So Many Personal Essays...
PLUS: a workshop and a call for submissions in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring four verticals:Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “You Have Been Given,” an excerpt of
’s new essay collection. A new essay is coming soon.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #9” the ninth in that prompt series for paid subscribers.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I published “Drama! at The Knitting Factory” an excerpt of
’s anthology, That’s So New York: Short (and Very Short) Stories About the Greatest City on Earth.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Weather Report
by Laureli Ivanoff
“‘It wants to be windy,’ Papa would say of Sila, the weather. ‘It likes to be cold,’ he’d say in December when the Monitor heater in Papa and Gram’s home ran nonstop, the temperature at -40 to -50 degrees Fahrenheit for days. Sila is alive, his words told me. Sila has a spirit. She, after all, decides the actions of our days.”
Generation Gap
by Lynne Tillman
“I was thirteen, beginning to read stories by and histories of artists and writers, memoirs and essays. Oh the Americans in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, how wild they seemed, bohemians they were called. After college, in a middle-class tradition, I was offered a trip to Europe and grabbed it. Once there I would transform into the writer I was destined to become since the age of eight. Whoever I was, I was riven with images from books, delectable visions, say, of Parisians, their antics, streets and cafes.”
Erotic Bodywork
by Mark Bessen
“I’d never felt a man’s hands against my skin like this. The warmth and pressure as he glided his hands from my neck down to my lumbar spine. Coaches had prodded at me to correct my form, laid on top of me to press me deeper into the splits. Physical therapists had probed my nerves and joints. But this was new. With each measured stroke of Alex’s hands, I felt a muscle relax, an insecurity fade away. I was a touch-starved teen, and this was delicious.”
The Perks of Yearning
by Victoria Chan
“I decided to let my yearning take the lead once more, going wherever it would take me. Armed with strengthened skills in my native tongue, a digital recorder, and a desire to kill my nostalgia once and for all, I went back to Hong Kong in the late fall of 2023.”
On Longevity, and the Stubborn Gene
by
“By March of 2023, my dad had healed from his surgery and V had recovered enough from her fall the previous December that she could walk up and down the hallway in their apartment. Her stubborn refusal to consent to a fulltime walker or a cane seems to be working for her. My dad also walks without assistance…‘Don’t grow old!’ V advises me on the regular, as if I have any control over the matter. In spite of her complaints, it seems to me that extreme old age is working out well enough for them, better than the alternative. ‘Your dad and me, we are the survivors.’”
17th-Century Dildo Shopping with the Ladies: On the Contested Terrain of Early Modern Desire
by Annabelle Hirsch
“In the late eighteenth century, for example, the medical profession began the rumor—which stubbornly persists to this day—that women fundamentally don’t enjoy sex, are only out for relationships, and will commonly feign a migraine in order to evade their duty. Yet in all the preceding centuries, people had believed quite the opposite: namely that women were wild, hypersexualized creatures—animals, almost—who were at the mercy of their own urges and would fall on anything and everything if not restrained and monitored for their own safety.”
Essays from around the web…
Consumed By You
by
“Bright rays of sun pierce our sleep and pour into our bed through the skylight. You caress me gently and kiss me wherever you find my star-kissed skin — my back, my forehead, my shoulder. You remind me that these photons, these beams of light that touch me, are incredibly precious, “they have been waiting, bouncing around for roughly 100,000 years inside the core of the sun, waiting, struggling, fighting to reach you.” I know that all life on Earth is nourished by our committed star. I also know that suns and stars engulf their planets, eventually. Sometimes I think I too will burn up, be consumed in your light.”
When MeToo Meets I Do
by Stella Grae
“Some of the most heinous aspects of intimate partner abuse are the manipulation, gaslighting, and general cloud of confusion that surrounds events and conversations. I borrowed anger that never fit; it always acquitted him. No matter where he went or who he met, I knew he would never be cleanly convicted; I alone would carry the awful secret of who he really was. He wasn’t a stranger, I wasn’t drunk or under the influence of any substance, I had no bruises or abrasions, and it didn’t happen in a dark alley, but in our marital bed.”
Fairy Godfather
by James Magruder
“I was already feeling like one lucky show queen when, with three minutes to curtain, an attractive older gentleman approached me at the rail and said that he had an extra seat in the orchestra. Would I like to sit with him?…A free ticket cleared a low bar in my twenties. During the decade when Psychology Today and Sally Jessy Raphael invented self-esteem, I was yours for the night if you bought me a White Russian and called me cute.”
Apple Tree
by Julie Motyka
“A couple of hours ago I sat on the phone with a geneticist who explained that—like my mother, who found out just a week after giving me the tree—I have a single anomalous gene that raises my probability of developing uterine cancer to 48%…Since I got off the phone, visions of my precipitous and painful demise have been playing on a loop in my mind. I briefly wonder if my daughter talked about my death because she knows something I don’t.”
Ugly
by Sanobar Sabah
“Turning 43 makes me feel drained; exhausted. Adulting was supposed to be my ticket to freedom...Freedom from having my life being choreographed by adults at all times. Freedom from society’s beauty standards set for women…My skin’s peeling off. I’m bruised - inside out. But the scars refuse to budge….Ugly watches me calmly from afar as if to say, “The scars are here to stay. No-one’s coming to save you from them.”…What if Ugly’s earned a bad name simply for speaking the truth? I have so much to say to Ugly. But more importantly, I want to listen to Ugly…”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Starting this week at Academy: Untangling the Traumatic Narrative: Using Words to Access Our Wounds…
… a three-part memoir workshop with Rebecca Evans.
📢 Call for submissions from Proseterity Magazine Issue #3: On Rage
Proseterity is looking for essays, prose, poems and art that reckon with the magnificence of anger. Give us its tender origins, its love stories, its formative years, its deepest desires and formidable fears.
📢 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, and the author’s Twitter handle.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.
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!
In plain English, what is a "vertical"?
Loved the essay on nostalgia, The Perks of Yearning. Thanks so much for calling our attention to it!
Thank you for introducing me to Proseterity and its call for submissions! I learned last night they accepted my Rage piece. So grateful!