So Many Excellent Personal Essays, So Little Time...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
*Beginning in February, there’ll occasionally be original work as well, likely behind a paywall—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish. So, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!
I’m working now with the National Writers’ Union/Freelance Solidarity Project on creating a writer-friendly contract. Once I have one, I will announce how to submit, although it will be a limited opportunity for now—one essay per month, to be called “Memoir Monthly.” Stay tuned for information in the coming weeks on how to submit…
You can read all about expansion plans here. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
Watching My Neighbor Totoro on the Eve of My Daughters’ Omicron-Surge Return to School
by Anri Wheeler
"As the opening credits rolled, I sensed a shift in the room. A softening in the older girls so used to TV shows with mean girls they promise not to emulate and chaste kisses they still find gross. I reveled in their laughter—the youngest, watching for the first time, cackling at the small white Totoro who first appears from the forest. My phone sat untouched, my spiraling paused: Should we send the girls even though one school planned to open before PCR tests results were in? Would lunch be eaten inside or out? What was our plan if one of us tested positive?"
Resurrecting the Mosque of Banja Luka
by Maude Doyle
“There is a scene in a Bosnian war satire, No Man’s Land, in which a Bosnian Serb soldier and a Bosniak soldier are caught in a trench in between the lines, dodging shells being lobbed at them from both sides. They begin to accuse one another of starting the war (“You started it!”), and the argument continues through the whole movie (“No you did!”). I ask Vučanović who started the war. “America,” he says. You did. And I can’t tell if he believes it.”
Becoming an 'It Girl' in the Las Vegas Body-con Dress
by Tabitha Blankenbiller
"It was the same thing I heard at home, and away, and from strangers on the internet: You are so cute! So fashionable! So fun! This was the niche I culled for my thirties, after all the teenage and young adulthood years I spent flailing around for an identity. My style emerged from the office-job necessity of Ann Taylor Loft, the aspirational tableaux of Anthropologie windows, and seasons of Mad Men—fun and bright, but restrained enough to give me the illusion of control. Nothing visible that made me feel insecure or vulnerable. Pretty and composed was my sexy."
Motherless in Albertsons
by Melissa Stephenson
“Just before my mother entered the hospital, my son had a biopsy to confirm celiac disease, in which they also discovered a gut bacterium. These meds will kill the bacteria.
Celiac, the doctor said, is an autoimmune disease. Gluten is the trigger that turns the body against itself, to destroy itself; what booze is to alcohol use disorder, what loss is to grief. I am not sick with death. I am sick with grief, triggered by my mother’s death, in turn triggered by Chardonnay.”
Reading With My Father
by David Ulin
"Even when we’ve had our conflicts—and what father and son haven’t?—we’ve maintained a common ground in books. We recommend novels to one another. I order titles for him (the essays of George Orwell, among others) via the internet. This is what got us through the COVID lockdown, my father in New York and me in Los Angeles, talking books over the telephone. Then he became sick and began to lose weight and strength and stamina, shrinking into a ghostly manifestation of himself.”
I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life
By Danielle Tcholakian
“The truth is that most of my drinking and using had one primary purpose: to allow me to feel less. To be less aware. To not have to live in my own brain or settle for the reality of living in the world as myself. To hide from how overwhelmed I was by seemingly everything. So it’s a little unbelievable that a year in which I was forced to feel things all the time, to be aware of all of it, and to, the whole time, be stuck being me—what seemed like a truly disgusting option—was, in the rearview, better than any of the years in which I’d been able to hide.”
The Place Where Everybody Knows My Name
by Arvin Temkar
"A few summers ago, I decided to ride my motorcycle down to Arvin. Maybe, I thought, going to the town could help me clear up some of my feelings about my name. Unlike me, the town seemed to have no shortage of pride in its name. There was Arvin Doughnuts, which was conveniently located a short walk from Arvin Family Dentistry and Arvin Dialysis. Across the street was Arvin Auto. Never before had I seen my name so prominently exhibited. It was like seeing your name on Broadway, if Broadway was in the middle of nowhere and you’d never heard of it."
Little Lost Girl
by Jane Marcellus
"I was driven by curiosity, a sort of territorial instinct, and I suppose a sense that some fundamental question about myself or life or, well, something might be answered among aisles of marked-down goods.”
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
The artwork and appropriate credits.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received.
You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!
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