Thirteen Excellent Essays to Read on this Holiday from Work...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter now featuring three 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. (Plus an associated quarterly reading series hosted by Lilly Dancyger.)
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Tell Me, What Do You Think About You?” by
. A new essay is coming later this week.(***Submissions for First Person Singular are now PAUSED. An overwhelming number of new submissions have recently come in. There are more essays in my inbox than I could publish in two years. And I’m too overwhelmed to keep bringing in more to read before I go through all those already in there, even with help from recently appointed contributing editor Katie Kosma.
*Going forward, there will be specific limited submission periods, which I will announce here. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page, but, again, submissions are currently PAUSED.)
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I published, “How I Survive as Writer Through Public Speaking,” an essay by Edgar Gomez.
Essays from partner publications…
Voices on Addiction: Speaking Ill Of the Dead
by Juliane Bergmann
“I have always felt stuck in the quicksand of Wanting-Things-To-Be-Different. Even my mom’s death was not enough proof for me that things would never be—could never be—different. The grief over what I wanted and didn’t have, what I wished to be true but could never make true, didn’t die along with my mom’s body.”
Saying Goodbye: Hannah Lillith Assadi on Brian Cox, Logan Roy, and Her Father
by Hannah Lillith Assadi
“This letter begins on a night just before my father dies. Back when he could still walk, we might have been on the porch sharing a cigarette, confessing our last words before sleep to a congregation of stars. Instead, we’re in the living room of the ranch house in Arizona. The credits roll on yet another episode of Succession and that improbably, mystical soundtrack swells forth from the television set.”
O Lurida!
by Kate Lebo
“To desire differently—to let the beautiful thing alone—requires more thought than I’m always able to muster. When it comes to this house, I’m not so different from my friend. I know that one year, probably soon, we’ll no longer be able to pick up our lives and live here. Or the house will pass into someone else’s hands, they’ll remodel it, and we’ll be out. When I live here, I bring my own fantasies of refuge and creation and beauty and wealth. These dreams are perishable, I know. That’s what makes them precious.”
Sound Shadow
by John Cotter
“I tried to distract myself by picturing the sound-starved neurons misfiring in my ears, creating the feedback signals I misread as noise. As I tried to imagine the auditory centers of my own brain, the neural networks of fibers far thinner than spider’s silk, constellations and ligatures pulsing off and on all night and day, I thought too of the shapes sounds make in the air, the way we come up against them.”
Sartorial Misdirection
by Rosie Findlay
“One of the rectories we lived in when I was a child had a tree in the garden where cicadas loved to wrestle out of their bodies. Unhooking the husks they left behind was a careful job. Poised on the length of my palm, each empty cicada light as a dried leaf and as recently alive. A ghost you could stroke with your fingertip. My dad, my brother and I would spray-paint them gold and silver for our Christmas tree.”
If You Want to Change Your Life, Start by Changing Your Outfit
by Marissa D’Orazio
“I wanted to be them. I wanted the uniform. But the closest I ever came was a hand-me-down from my oldest girl cousin. It was a white and light blue check button-down dress with a tie waist, a cast-off from her regular wardrobe. If anything, it looked more grunge-inspired than school uniform—after all, it was 1995. But still, it was the best I could do. With no authority figure forcing me to wear it every day, I still put it on as often as I could. At least once a week, I arrived at my public elementary school in clean, intersecting lines: my own personal uniform.”
Why I Developed a Roll of Film I Found on the Curb
by Christine Estima
“In a world full of locked doors, I was going to use these photographs to open at least one, come hell or high water. And so twenty-four hours later, I reached out to Zahra. Before I could relay the amazing tale or compliment her ethereal photos, she responded, ‘Soooooo awkward. I’m so sorry that that happened…I’m super embarrassed.’ Wait, what?”
The Kid in the Undershirt Stays in the Picture
by Carolita Johnson
“Maybe other people can still have sex while one of them is menopausal and the other knows he’s going to die in spite of taking the hormone suppressant drug, Lupron, which makes him effectively “menopausal,” himself. But we could barely cuddle in bed without our respective hot flashes causing us to overheat within seconds of each other.”
Essays from around the web…
Lessons from Lambing Season
by Jessica Gigot
“I have learned how to squeeze writing into the margins of my life, and I am making slow and steady progress on my projects. The lingering feeling of never having enough solitude—time and space to be in my own mind and at my own desk—is always with me though.”
my secret is I’m now wearing Secret, while watching Men I consider how much longer I’ll present as one, and other trans thoughts
by Liza Olson
“I went to see Men, and I went with my nails painted and wings that could kill a man, and I knew going in that it’d be no big deal, and it wasn’t, but the tape in your head can sometimes be so loud and so old that you forget who originally recorded it, forget that you can press stop at any point, eject, yank at the Coca-Cola-colored ribbons till they’re a tangled mess of lost, inert audio, toss the whole thing out and let it burn in the sun, so that’s what I did”
Men Eat Meat
by Kirtan Nautiyal
“I wanted to tell them that I hadn’t started eating what everyone else did because I thought that a piece of salmon every now and then could erase my skin color or family history. I wanted to tell them that it was merely a question of freedom, that a man was entitled to be free in the land of the free, or at least to live by the rules that he has decided on for himself, not simply those that he inherited.”
The Problem with Ants
by Meg Weber
“Like many of my social media posts, I’m not sure what response I wanted when I shared this photo. Solidarity from other parents? Empathy? A laugh? Whatever solace I hoped I’d receive, it didn’t happen. Friends with older teenagers, or whose kids are grown or gone, commented that this was the work of an amateur. Their kids’ piles were worse; this was nothing. Maybe they meant it reassuringly or with compassion; that’s not, however, what I felt.”
Urgent, tender Care. A recipe for Kachhi Karhi
by Anuradha Roy
“Mrs. Dhar always cooked a meaty, extravagant dish especially for me, such as a Kashmiri pasanda, the meat melting into the rich gravy, or a homely, nourishing pot of mutton cooked with haak saag. When asked why she went to such trouble, she would say, ‘Beti ghar aa rahi hai’, a phrase that gathers within it a complex emotion peculiar to India: the idea that a daughter is oppressed by her in-laws, so on her rare visits home she must be coddled thoroughly before her return to Hades.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Looking to meet some writing goals and build your community this summer? Summer of Support is an 11-week, online group coaching program for writers of all genres and experiences, facilitated by Resort founder Catherine LaSota. This low cost program starts on June 5, 2023 and includes new mini workshops every week, plus live group coaching and Q&As with this star-studded guest list: K-Ming Chang, Matt Ortile, Greg Mania, Tajja Isen, Denne Michele Norris, and Leigh Stein. All live programs are recorded, so you don't have to miss a thing, even if you've got a busy schedule! A payment plan is available for sign up by May 24. More information and sign up here.
📢 From Writing Class Radio: Join our First Draft writing groups Tuesdays 12-1 (ET) and/or Thursdays 8-9 p.m. (ET). Participants will write to a prompt and share (if you want) what you wrote. Sign up to get the Zoom link. First session is free.
📢 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.