Some Great Personal Essays to Get You Through the Week...
Plus: Southern Vermont Writer's Conference + scholarships, Electric Literature's Masquerade, Narratively Academy's first lines workshop, and Literary Liberation's postpartum narrative workshop...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, 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 reprinted
“Frenzied Woman,” by Cinelle Barnes, guest edited by Vanessa Mártir — originally published in Barnes’ essay collection, Malaya: Essays on Freedom, and excerpted in Longreads.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire in Review,” a Look at 9 of the 44 essays in the series so far, “The Prompt-O-Matic #35,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #44: Joanne Greene”.
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 “Cinema and the City” by Michael A. Gonzales. I’ll have a new essay in the series soon.
Essays from partner publications…
Doing the Work
by Camilla Grudova
“I moved to Edinburgh in 2018 and since then have worked in various Scottish cultural institutions as a low-paid customer service worker to support myself, my art and my cat Ludwig…My art has often been criticised for being too gross, too bodily, but I am only recounting what I have seen and cleaned up in the service industry. It is often people who have never had to work such jobs who take the most offence when they encounter the body and its natural discharges in literature. Perhaps it is because I am a woman writer. Chaucer and James Joyce were indecorous and scatological as hell.”
Friends Until We Are Old And Senile
by ellen oneill
“The summer prior, Camille’s son had called me and asked for help convincing her she belongs in assisted living. I told him that I hadn’t noticed any great change in her, that she was fine, and that she could make that decision when she needed and wanted to… ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. Teed off, I snapped back at him. ‘Hey, I took care of my mother through dementia,’ I said. ‘I do understand from both sides—caretaker and old person.’ He definitely was not happy with me.”
I’ll Never Know the Whole Story of Papi’s Death: An Excerpt of Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir
by Erika Morillo
“Sound itself can be a form of violence, but silence can be the most violent of all. A void that continues to kill after death. I now think of my chanting for Balaguer during those days of campaigning as your strange legacy of silence, how the women in our family have been either silent or silenced. En la isla, a man’s mouth still the main instrument to inform, to legitimize, to kill.”
How to Talk to People When You Live Alone
by Ian Williams
“The question is the clearest sign of curiosity. It promotes spontaneity and originality. I bristle at superficial rote questions, although I long for people to be genuinely curious about me. We need the social forms of politeness—how are you, fine—to get us through the ice, to keep us together long enough for our defences to break down, but a good conversation moves beyond rote questions and responses.”
Essays from around the web…
Memories of the Rise and Fall of VICE China, 2015-2022
by Ruonan Zheng
“The allure of working at Vice was very real for a twenty-something, especially for a Chinese kid. The Western influence took root and prospered at Vice China, which opposed everything a normal job in China entailed. To be recruited meant becoming part of a cool-kid club, access to a social currency, a guaranteed adventurous time.”
There Is No Show More Beautiful Than This
by Tove K. Danovich
“Last night, I gathered with hundreds of strangers in Portland, Oregon, to watch a strange kind of show. Some people arrived as early as 5:30 to get a good spot, others came later, just as things were getting exciting. We brought camp chairs and picnic blankets. We came alone or with friends or with lovers, kissing in the grass. We booed and applauded and shouted warnings when the villain of the night’s story was up to no good. The play was unscripted. The actors weren’t listed in any playbook. The stars of the night’s entertainment were thousands of tiny birds, Vaux’s swifts, who funneled into a school’s chimney to spend the night. I can’t stop going back—it’s a little different every time.”
Love Without Words
by Yi Xue
“Two years ago, an NYT article about Anderson Cooper and his podcast All There Is with Anderson Cooper (Season One) introduced me to the concept of "anticipatory grief." Two years later, I have a profound new understanding of grief, the grief brought on by losing a parent, the grief that, no matter how much anticipation, I can never be ready for.”
Why I Cut Off My Hair
by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Why am I still pretending that I’m not getting older? Why am I afraid of looking my age? Why does any of this matter at all? What if I just allowed myself to become a gorgeous old amazing woman, like her? What if I were just free?”
