This Week's Batch of Stellar 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!
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✨ For those of you attending the 2022 edition of the AWP conference in Philadlephia, mark your calendars for the AWP edition of Memoir Monday, to be held on Wednesday, March 23rd! Check back here for more information as it develops… ✨
Boarding Pass
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez
"From whom is the oppressor hiding, since it is he who oppresses? He is hiding from some future moment, from a time that some of us had launched ourselves into, which was precisely why we were being interrogated. Beneath the mask of some present guilt, what the oppressors were really asking was how it would work, this moment of ours, this moment they could not comprehend. It’s fragile, we would have told them, it is not a closed time like the one in which you live. But those who ask lots of questions have no wish to listen, only to defeat the other."
Falling Behind
by Shubnum Khan
"It’s so easy to fall behind when you’re just trying to keep up, and in this age of advancing technology and always changing hot-topics (ever had to scroll through your feed endlessly to figure out the current joke or debate?) if you even pause for a moment, you fall so far behind that it’s almost impossible to catch up. But I just can’t muster the strength anymore. I would rather read a book or walk outside or have a conversation with a friend than scroll through a feed of tiny photos looking for the perfect one that encapsulates the ultimate mix of background, light and color.”
Why Don’t American Schools Value Creativity?
by Erin Crosby-Eckstine
"What would have happened if, instead of neglect and dismissal, my interest in writing had been tended by the educators in my life? What if, by the time I met that toxic ex, my confidence in my creativity was strong enough to withstand his arrogance and jealousy? And more importantly, why wasn’t my creativity—or that of any of my peers—nourished?"
Into Thin Air (The Women on Flight 305)
by Emily Nelson
"In a world where every crime story and serial killer bildungsroman can be condensed neatly into a fifty-minute podcast with time for ad breaks, it’s easy to forget that these aren’t characters, but real people whose lives will never be the same because of the act of a self-interested man who has had the privilege of living on in anonymity. In doing so, we make the crime something less than real, something without victims or consequences, just a collection of names and dates and timelines without meaning. "
Abundant
by Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe
"You register the shame, anger, frustration, and pity that your body inspires, in yourself and in others. You question your body’s worth, your desirability drenched in doubt. When people stare and whisper and snicker, you look down at your belly, up at your folding neck. You are overwhelmed by feeling displaced. You are not at home in your body. But you cannot leave."
I was in a cult. Britney was in a conservatorship. Our situations are crazy similar.
by Tamara MC
"When you see a woman ‘acting out,’ don't question her sanity. Instead, ask who and what is making her behave hysterically. Point to her social and political systems of control rather than spotlighting attention on her. Stop creating ‘crazy’ women and then calling them cray-cray as a means to manipulate and control them into acquiescing.”
Chef For the Day
by M. Nzadi Keita
"You wanted to ensure that they became men like him. Men who don’t passively receive, waiting and expecting, weighing someone else down. You wanted to stir them actively into the work of being a family.”
Transcendence of Witnessing: An Immigrant’s Odyssey Reaches the Last Stop
by Mauricio Matiz
"Jaime and Mery landed in Astoria in the mid-sixties, craving secure futures for their little ones. Many of their friends were other Colombian families, like mine, arriving in the neighborhood around the same time. Their shared language, customs, and mores was the glue for the friendships that kept alive the traditions carried north."
Wings of Grass
By Sucheta Dasgupta
“Before he began to slam my freedom of movement and choice of clothing, music and activity, my father taught me all the important things in life. The Atomic Theory at age 6, the hidden stories of the Indian nationalist movement, how to appreciate cricket. It was he who coached me to smoke at age 4 (I would wonder if the cigarette got smaller by burning itself then why put it to one’s lips and why burn it in the first place and he said the trick is in the drag; I remembered enough to be actually able to inhale and understand the second time I tried it alone in my granddaddy’s antechamber during summer vacation of Class I; my mother later commenting on how I could smoke without coughing one afternoon when she had asked my father for a post-lunch puff to make up for the lack of mouth-freshener in the house but found herself choking on the uptake) and at his friend’s place, all grown at 24, I had my first whisky–a scotch brand called Valentine, on his benign watch.”
📢 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.
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