Ten Great New Personal Essays...
PLUS: A workshop with Rachel Kramer Bussel, and a solicitation for advice column letters in the announcements.
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 published “The Doctor Will See You Now” by The Real Sarah Miller.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also week 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 Prompt-O-Matic #25,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #26: Evan Dalton Smith”.
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 “Washington Square” by Abigail Thomas.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Passing
by Lane Michael Stanley
“I don’t know how I’m being perceived in this moment–which is an odd concern, because the entire purpose of a gloryhole is not to perceive each other, except as givers and receivers of sexual favors. Still, this space is explicitly for men, and my presence in here implies that I am a man, at least by my own definition and the definition of the guy at the front desk who took my entry fee, but I am the one who will have to deal with the consequences if this stranger has a different definition.”
What It Means to Go on a Modern Pilgrimage
by Mark Mann
“I don’t know how to defend my former pilgrim identity, which now seems like a form of sublimated alienation. Without the principles of piety and penitence offered by religion, does it really mean anything anymore to be a pilgrim?”
Towards Universality: On Reading—and Rereading—James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”
by Tom Jenks
“Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than thirty-five years I’ve been reading and teaching the story to writers who are developing their art.”
The Semi-Egalitarian Sex Life of Elaine Benes
by MUTHR, FCKD
“As a one-of-the-guys kind of girl with a nascent writing career (right down to the clothing brand copywriting gig), there was something of a vibe parallel between my life and Elaine’s life that I rarely saw elsewhere, every eye-roll of hers echoing a disparate moment of my own ‘90s experience.”
Essays from around the web…
Costco in Cancún
by Simon Wu
“So here I am, in Cancun, on an all-inclusive vacation with my family through Costco Travel, and it feels like the world of the wholesale warehouse has somehow been extended down the East Coast to the Yucatán peninsula, all the way to the poor woman in a white polo with the laminated COSTCO TRAVEL sign, who’d been sent to meet us outside of the airport.”
What Does A Mother Sound Like?
by Gloria Alamrew
“There is a kind of symphonic lyricism to motherhood. Have you noticed it? From the seasoned, battle-weary mothers warning you of what’s to come to the friends who promise things will still be the same, we all sing our harmonies so well. I wonder how and when we learned these melodies. I wonder who created this chorus. Who decided that women get to be society's sounding board for words that feel like shadows?”
I told him he was too short for me. Then we fell in love
by Joyce maynard
“At the end of this perfectly terrific and romantic date, I told Jim how much I liked him. ‘I hope I get to know you better,’ I said. There was just one problem, I told him. ‘You’re too short for me.’”
In Salt Lake City, Everyone and Everything is Queer*
by Samuel Autman
“A few times in the last decade Salt Lake City has been designated as a queer friendly city. Each time I tell anyone how queer the city is, they lift an eyebrow or tilt their head. Last year The Salt Lake Tribune’s headline asked, “Is Salt Lake City one of the queerest places in America?” In late May, Salt Lake City scored a perfect 100 on The Thrillist’s index for “queer adventures in red states,” and one of the nation’s “Top 10 most surprising Pride destinations,” blasted The Advocate’s magazine. Salt Lake City began popping up on queer destination lists in 2015 when the city unveiled a plan to name a street for Harvey Milk. Salt Lake City got it done in 2016, almost a full decade before San Diego and Portland did. Unlike West Hollywood or San Francisco, its queerness has a qualified ‘q.’ ”
Misconstrued
by Karen DeBonis
“At twelve, I watched a story on TV one night about a local home invasion. ‘Dad, if someone came into our house and tried to attack us,’ I asked, ‘would you fight them?’ I wanted my father, who did sit-ups in his bedroom, chin-ups in the basement, and ate wheat germ and liver, to say, ‘I’d do anything to protect my family.’ Or ‘I’d kill him if I had to.’ Instead, Dad mumbled about peace and non-violence and God’s children. In my easily distressed, active imagination, I pictured my father calmly asking a masked man to please remove his knife from my mother’s neck.”
In the Garden of Gethsemane, a Lamp
by Jamie Etheridge
“My mother-in-law towers for an Indian woman, almost regal in her bearing and wears her long, dark hair braided and slung over her left shoulder. I watch as she rests my daughter’s head against her knobby knees. This is a woman I barely know, who let’s face it, I’ve resisted knowing. Yet at this moment, she seems like a goddess to me. Demeter anointing Persephone with life-giving ambrosia. She sits straight, her legs forming a platform, and lays my naked child facedown and lengthwise, along her thighs. Naked hands, naked skin. Skin-to-skin. Life-to-life. We are women, all in a line, from the first mitochondrial Eve until this baby girl splayed across her grandmother’s lap. I almost cry; it hurts so much to see someone else tending my child.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Open Secrets Editor Rachel Kramer Bussel Has a New Essay Workshop…
Sign up for “Small Group Zoom Essay Class” taught by Open Secrets editor Rachel Kramer Bussel. Dates: September 7, 14, 21, 28, 1-3 pm ET Price: $250 includes two rounds of essay edits and lifetime access to curated essay market listings. Limited to 15 people.
📢 Do you have a personal problem you could use help with? Ask Oldster Magazine’s “The East Village Yenta” (me) about it.
Send your questions about interactions with romantic partners, friends, coworkers, neighbors, or family members to eastvillageyenta@gmail.com (If I choose your letter, I’ll work with you on editing, and to blur identifying details. And we won’t use your real name.)
📢 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.
Fabulous links today - all over the map and just wonderful! Thanks for doing the work and letting me sit back and enjoy them all.
I am honored to be included here with such talented authors published in these great literary journals! Only a few short years ago, all of this would have been a dream. To know it's a reality is 🤯.