We ❤️ Personal Essays. Here's a Big Batch of Them...
Plus some great workshops in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring four 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. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Plagiarist” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #3: Leslie Jamison” the third in that interview series, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I published “It’s Not Over Until the Bride’s Father Sings,” my own story of eloping to Manhattan’s old, no-frills marriage bureau. This Friday I’ll publish a new essay there.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Placenta, Polenta, a Piece of Onion
by Kirby Chen Mages
“Looking down at the piece of onion in the shallow pasta bowl, I thought I might vomit. I kept this nausea to myself. I felt alone, trapped in a tunnel that transported me back to the Atomix Cafe. From pasta bowl to toilet bowl. A red mess. In that moment, I felt both deeply rooted in my body and far, far away. Speechless and immobile. What I wish is that I had used Marisa’s joke as an opening into a conversation about my experience rather than keeping it held inside. I’ve often wondered why I didn’t tell Marisa. Why I felt the need to navigate the troubling memory on my own.”
Gutbucket
by Emily Raboteau
“I am a mother raising Black children in New York City, which is unceded Munsee Lenape territory. Often, I am afraid for my children’s lives. Where my family lives, the storms are growing worse, and the water is rising, and these are not the only threats to our safety. I have come to the Arctic to ask you what changes you have witnessed, and to humbly ask, with your permission, for your wisdom about survival.”
Me, My Selfies, and I
by Erika Thorkelson
“The more I shared, the more my archive grew, but unlike the prints of my childhood photos, these digital shots don’t bleach with time or curl at the edges. They look the same as on the day I took them. I, on the other hand, have changed a great deal in ways that are all the more obvious because of that archive.”
I Don’t Want to Grow Up
by
“I think the dreamers have more to say about the world than the nihilists do. We can still see it for what it is, even as we plant a garden in it…I think when we grow up, we shouldn’t throw out our youth. I think we should keep it with us as we go. Because we will come to see the way of the world, but we’re still capable of seeing the magic in it.”
Essays from around the web…
My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza
by Mosab Abu Toha
“It is difficult to find maftoul in Egypt, and Leila’s was good. I felt lucky to taste it with my wife and kids. But, lately, hearing about unprecedented starvation in Gaza, I have felt a sort of hatred for the food in front of me. As I eat simple meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives with my family, I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals. I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.”
The Best Jewish Mother a Baby Dyke Could Have
by Deb Sinness
“My dear friend Sybil Offen passed one year ago today. I never got the chance to say goodbye, so I wrote an essay in celebration of the social justice warrior she was. Sybil was a friend, a confidante, and the best Jewish mother a baby dyke could have…or as she would say, a mensch.”
Limitations at Play
by Marlin M. Jenkins
“The nature of the questions I had as a kid about my hodgepodge of hand-me-down toys wasn’t based in skepticism at the lack of cohesion or a need to reconcile with sense; the questions were based in possibility, in what I might try—and, generally, in process over product. What would happen if Batman fought a Power Ranger? How might dinosaurs and fighter jets coexist? The question isn’t: Why would a lego man in a go kart be able to fly alongside an A-Wing spacecraft from Star Wars? It’s: Why wouldn’t they?”
A Family Dinner With My Wife and Girlfriend
by Townsend Davis
“Deb expressed her empathy for Bridget during one of our first nights together. ‘It’s so unfair that someone had to get sick in order for me to be with you,’ she said. Since then, the two had met several times and attended events with me, including an Alzheimer’s fund-raising walk and a photo shoot before my son’s graduation from high school — yet another milestone for which Bridget was present yet absent. Deb, whom I would describe as emotionally intrepid, had handled all these occasions with generosity and grace.”
