Ten Moving Personal Narratives to Delve Into this Week...
Plus: A revision workshop at Narratively Academy, A retreat with Amy Shearn and Diana Friedman, our partnership with Literary Liberation and new workshops there, and more...
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.
***Hello! Later this week I’ll begin a five-day writing retreat, so the “Memoir Monday” roundup for next week, 1/20/25, will be crowd-sourced like the one from mid-December. Get ready to add your favorite essays that have been published recently…or ever. - Sari ***
Essays from partner publications…
I Was a Waitress
by Samantha Allan
“I say I miss food service and my friend May looks at me like I’ve lost it. “You don’t remember,” she says, shaking a sugar packet into her coffee at our favorite diner in Austin, a hole in the wall that is deliciously un-instagrammable and crammed with others who crave its faded upholstery and dated green glassware. She’s probably right. Miraculously, my body has forgotten the dispassionate questions—“and on the side would you like”—the tense waiting game between kitchen and hungry businessmen, the backache at the end of each day, even though my mind remembers. My body only remembers a constant state of flow.”
America the Beautiful
by Don Gillmor
“There are times now when I am driving through North Carolina, or Maine, or Pennsylvania, or Ohio when I feel like I have lost the storyline of a film. The federation, which has been held together by cowboy iconography, faith, conspiracy, politics, blood, and belief, and divided by most of these things as well as others, seems to be without a larger narrative.”
Diversity Syndrome: On Publishing’s Relentless Pigeonholing of Black Writers
by Naomi Day
“Diversity syndrome is a cultural condition where the ‘otherness’ of an author is elevated over the impact of their work, to the detriment of the author, their work, and their audiences. Much like structural racism, it’s more systemic than individual, though individual actions certainly uphold or subvert its existence. An illuminating case study of diversity syndrome in the real world is that of Black authors of what I’ll broadly define as speculative fiction.”
Writing His Obituary
by Sallie Reynolds
“One day, my daughter said, ‘Mom, will you do something for me?’ ‘Anything.’ ‘Will you write his obituary?’ Dear god. How could she ask that? I’ve never told my daughter the hardest things. ‘Will you write it for me, Mom?’ ‘Of course’—oh I was going to hate myself!—’of course I will.’”
Essays from around the web…
My PMDD Ruled My Life. Then I Got on Zepbound.
by
“I had been taking Zepbound for about six months when it clicked. My period — the monster that turned me from a functioning person into a whimpering, tremulous piece of Jell-O carving a spot into the couch — had, somehow, lost its power. As I understood it, I had premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. More than just “heavy PMS,” PMDD meant that the week before my period I suffered from a grab bag of severe mental and physical symptoms including a new, frightening one: suicidal ideation.”
Becoming My Mother Was My Worst Fear—Until I Became a Mom
by Rachael Rifkin
“My mom got underneath my skin in other ways too, but my annoyance with her mainly stemmed from the constant coaxing and prodding. I attributed all the things I disliked about my mom to her personally, rather than looking at the broader picture of her role in society and my family’s home, or of her responsibilities, which included things like making sure my brother and I didn’t turn out like assholes. And it sure didn’t occur to me that so many women I knew felt just as horrified as I did at the prospect of turning into their mothers—because what we actually feared was being taken advantage of and treated with as little regard as they were.”
Writing Nonfiction as a Path to Lasting Resolutions, No Champagne Required
by Becky Blake
“Writing memoir is a way to extend the amount of time we spend looking back, stretching out our review of the past throughout the year and giving it the attention it deserves. The insights we discover as nonfiction writers are precisely the kind that can ripple into the future, leading us to make real, lasting changes in our lives.”
How Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me How To Be Brave In The Real World
by
“What’s most remarkable about the game is the unique space it has protected from its pop culture competitors. D&D is not about consuming narratives. Instead, the focus remains on a shared, communal, imaginative space, which its players agree to inhabit and nurture by spending an evening playing around a table together. In our culture today, there exist few opportunities for genuine collaborative creativity and play that are accessible to anyone of any age and skill level. But D&D has provided that for 50 years.”
Coming Out on Top
by
“I left the coastguard cottage on the crumbling rim of England and moved inland to a block of flats. A gay male nurse in his fifties lived there, a guy with psychic flashes. I was set to head for New Mexico and a summer with James. 'You’ll find your future there,' the nurse said, after closing his eyes and peering into my future. ‘There will be a spurt of dust around your ankles, and your life will change. You will know it when it happens. I can tell you no more.’”
My Mentor: Audre Lorde, Hunter College
by Julene Tripp Weaver
“On Tuesday October 25, 1983, Audre entered the classroom like a storm, asking, “Do you know what happened today?” She threw her huge handbag filled with books onto the desk. We sat in silence. “Today is not class as usual. The United States is invading my home country, Granada. My family and friends are at risk!” She gave a long impassioned speech about the history of U.S. imperialism. I began to understand how our country manipulated other countries.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Narratively Academy’s “The Fine Art of Deep Revision” with Katey Schultz Thursday, 1/16
Katey Schultz, the former artistic director at Interlochen College of Creative Arts, is teaching The Fine Art of Deep Revision at Narratively Academy. Starting this Thursday, January 16, this intensive three-week workshop is designed to empower writers with concrete, actionable revision techniques they can apply to memoir, essays, short stories or novels.
📢 April 27-May1, Attend and Diana Friedman’s “The Motherlode Retreat”…
Delve into the heart of your matrilineal story at The Motherlode Retreat, a transformative five-day writing experience in the tranquil foothills of Pennsylvania’s Poconos. The Motherlode Retreat is for writers of all levels looking to explore their complex relationships with their mothers. Through facilitated discussions, generative prompts, and craft workshops, we’ll examine themes like the mother wound, inherited narratives, and how to transform personal experiences into powerful writing. Whether you're crafting fiction, memoir, poetry, or plays, this retreat provides a safe, supportive space to deepen your writing and bring your stories to life. Via Pyrenean Writing Retreats.
📢 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.📢 Write with Literary Liberation this January!
Check out Literary Liberation’s 2025 writing class schedule featuring new classes centered around removing creative blocks, telling your truth and embodiment. We now offer sliding scale! Our first workshop begins Jan 5th!
📢 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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You probably have already completed the roundup, but here’s an essay published on Friday (my 60th birthday) about a decision half a lifetime ago that altered my course forever. https://open.substack.com/pub/glenncook/p/a-leap-of-faith?r=727x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false