Some Personal Essays to Get You Through the Week...
Plus: Classes from Narratively Academy, Alicia Kennedy, Megan Stielstra/Off Assignment, a call for submissions, and two conferences...
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, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—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) exclusively 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.
~The recent crowd-sourced editions of Memoir Monday went well. Thanks to those of you who suggested so many excellent essays. I’m going to make it a regular mini-feature, like this: You are welcome, each week, to suggest to readers one essay you loved—***by someone other than you.~
Essays from partner publications…
A Coward’s Guide to the Intifada
by Corinne Goria
“I call my other aunt in Beirut. She is 90 years old and she was a history professor at the American University of Beirut and she speaks four languages fluently and she never married and last I saw her, she had traveled alone to my wedding, her gray hair blown into a beautiful style. She had loved the food. She says, I am fine. But it really is horrible. They will try to take the whole region, mark my words. But I am fine. My apartment building has a generator.”
Ear Candy: How Hearing Protection Became Cool
by Angus MacCaull
“Twenty-seven years ago, I stood on top of the music building at Indiana University, considering a jump. As a teenager in the ’90s, I had played a lot of music—some jazz saxophone, drums, and the clarinet. One evening after a jam session in my basement, I heard a ringing in my ears. I learned the word tinnitus.”
I Don't Know Why #5: "It was only three months ago—do the math—that I lost my ability to open a pint of Talenti."
by
“I know a lot of us are trying to figure out right now how to do something, anything, meaningful. We’ve downloaded the 5 Calls app. We’ve telephoned our representatives, only to be stymied by full voicemail boxes. We’ve screamed into the void of social media. And every time we do, someone is happy to assure us that nothing we do will matter.”
Voices On Addiction: Got A Light?
by
“She’d walk into the classroom on crutches, the need for them the result of childhood polio. She’d unsling her briefcase from her shoulder, flame a smoke leaning on her desk, and welcomed us to join her. We’d all light up and practice declensions and conjugating verbs, amo, amas, amat, amatis, puff, puff, puff, amare, amavi, amato. Then we extinguished the butts on the classroom floor, leaving them there for the custodian to deal with. It was 1979. Gah!”
The Things We Learned in the Fire:
On the Destruction (and Rebirth) of a Bookstore
by Brad Johnson
“People in New York knew about the fire before I did. A few days before I had turned the ringer off on my phone. I slept in. I never sleep in, not even when I’ve been up all night. I awoke to my wife telling me, ‘Get up, the store’s on fire.’ By the time I got there, the burn seemed complete. Books had become picturesque trash strewn down the street.”
My Mind Was Trashed by a Truck
by
“I was called an ‘outside creative.’ Pretty creative, very outside. Then I got in a car and never came back…One moment, I was a single mom—making dinner and deadlines all over the world, perking up headlines while picking up kids—and the next I was strapped on a board, looking up at the ceiling in an icy, airless room. I was afraid of the metal taste, the tilting room, the techs pulling shards out of my skin, the nurse with the booming voice in the beeping, blinding light.”
Essays from around the web…
Boy Toy: On Older Women, Teenage Boys, and Pop Culture's Mixed Signals
by
“Without a doubt, there seems to be very little outrage when it comes to teen boys being sexually abused or assaulted by older women, as though it’s a rite of passage that they should make them proud. When it comes to teen boys it seems as though the age of consent, which was 17 in 1978, is rarely considered. Lost in a fantasy that would be the perfect text for Penthouse Forum, they have no idea how destructive that sort of behavior can have on boys not ready to be men.”
Welcome to Canada or How I Survived the "Little Back Room"
by
“‘=-10 °C? What does that even feel like?’ I thought. When I left Maiquetía, La Guaira, it was about 28°C, maybe higher. In Venezuela, nobody checks the weather forecast. It's pointless, always hot, the sky is always blue, and the sun is always relentless. It's an eternal summer. If you want to know if it's going to rain, you ask your grandmother to look at the sky and tell you if you should bring an umbrella. And you better pray if you don't listen—Venezuelan grandmothers are never wrong!”
How I Love You
by Daniel Speechly
“The thought first arrived while we lay in bed, right before I fell asleep, and in the brief time where the day fully recedes and night takes control, the brunt realization of our mortality burrowed deep into the creases of my brain. The memory is so vivid I remember it like it’s occurring in present tense: while I become host to this malady, my wife–unaware–scrolls through her social media feed. And it is in this moment, in the comfort of our bedroom and in the quiet of our marriage, that the parasitic thought appears and passes on a whisper of an idea that she might one day die.”
