Thirteen Mini-Memoirs...and More
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers. The latest original essay, published in the First Person Singular series last week, is “The Bedroom” by Kate Vieira. The next original essay is coming next week.
***Submissions for First Person Singular are now PAUSED. An overwhelming number of new submissions have recently come in (I think because some websites have posted my submissions guidelines and email address?). There are way 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. (Welcome, Katie!)
Going forward, there will be specific submission periods, which I will announce here. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page, but, again, submissions are currently PAUSED.
In other news, recently, I launched a new video interview series for paying subscribers. Check out “How to Be Your Own Agent,” the latest video interview with Chloe Caldwell, author of four books including The Red Zone: A Love Story, published last April. Chloe and I talk about how she has acted as her own agent, for the most part, in publishing her books with indie presses.
Essays from partner publications…
The Pain Cave
by Lauren Groff
“The house of my childhood was thickly haunted, so we spent what time we could outdoors. This is where, I believe, the rite came from, a way to mark our joy at being released from the house’s chill and eerie confinement and set loose into the warming spring. My brother now says the rite was not a rite, that it was only a fluke that happened once, as a bet; my sister, the diplomat and wise one, says she doesn’t remember, but that of course truth is a shifty thing, dependent on the needs of the rememberer.”
Our Skin Does Not Protect Us From the Climate Crisis
by Amanda Paige Inman
“Despite my risk factors—naturally pale skin, family history, and growing up sunbathing in South Florida—I spent years avoiding the dermatologist. Sometimes great fear is paired with the only emotion that can contain it: great indifference. When the dermatologist called later, she told me I had 'the best kind of skin cancer.”
Strange Season
by Jessica Lind Peterson
“When you get to this phase in your crying, there’s no untangling anything. It exists in one big rolled-up yarn ball of hot pain under your rib cage, like a sock full of rice that’s been in the microwave. You see your dog’s shadow under the bathroom door and know that his big fluffy body is pressed against the wood. He must be wondering what’s going on in there. This scene is upsetting him. He’s not going anywhere. That’s his girl in there.”
Whole 60
by Laura Lippman
“Every woman on the planet knows the rest of this story. Diet blah blah blah body dysmorphia yadda yadda yadda Atkins Scarsdale etc etc. We can all write list poems of the eating plans we have undertaken, the measurements on which we obsessed, the various low-carb sects to which we converted. I have nothing new to say about any of this…What is new is that I decided a few years ago, at the age of 60, that I am a goddamn knockout.”
Wanting a Child Makes No Goddamn Sense: Tiphanie Yanique on the Hope and Grief of Pregnancy and Childbirth
by Tiphanie Yanique
“On the day I awoke to a woman confessing murder, my spouse and I already had a baby. Our son was a boy I’d named two decades before he even existed. I loved being a mother, instantly knew it was what I came to earth first and foremost to do. My writing? Yes, vital to me, but now and forever secondary to my child. I was so full of this miracle thing I had done—become a mother—that I felt sure that it really must be every woman’s first and foremost thing to do. As a feminist, this feeling felt absurd. And yet, there was the feeling inside of me.”
The Bedroom
by Kate Vieira
“When I closed on the house in 2019 I had immediately demoed one of the bedroom walls down to the studs, exposing the yawning fiberglass chasm of the attic and its many mice carcasses. Now, in 2020, the wind screamed through the roof slats, blowing toxic dust into the room’s corners, and each time I ventured in to retrieve a sweatshirt or an earring, I faced my own mortality.”
Essays from around the web…
A Note on Asking the Internet for Marriage Advice
by Katiy Heath
“Reversing hate is easy as unlearning to ride a bike, uncreasing a slip of paper, unbruising a peach.”
For my Chinese American Parents, Ballroom Dancing Brought fun, Comfort and a Sense of Belonging
by Yvonne Liu
“The importance of ballroom culture to many senior Asian Americans brings the Monterey Park tragedy into focus. I only hope the rest of this year, unlike the past few years, which have been marked by an increase I violence directed at Asian Americans will bring forth the promise of the Year of the Rabbit. In the meantime, we grieve. Six women and five men were slaughtered wearing their dancing shoes. I hope and pray they are dancing in heaven. ”
My Husband Left Me at 60 to Have a Baby With a Younger Woman. Here's What it Taught Me
by Virginia DeLuca
“When he left, I wished him triplets. Sixty was the age of leaving the house and returning for the car keys, the age of 'have you seen my glasses?' Who left a marriage at this point? Turns a lot of people.”
Quitter
by Sarah Orman
“Once, in my twenties, I was a coat check girl in New York. It was the cusp of 2003, tapas were trending, and my boyfriend had a job waiting tables at a Spanish restaurant on the Lower East Side. The restaurant’s cavernous dining room was surrounded by a black-hued moat into which diners were constantly dropping their possessions. The staff would dredge the moat with a net every morning and discover gold credit cards, Blackberries, drugs. My boyfriend made more money as a waiter than I did working as an assistant at a prestigious literary agency, so when the restaurant opened a coat check counter, I decided to moonlight.”
The Books that Made My Father
by Jeanne Bonner
“Some girls learn from their dads how to play softball or the art of fly-fishing. I absorbed from mine the power of words. He and I were quite alike, which made at times for a tempestuous rapport, but I mainlined his love of reading and the intensity with which he approached language. After he died, I began to gather some of his books as if to compile a syllabus of my own personal course of grief. Already among my prized possessions were his four-novel F. Scott Fitzgerald set, a 1945 anthology of British and American poetry that I filched from him a few decades ago and his Richard Ellmann biography of James Joyce. Growing up, I used to spend hours in the basement of our Long Island home gazing at the spines of his hardbacks: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”
The First Ten Days After A Shooting at Your Daughter's School: Or, What to Expect When You Are Expecting the Inevitable
by Beth Kanter
“Day 3: You feel acutely aware in your gut, in your brain, and in your heart that you are 'lucky' compared to others who have been pushed onto this path. You contemplate the notion of luck. You swirl the word around in your mouth. It tastes wrong and is hard to digest. You imagine it boring holes in your belly much the way the carpenter bees attempt to make holes in the old pergola outside your kitchen window. They do not understand the sealant recently applied to protect the wood is keeping them out. You identify with the bees and the pressure-treated wood.”
Color of Time
by Dian Parker
“Time erases. Time returns. Time folds in on itself and the places I miss don't exist. In all seasons, color remains.”
🚨Announcements:
Get ready for the AWP offsite edition of the quarterly Memoir Monday reading series, Saturday, March 11th, hosted by Lilly Dancyger! This edition, in Seattle, features Raquel Gutiérrez, Erin Keane, Sabrina Imbler, and Comonghne Felix.
📢 The Woodstock Bookfest is back, March 30th to April 2nd in Woodstock, NY! If you attend, don’t miss the personal essay panel on April 1st, featuring Alexander Cheek, Gary Shteyngart, and Carolita Johnson, moderated by me, Sari Botton.
📢 Writer and creativity coach Catherine LaSota, founder of the Resort writing community, is offering a new workshop this month to help you fall in love with your writing practice and achieve your writing goals! Join the Love Your Writing workshop on February 15th at 7:30pm ET. In this 90-minute live workshop, Catherine will guide you through a series of exercises to audit your writing environment, connect to the purpose behind your writing projects, and generate both new writing and a plan to make progress on your big writing goals. More information and sign up here. All registrants receive a recording of the workshop.
📢 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.
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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