Twelve Stellar Personal Essays, Curated Just For You...
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 “Running For My Lives” by
. A new essay is coming Wednesday.(***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, “From Memoir to Movie Script,” an interview with The Same River Twice author
. Another interview is coming soon.
Essays from partner publications…
Wanting to Want
by Summer Farrah
“I think I understand the gap between obsession and devotion, then. Obsession is intrusive, a misshapen puzzle piece that my world crookedly rebuilds itself around, and so long I have been recreated by those that I’ve loved—platonically, romantically, abstractly. With each new love there is something new in me, a reset.”
Dancing Bear
by Dimitri Nasrallah
“My dreams returned to the night market. Now I was the bear, standing in the middle for all to see, the reluctant attraction. I felt a muzzle around my mouth, its leather straps and silver buckles digging into my fur. The muzzle made a show of shutting me up in front of all the people who didn’t look or sound like me. My parents had warned me: the locals don’t like brown boys barking in Arabic in their supermarket aisles or along their sidewalks. They already thought there were too many of us here because of our wars. In my dream, I had committed the crime of speaking too loudly in my own language.”
Mom, Is That You?
by Ethan Gilsdorf
“I’m sorry, but I’m just a computer program and don’t have a physical form. I cannot be your mother. My purpose is to assist with tasks such as answering questions and generating text. Is there something else I can assist you with?”
The Piggy 9 Show
by
“As I navigated through life, I still wore an array of masks. But I did so with less fanfare, more subtlety. One elaborate mask I donned was to hide being gay. It took years to discard it. Attaining a measure of self-esteem (losing my baby fat and getting contact lenses helped) made it easier to attend class reunions years later.”
In Search of a Black Odysseus: My Father’s Journey Home
by Maya Phillips
“Though my father’s death, at age 51, was a surprise, it was only a surprise in the way that the exact moment when rain starts is always a surprise: you checked the forecast, saw the clouds, and yet the first cool touch of water to your face somehow startles you, makes you look up and stretch your palm out to the sky. My book is full of bad weather. In it, my father is a storm always happening.”
The Land Was Made
by Ama Codjoe
“I water flowers whose names only my mother knows. I consider the soil of this country and what has soiled it, the blood that won’t come out. Even when I am not thinking of this, I am thinking of this.”
Essays from around the web…
As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local
by Tiya Miles
“It’s been two years since Juneteenth became a federal holiday, one we can celebrate together as a nation. The signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2021 was an expression of real progress in the collective understanding of Black struggle that reinforced our national ideals of liberty and dignity. But I confess my ambivalence. I am worried about what official national recognition might do to what has always been a community-based holiday.”
The Closet Has Teeth
by Finn Deerhart
“I was twenty-three years old when I married a woman. I loved her as deeply as I knew how to love, as deeply as I knew myself. When she became my wife, I felt safe from the jaws of the closet. My wife and I enrolled together at the University of Texas where I studied cultural anthropology in the classroom, researched in secret. Men like me have always found each other under a blanket of lies…We escape the closet in our own time…But the closet has teeth, and it chews men to pulp. Some of us make it out but forever carry the marks of teeth and nails.”
My Mother and Me
by Alberta Nassi
“Almost 40 years have passed. Now I am staring down the decade when both my mother and her mother ended their lives. My grandmother leaped to certain death from the ledge of her Brooklyn apartment on a November night at the age of 67, her slippers placed neatly beneath the windowsill. A month after turning 68, my mother swallowed a fatal dose of lithium as the walls of her one-bedroom apartment closed in on her. People who kill themselves kill others in their wake. Is this a lethal legacy?”
Gray Rainbow
by Crystal Odelle
“I’m more uncomfortable when Jake strides past the server and secures a table for two—the best seats. Late, and the rooftop is nearly empty. Downtown yawns before us. The St. Louis Arch frowns…‘This is the view I wanted,’ he says. I order a drink in short words. ‘I’ll have the sex change,’ says my pitch.”
My Dad's Love Was Hidden In a Dining Room Table
by Candy Schulman
“I grew up thinking my father didn't love me. He was a first-generation American, the son of a Polish immigrant who cleaned houses for a living. Scarred by the Great Depression, Dad was always working.”
Show yourself: On Coming Out of Hiding, Working Through the Fog of the Mind, and Opening to Love
by Aliya Mughal
“It matters that we're seen, that we see. And not just sight as connected to what the eyes register, that too, but more what the heart can take, and how we meet its needs, our needs. By tending and attending. In places, spaces and among people who can take it, reflect something back, hold our energy, gift their own. Show us how to feel. Sangha, in a word, and in a feeling if and once we find and then tiptoe or march our way into a space where we figure out that we belong. Show yourself, when you're ready, speak up. Because it's also true that it takes time to get here. There. To this. I knew this. But I needed to remember. To feel it. To show myself. To be okay with what happened after I spoke, regardless. To care for how I'd be received a little less, so that I could speak up a little more.”
🚨Announcements:
📢
has some new workshops on offer! On Thursdays from 7/20 through 8/31 there’s The Braided Essay, a generative workshop. On 7/22, there’s Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Other People in Memoir, a one-day workshop. There are other options, too!📢 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.
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!