The Shadow Mountain
by Britany Robinson
“A tall man with a big smile climbs onto a platform and starts talking into a mic. As a group, we are clumped and scattered like spilled beads. Then slowly, as he talks and the clock ticks closer to the starting time, it’s like a string sewn through us is slowly pulled taut. Now, we are together and still. He tells us that once we start, there’s no going back. You’re better off pushing through whatever happens out there; you'll have to hike out either way. Then he laughs and tells us that we’re all going to be in a “world of hurt” when we’re done. My heart shimmers at the thought.”
Kids: Small, irrational roommates with rage issues and separation anxiety
by
“They will say things like, ‘Coke is baby’s wine,’ and, ‘Listen to this appetizer of a song,’ and ‘My green eyes are hungry,’ and you will be sure that they are minor blossoming geniuses and then they will ask if west is left or right at an age when they should know. And you will know that they are like you.”
He-Man’s Ripped Muscles Fueled My Eating Disorder and Body Dysmorphia
by
“My self-membrane was always super squishy—a body with no border, like a photo of a ghost. Maybe this was why I was drawn to the squat rack? To feel the actual, physical boundaries of my body. To build myself up from a feeling of nothingness. If my muscles were pumped and defined, then I was more defined. I existed.”
The Ghosts of Forests Past
by Shantell Powell
“I remember trees which no longer exist. The towering white pines at my grandparents’ old home were cut down and replaced by a subdivision. The sugar maples of my father’s tap line were removed and replaced by a Christmas tree farm. These Christmas trees are cut down, sold wholesale, and discarded like trash when the holidays are over. The cedars, spruces, and balsam firs of my childhood home were bulldozed. They’re long gone, but I can still feel their bark, still smell their sap, still taste their tacky gum. I still remember my Dad boiling maple sap in the basement, distilling the trees’ gifts into rich, amber syrup. My tongue aches to taste it again, but Dad hasn’t worked the sugar bush since the 1970s. No maples grow where he lives now. He’ll never make maple syrup again.”
Sex Without Love: The Ordeal of a Queer Nigerian Man
by Tony-Francis
“In the Nigerian queer dating community, I’ve found that the majority of gay men want you sexually but not romantically. You often wonder why. Maybe it’s because they can’t commit to a same-sex relationship, or maybe it’s because Nigerian men don’t know how to love beyond financial rewards and parading their partners to friends, families, and social groups as proof that they are not single. In a male-to-male dynamic, the expectation of financial commitment disappears, so what, then, is left to love? Without any sense of financial responsibility, you are left in the dark, swimming in nothing.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Academy's The Art and Ethics of Writing Travel Memoir, with Monday, March 10.
In Narratively Academy's The Art and Ethics of Writing Travel Memoir, Kerra Bolton will help writers explore how to create authentic travel narratives that honor the people and places they encounter. Starts Monday, March 10.
📢 ’s Reported and Personal Essays in Food Media, March 11th
What does it mean to write short- and long-form essays for food magazines? What are different examples of features, and how would one go about pitching such ideas? What are the structures of these pieces and how do the writers build their arguments within the container of the essay?
Tuesday, March 11 over Zoom
Session No. 1: 11 AM to 1 PM EST
Session No. 2: 7 PM to 9 PM EST
$100
📢 Writing Grief with via Off Assignment
A generative/discussion-based class. With guest authors Samantha Irby, Lulu Miller, Matthew Salesses, and Vauhini Vara. Saturdays: Apr 5 - May 3
12 - 2 p.m. EST. $400
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and
will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.📢 My Panel at The Woodstock Bookfest Sunday, April 6th
On Sunday, April 6th I’ll be moderating a panel at The Woodstock Bookfest called “On Permission: Daring to Tell,” inspired by Elissa Altman’s wonderful forthcoming book, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create. Participating will be Altman; Hyeseung Song, author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl; and Jonathan Lerner, author of Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid. This is the first of THREE events I’ll be doing with Altman around the publication of Permission. This book couldn’t be more in my wheelhouse, and I am a big fan of hers, so I’m thrilled and honored to be taking part in a few of her events.
📢 Open Secrets Live! May 3rd in NYC…
May 3rd I’ll be moderating a panel at Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Open Secrets Live! symposium in Manhattan. It’s a great lineup.
📢 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, NEW, the author’s Bluesky Handle.
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.
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Thank you so much, Sari!!! 🎊
Huge thanks, Sari! 🙏🏻 I appreciate it!