Flying Solo
by Kristina Kaparian
“I notice the uncertainty around my eyes in my selfies. I catch glimpses of my body in store windows—hunched, soft, off-kilter. I imagine the younger me reflected, slender and serene, maybe even sexy. I can feel traces of her lingering on these same street corners and in the routines I settle back into. I feel like I’m acting, playing her part. The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me? I’m resistant to changing my rituals, to deviating from the script. I order the same gelato, take the same shortcut, sit in my same spot on the fountain and on my bench in the park. I want to stick to what I used to do and who I used to be.”
When an Ex Dies: No Place for Your Grief
by Cindy Eastman
“And yet, there I was, just without a defined role. Kelli expected me to join them at the funeral home (“You’re family,” she told me), but I couldn’t even contribute pictures for the collages that would portray Bob’s life for the memorial; I didn’t have any. They were a casualty of our divorce. He had kept all of them. One, a color 5-by-7 that I took, was prominent on one of the collages. It was a close-up of a young Bob holding 3-month-old Annie in his arms. Bathing her in the shower, hugging her firmly, tenderly, skin-to-skin. Their mutual adoration was tangible, at least to me.”
The Goat
by Elizabeth J. Wenger
“When my aunt took the goat in, he was already old, already failing, already blind, and one day his leg just gave out and he couldn’t walk any longer and there was not a thing any of us could do, because at that age if you fix one leg, the other will quit, and if you fix that, then the fur will fall out, or the liver will fail. There is a point when things are just too broken and the breaking is less a thing to fix than a sign of coming loss.”
Our Golden Maple
by Abby Manzella
“Even from this distance across space and time, I can see the halo-colored morning light that my maple filtered onto my bedroom floor. The image takes me right back to the comfort of my childhood. I can feel the shaded cool it lent me during sweltering summers decades ago, around the same time when my mother hung sheer curtains that she bought just for me and then named the tree mine. Surely, it can be saved.”
The Fair Kids
by Jean Coco
“I envied them because they never stayed at school long enough to take a spelling test, to hand in math homework, to get grades on anything. Envied them because I figured they got gobs of fair stuff for free: sideshow tickets, plush teddy bear prizes, corn dogs, cotton candy, all the fried funnel cakes they could eat.”
Just the Edges
by Molly Wadzeck Kraus
“My daughter asks if she can draw more tattoos. ‘Just with this pencil,’ she says. I’m a canvas. My tiny artists cover my skin in rainbows and suns and smiley faces and cats with whiskers so long they curl at the tip. Connecting freckles, they design constellations and develop mythologies.”
Where Are You? Here I Am, Here
by Rebecca Meacham
“My German Shepherd waits in my front yard. This is unexpected. We killed our German Shepherd a month ago. Scarlet? I call. She’s doing that German Shepherd smiling thing you see in dog food ads. Our German Shepherd wags. Her coat is black and tan and shining—it’s all grown back —and she runs the way she did when she was alive: a creature too big for the human world, a horse let loose in pasture.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 A New Memoir Workshop at Narratively Academy:
Have you ever been told, "you should write a book about your life" but you're not sure how to get started? Launching March 19 at Narratively Academy, How to Write Your Life Story—Even if You’ve Never Written Anything Before is a 6-week writing class that will help you develop the practical tools and confidence to finish your memoir and get it out into the world.
📢 Authors Chloé Caldwell and Alex Alberto just launched Scrappy Literary …
…to help writers take the literary life into their own hands by finding unconventional approaches that work for them, and there are a few spots left at their next retreat in Hudson, NY, from March 10 to 13.
This retreat combines all of the ways in which Chloé and Alex have taken the literary life into their own hands: by letting go of imposter syndrome, cold-emailing, using the backdoor, going rogue, tapping into their unused resources, DIY-ing publicity, and more. These three days in Hudson will be packed with actionable exercises done in real time, like hitting submit, stalking agents, organizing your lit shit, and crafting your action plan to map your literary life. We will alternate with talks that open the publishing black box: how each avenue works, including real numbers: advances, royalties, distribution, sales, and industry statistics.
📢 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.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised 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!