animal
by Sarah Panlibuton Barnes
When it was time to go back down south, my beloved did not get in the car. They told me to drive safely. I hear that my beloved is thriving. I hear they are planting a garden or maybe they finally went to Paris, but they are lost to me and I am lost in the ticking of the days, lost in my own skin, and lost in the state of Alabama without my beloved who smelled of vetiver and came to me in every dream for months.
The Spontaneous Quarantine Writing that Became a Hit in Japan
by Barry Yourgrau
It was all too much. The world was ending. In anguish I shut off the news with its infection rates and fatality counts and lack of PPE, shut off Twitter, the catastrophic lies and ravings from the White House. From this silence, my first story came bursting out.
Racism is a Reboot: Binging Battlestar Galactica at the End of a World
by Franny Choi
I knew Boomer before I knew Boomer, if you know what I mean. I’m talking about the character played by Korean Canadian actress Grace Park on the critically acclaimed Battlestar Galactica reboot of the early aughts. I didn’t watch the show when it first aired, but I’d heard about some of the controversy around the choice to cast Boomer, who is secretly a robot (a Cylon, in the show’s parlance) as Asian. That might have been part of the reason I didn’t watch the show for years, though friend after friend recommended it to me. I couldn’t imagine what I might learn from it that I hadn’t already seen in every other iteration of the “is she a sexy robot, or just Asian?” storyline. Still, I knew I ought to try to get past the first two episodes, as tiresome as it all seemed.
The Year of Breath
by Gabrielle Bellot
I almost skipped the part when I was sure I was going to die, when a hand held me so I couldn’t swim to the surface. The part where, months later, I still worry I will spontaneously stop breathing. Where, even now, I sometimes see I’m going to die flash across my mind when I hold my breath, when I kiss, when I push my face too deeply into a pillow. The part when Her blue-fingernailed hand touched my throat, and instead of air I got water.
Writers’ Resources
Corporeal Writing is offering a brand new online course on writing narrative triptychs, starting this Friday. Check it out here.
The Memoir Monday reading series will return in December!
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