The Fall Memoir Monday Reading is tonight! Plus 9 Great New Personal Essays...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications. Beginning in January, 2022, there’ll occasionally be original work as well—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish, so if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!
You can read all about expansion plans here. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
🚨TONIGHT!: The Memoir Monday quarterly reading series hosted by Memoir Monday founder Lilly Dancyger is not only back, it’s both in-person, and over Zoom. The fall edition features Alisson Wood, Jordan Kisner, Erin Khar, and Larissa Pham. It will be held this evening, November 8th at 7pm at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. 🚨
On the Logistics of Memory; Or, Writing While Uprooted
by Anjanette Delgado
"For the uprooted, a room of their own is not enough to write; her most important tool is not paper and pen or pencil, not even place or space. It’s memory. But from the moment she leaves, she is halved; her memories are tainted by sadness, by guilt, by relief cooked in regret. Who did she leave behind? If she was forced to leave, her sadness is unbearable. If she chose to, the guilt murders her daily. She doesn’t yet belong in the new place, but the old place is already dissolving, never to exist again."
Horse
by Sandra Newman (Artwork © David Jiménez)
"Throughout my childhood I desperately wanted a horse, but my parents said we couldn’t afford one. Awkwardly for them, when I was twelve my friend Emily, whose mother was on welfare, got a horse. It was a rescue horse, but a horse. The day we first got drunk at thirteen, Emily and I took this horse, Rebel, for a walk. We’d both thrown up many times and were too fucked up to think about riding. The horse also had a heart condition. I can’t remember if this factored into our decision.”
Writing an Extraordinary Existence
by Kyle Lucia Wu (Photo by Holly Mandarich/Unsplash)
"When I was younger, I did not understand microaggressions or racism, just that I had to be very vigilant at all times, because at any second someone could interrupt my day and turn my head into a seashell, empty but for the sound of frothing waves, of blood crashing between ears ... Now, my hands only sweat before I public speak or have to face down an anti-vaxxer, which is to say only when I am in fight-or-flight response. I think my body was in that state every day of every year growing up—alarm bells ringing, from first period to last. But I was just sitting quietly in class, opening my locker and closing it, changing for gym class, eating plastic-wrapped cookies I bought for three quarters in the cafeteria. How was I to communicate what it felt like, to have an ordinary day that felt like a seismic war?"
Departures
by Myriam J. A. Chancy (Photograph courtesy of the author)
"When the pandemic began, my mother had been gone for just a little over a year. I was still working out how to live in the shadow of her absence, just as I had learned to live with all that had been lost of our homeland and that we would never see again, re-learning the rituals of dancing the dead to rest whether by movement or by metaphor."
The Last Poem I Loved: 'In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden' by Matthea Harvey
by Anne H. Putnam (Photograph courtesy of the author)
"It took a few months of therapy before I could look at the tattoo without feeling fury or devastation. Once I could, I began to realize something: the tattoo was never really about him. It was about her, about Harvey, and me—it was about my relationship to poetry, and my ever-opening mind."
Growing Up Backwards
by Eve Ettinger (Photo courtesy of the author)
"When I was 15, I was homeschooled and my mom realized I had to get a physical education credit on my transcript if I was to apply to colleges. Her solution was to ask my grandmother, who lived up the street from us, if I could accompany her to her Silver Sneakers jazzercise class at the YMCA. With nine kids, my mom wasn’t free to ferry me around, and I didn’t have my driver’s license yet, so the senior class at the Y it was, meeting at 8 a.m. twice a week. "
Autumn Inferno
by Nicole R. Zimmerman
"In the middle of the night, sirens startle me awake. My ears prick to the wind. Oak branches whip the sky like Medusa’s head of snakes—a raspy hiss. Plastic pool chairs scuttle across asphalt. Beside me in bed, my wife’s breath halts, sensing, before the cadence shifts back into slumber. I write in red ink while she sleeps. It’s fire season in California. October, my birthday month. Fall was always my favorite. But that was before."
But Then I Started To Drink With Strangers
by Flávia Monteiro (Image: Dan Barrett/Unsplash)
"This sudden shift from banal to wonderful is precisely what I love about bar conversations. It explains my long-running habit of sitting at a bar, alone, determined to strike up conversation with the next stranger. Sounds like just another drunkard’s tale, except for this: I’m shy. Or at least that’s what I tell everyone, and myself most of all. It will take me thirty years and countless bars to realize that I was, in fact, a closeted extrovert."
Writer’s Corner:
Catapult’s wonderful “Don’t Write Alone” series features many great writers on various aspects of the writing life.
Writing Sex Was Easy Until I Had to Read it Aloud
by Rax King
“Personal writing is an excavation project as much as anything else, and when I write other essays, I am routinely stalled by an inability to dig up a memory that I know I need. My memories of childhood are fuzzy due to their distance. Adult memories are fuzzy, too, but mostly due to trauma. A conversation that I know was formative turns to dust in my hands when I try to transfer it into an essay; a poignant moment I once shared with a loved one lodges itself impossibly beneath layers of suppression. Sex, though, is the rare thing in my life that’s neither forgettable nor fleeting. Maybe the physicality of it makes it sturdier in my memory, or maybe my exes were right and I really am a sex monster.”
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
The artwork and the appropriate credits.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions.
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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