Pride Parade on Aisle 3
by Amy Pearl
“Then I had to ask myself, why did it bother me so much to be assumed to be straight? Many people are straight. Most of them, in fact! Heterosexual people are not inherently any better or worse than the rest of us. But bother me it did. I’m not heterosexual. I’m not monosexual at all! I’m bisexual, and that’s important to me. I’m proud to have the capacity to experience love and attraction the way I do.”
“Enemy”? Maybe a Politically Mixed Marriage Is a Good Thing
by Courtney Kocak
“I can't just reduce my husband to a one-dimensional meme and mentally sort him into a box marked ‘BAD.’ This has forced me to find more empathy for the wider swath of people I disagree with, and I think that's a good thing.”
Sidewalk Crack is Free
by Shadow Silvers
“AFTER THAT SHIT HAPPENED with my ear—and by ‘that shit,’ I mean having my industrial piercing fucking ripped out of my ear, and after that, this older hippie-type cat gave me some triple antibiotic ointment and goldenseal powder to keep it clean so it wouldn’t become infected and swell up and ooze gooey pus and get gangrene and whatnot—and after that, I caught a ride out of Olympia and headed south.”
Mountain Removed: On Queer Grief
by Jardana Peacock
“Have you ever seen a mountain top removed? I have once. It haunts me. It is a gray and vast scene. A deep hole. It’s embarrassing, the collapsed soil. The bulldozed dirt. Nothing grows on the site. It’s miles of brown. So eerily quiet. It’s shameful. I have hated humankind and myself for many evils and this is one of them. To kill a mountain, to remove a mountain. To excavate a god brings destruction upon us all. If a mountain can be removed, nothing is guaranteed.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 I’ll Be Leading a Workshop at Southern Vermont Writer’s Conference Next March and There are Scholarships with Applications Due October 20th…
I’m thrilled to be leading a personal essay/memoir workshop at the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference March 30-April 4 2025. The conference has announced some scholarships:
1) The Third Act Scholarship is for a Writer 65+ who now has more time to devote to their craft. Sponsored by a wonderful group of supporters in the Dorset/Manchester area, this scholarship covers the conference fee.
2) The Yvonne Daley Memorial Scholarship is designated for a Vermont Writer. Sponsored by Consie West, this scholarship covers the conference fee.
3) The Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Scholarship is for an Indigenous writer to come and write in their ancestral homelands. Sponsored by Mary-Anne Van Degna, this scholarship covers the conference fee, lodging, and transportation.
“Applications are due Sunday, October 20, and we’ll make a decision by early November.”
📢 The 90-Minute Guide to Writing a Perfect First Line at Narratively Academy
Want to learn how to ace your opening words? Join Narratively Academy and essayist Lorraine Allen for The 90-Minute Guide to Writing a Perfect First Line this Wednesday, October 16 at 7pm ET.
Attend Electric Literature’s Annual Masquerade, This Friday October 18th…
Calling all readers, writers, and book lovers: Electric Literature is hosting our literary masquerade, and this year we’re celebrating our 15th birthday! Join our hosts—authors Emma Copley Eisenberg, Vanessa Chan, Deesha Philyaw, and Clare Sestanovich—as well as EL’s editors, for an evening of drinks and dancing. Ticket price includes an open bar, free books and masks, a photobooth…and maybe some birthday cake, too!
📢 After Birth: Postpartum Narratives Masterclass from Literary Liberation…
After Birth: Postpartum Narratives masterclass with Sharon Dalton begins this Thursday, Oct 19!
By tapping into this biological wellspring, we can discover, uncover, and make space for stories about one of the most profound transitions of a woman’s life: the postpartum period. In this generative workshop we will explore our postpartum journeys—the beautiful and the terrible, the hilarious and the surreal, the mundane and the profound.
Payment plans are available. Reserve your seat now.
📢 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.
Honored to be included among so many great essays and Liz Freaking Gilbert!
Thanks for these links to explore, Sari. I'd already read Camilla Grudova's Granta essay on working in service industries to survive as an author, and absolutely loved it. (Poets are the worst behaved, huh?!) She has such a unique voice.