The Memoir Monday Reading Series is Back November 8th! Plus, Seven 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. In the next few months, there’ll 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!
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Before we get into this week’s essays, some exciting news: 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 Monday, November 8th at 7pm at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn.
Skateboarding Gave Me a Way to Express My Grief
by Cole Nowicki (Photograph by Jeff Thorburn; courtesy of the author)
"Skateboarding saved my life' is a mantra you’ll hear any bro at the skate park spew if they’ve Bogarted the joint for long enough. And to be honest, as corny as that is, I don’t know where I’d be without skateboarding either."
Slag
by Ryleigh Norgrove (Photo by Josh Sorenson on Unsplash)
"Is this the time for a declaration of love? A declaration of faith? It’s a funny thing, to be wholly spread before the ocean. For a moment you are purely thus, purely man, purely flesh — and easily broken open. Knowing then, that you are lesser, smaller, and at the mercy of the tide.”
Bones of Buried Kings
by Annalisa Bolin (Art by Briana Finegan)
"As people die around me, I have a harder time clinging to a different or a better world; I can think only of this one, bound in flesh and bone. My own body has become a strangely wired thing that I no longer recognize and cannot understand. I keep up a frazzled kind of monitoring in mirrors that distort my body and don’t show what is happening to me."
The Inside Story
by Carolita Johnson (All artwork by Carolita Johnson)
"I decided, here, to describe the life of one woman, me, in the context of one reproductive system, mine, from about 1970 to 2018. Writing about my body and its maintenance during my two odd quarters of the 20th and 21st centuries in the “free world” directly connects me to women who lived over a thousand years ago; women who lived and died before me, and sometimes, indirectly, for me."
What Losing My Daughter Taught Me About Living
by Hannah Van Sickle (Photograph courtesy of the author)
"There had been something alluring about the idea of an abortion — the promise of wiping the proverbial slate clean and trying again — but that decision did not resonate with me. Cora’s resilient spirit also forced me to be present. To stop planning. To live fully, in the moment, and cease entertaining the “what ifs” that threatened to rob me of being alive."
Among the Lonely People
by Pete Carvill (Art by Jeff Tidwell)
"These are the Men Who Have Had One Relationship Too Many. Every bar has them, but you do not know that you are speaking to one until the time is right and they bloom sadly at you. These were the guys you got speaking to late at night, in the moments before closing. The ones who can tell you about all the things that they had learned the hard way, who were waiting for an end that they had already accepted would be theirs. They usually revealed themselves among other sad men in the hour before closing, when many of their brethren had drifted off and they were lubricated enough to talk to you about the great tragedy of their life, which was usually a woman lost or gone."
To the Greek Who Helped Me Jump In
by Robin Reif (Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash)
"As I lay there, I felt luckier, freer, and perhaps more at home than I’d ever been. Here I was, in a little apartment in a foreign land where strangers had trusted one another. I think of that night now as a return from the land of the lost—a place of disappointment so deep I thought I might never get back on the map toward a hopeful life. But you helped me, carrying me a distance down the road."
📢 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.
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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