Some Personal Essays to Occupy Your Mind Between Holidays...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The latest original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in November, is “I Want to Be Approached by a Psychic Medium” by Caitlin Bitzegaio . The next original essay is coming later this week. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Last week, we launched a new video interview series for paying subscribers. Check out the first interview with Some of My Best Friends author and Catapult editor-in-chief Tajja Isen, about the realities of publishing an essay collection.
Essays from partner publications…
A Failed Hunt for Meaning in Wartime Ukraine
by Zarina Zabrisky
“After nine months of traveling around Ukraine, I have come to understand that war feels inconceivable in its entirety. Too epic to contemplate as whole. So I have instead begun to seek the truth about existence during wartime by examining familiar objects snatched by explosions from their habitual context. As reality shatters into a million senseless shards, the meaning of one’s life is rearranged and reassessed midflight, constantly changing.”
Anecdotal and Harsh
by Juniper Fitzgerald
“The thing about trauma is that it can split a person right down the middle. And J. was, indeed, bifurcated in this way. That is, she occupied multiple timelines simultaneously.”
“Auld Lang Syne” in July: Yiyun Li on the Solaces and Limits of Music
by Yiyun Li
“I drove on in the silence that, after some time, was as hypnotic as the static signals from the frequencies other than the Christian station. I had not thought of bringing CDs with me for the CD player. I had only my own singing voice—not a great one—to break the monotony. But what could I sing? I had been living in America for ten years by then, and could only sing in English the nursery rhymes to which I was being exposed for the first time along with my children. What I had in my Chinese repertoire: the propaganda songs I grew up with in China, and the military songs from my year in the People’s Liberation Army.”
What If We Dreamed of Shared Support Instead of Private Space?
by Beth Boyle Machlan
“My family’s roller-coaster financial status coincided with the onset of my bipolar disorder. For me, those changes are inextricably intertwined and mapped onto this house, which, like my mind, transformed from somewhere I should belong into a strange, unwelcoming space. I’d begun to change in ways I simply couldn’t understand. My sense of self was gone, as if someone had pulled a plug and simply drained the old me dry. Even today, forty years later, my memories of that house have a horror-movie quality: all normal, happy scenes were tragedies waiting to happen.”
Keeping My Promise to Popo
by Anne Liu Kellor
“…alone on my grandmother’s bed, I cry for the ghosts that linger. And I open my mouth and begin to sing. Tentatively, then stronger, clearer, I call out to my family, both dead and alive. No words, just toning, just allowing my body to remember how I once discovered I knew how to pray.”
Essays from Around the Web…
I Am Iran’s Daughter
by Naz Riahi
“The only Iran I know is one in which I became aware of my own body, its vulnerability as an object of men, at age six. It's where I became aware of my mortality before I could write or read. It's where I felt responsible for the lives of my family members, learning to keep secrets in the same breath I learned to speak…Iran was a place where I lived in fear that the terrible things happening around me could happen to me—and then they did.”
On 'Shauq' and Songs that Undo Us
by
“I first listened to the album on my way back home after a long day chasing bureaucratic paperwork that drained my will to exist. It was a dreary Delhi day, best defined as laminated in a grey sheen, and for the numerically inclined, when the AQI was 400+. The dread of the city lay heavy just atop. All of us breathing a non-air, whatever the opposite of oxygen can be, taking it in, resigned to our lives.”
Making Christmas cake in Compton
by Jenise Miller
“The sweet, spicy aroma of cinnamon, allspice and rum wafted through the apartment, a hint of goodness to come. The fruitcake appeared once a year in our apartment in Compton during the Christmas Eve festivities my Panamanian family celebrated. As a child, I waited all day for my mother to place the cake at the center of the table, carefully positioned like a star on the Christmas tree. Though she had not made it in years, on the first Christmas after she died, I yearned for that glorious fruitcake.”
Mother’s Birthday Wish
by Noelle Sterne
“Shortly after my divorce, in the lingering details of final separation, I unlocked the basement door of the now-for-sale house to get my last cartons. The new bittersweet freedom nudged me to reawaken my old dream of writing, and files of unfinished manuscripts rested here, waiting for resuscitation. I descended the dusty stairs with an unpleasant mix of familiarity and no longer belonging. Rummaging in the dim light, I pushed away discarded furniture and half-used paint cans.”
There Was a Strike and Then it Was Over
by Liesl Schwabe
“We rented a small flat on the first floor of a creaky wooden house belonging to a Sai Baba worshipping, middle-class Nepali family, who lived upstairs. From our narrow balcony, lined with potted orchids, we could see Mount Kangchenjunga, the third tallest mountain in the world. When the clouds lifted, the snow and the sunlight on the peak shone like glory. But in winter, the clouds rarely lifted. The wooden house was unheated and freezing. The baby’s cloth diapers, which we washed by hand in water heated on the burner, hung from a line over the bed and never quite dried…”
Defend the Body/Abandon the Body
by Jenny Sadre-Orafai
“They tell you not to open the trunk if you think you’re in danger. When I got to my car, I stopped. I unlocked the trunk and turned my body around to face the men who had followed me. I looked into their faces. They glanced away and walked past me fast. Nearly sprinting…How you respond to a perceived threat is not always a choice.”
Fearless Girls
by Debbie Feit
“We were originally from Brooklyn and Queens, we were comfortable being in the city but, truly, it was being with each other that made us feel at home. We filled our bags with books, our bellies with the flavors of the Lower East Side and our time exchanging knowing looks as we recognized our own exhaustion in the other’s face. We rode seahorses in circles and for the briefest moment we were engulfed in music and lights and whimsy rather than the despair and grief and confusion we had become accustomed to wearing as a second skin.”
Up Brown Jug Creek
by Catherine Halley
“I’m knee deep in mud and I can’t get out. My green rubber boots are slowly filling with cold water, but it’s a welcome relief in the 96 degree heat. I grew up watching 1970s television shows that overdramatized the crisis of quicksand. This isn’t that, but still I have to get to more solid ground.”
Old Man, Take A Look At My Life
by Sanjiv Bhattacharya
“Dad was already so convinced that I’d lost my way that he’d flown eleven hours to launch a rescue. And so far, this trip was only confirming his suspicions. We were in Babylon, already accessories to Derek’s identity fraud. Then Arjun shows up with all his money and his Hindi, saying ‘Baba’ like the son he’s never had. And now this—a man with a C-cup. How could Brian possibly help my case?”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Through January 16th, submissions are open for The Rumpus’s ENOUGH series. “We publish people who identify as women who have encountered rape culture or domestic violence,” says editor Katie Kosma.
📢 New Orleans Review is seeking writing (prose, poetry) and art by Iranian women (trans and non-binary inclusive) for a special issue of the journal, inspired by the current women's revolution, guest edited by writer and filmmaker Naz Riahi.Please submit your work by January 15 and help spread the word.
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, 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!
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