What Have Been Your Favorite Personal Essays Lately—Or Ever?

A crowd-sourced edition of "Memoir Monday" after a week of traveling. PLUS: Announcements from Literary Liberation, Writing our Lives, Electric Literature, Narratively, and Alex Alberto...

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Readers,

As I mentioned in last week’s “Memoir Monday” roundup, I’m traveling this week and short on time to read personal essays. So I thought this might be a good opportunity for an “open thread,” in which I invite all of you to comment with the personal essays that have moved YOU the most—recently, or ever.

So, in the comments tell me:

What have been your favorite personal essays lately? What are your all-time favorite essays, published at any time? Include the titles, author names, and publications associated with each of them, and if there’s a link you can share, please add that, too. You can share as many as you want. ***If you’d like to include one personal essay of your own, make sure you also include at least one by someone else.

Thanks for filling in for me this week after I was away! I’ll be back December 23rd with another regular edition of the Memoir Monday weekly personal essay roundup.

P.S. One essay that knocks me out every time is “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard, which was first published in The New Yorker in June, 1996, and later in her excellent collection, The Boys of My Youth.

- Sari Botton

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🚨Announcements:

📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation

Memoir Land and

Literary Liberation

will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.

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📢 Contribute to Literary Liberation’s End-Of-Year Fundraiser

At Literary Liberation we are building something vital—a space where activists, artists, and writers from the global majority come together to create, to learn, and to imagine futures rooted in freedom and justice. This work is powered by community, and it’s only possible with you.

When you join Literary Liberation as a paid member before December 31, you’re securing our 2024 rates before they’re gone for good. More importantly, you’re making a powerful commitment—to your creative growth, to the shared journey of liberation, and to ensuring this space continues to thrive.

Share this campaign, donate subscriptions, or join us so we can continue to forge a laboratory path towards the future.📢 Contribute to Literary Liberation’s End-Of-Year Fundraiser

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📢 Take a One-Day “Writing the Mother Wound Intensive” with

Vanessa Mártir

on Saturday, December 21st.

Don’t miss this opportunity to work with

Vanessa Mártir

, through her

Writing Our Lives

workshop, on an important and challenging topic. More about the program here. Learn more/register at: writingourlivesworkshop@gmail.com

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📢 Contribute to Electric Literature’s Annual Fund Drive

Electric Literature is a nonprofit organization with 8 staff members and 3 paid interns. We publish 15 articles per week—essays, reading lists, short stories, flash fiction, poetry, graphic narratives, interviews, and criticism—by over 500 writers per year.

Our work costs $500,000 annually, and last year, 33% of that was donated by 2,000 of our readers—people like you! The average donation of $65 made a difference. We depend on you to keep the lights on.

Electric Literature may be free to read, but the costs are real and going up. We need to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2024 to keep Electric Literature going into next year. In these uncertain times, the only thing I know for sure is that we cannot afford to take the organizations and institutions we care about for granted. If the continued existence of Electric Literature means something to you, please make a contribution today.

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📢 Narratively’s 2024 Memoir Prize…

Narratively is accepting submissions for their 2024 Memoir Prize. They are looking for “revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view." The guest judge is New York Times bestselling memoirist Jami Attenberg. One Grand Prize Winner will receive $3,000, and the two finalists will receive $1,000 each. There is a $20 entry fee and the deadline to submit is December 19, 2024.

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📢 Help Alex Alberto make a short film based on an essay in their collection, Entwined: Essays on Polyamory and Finding Home…

Alex Alberto

, one of the partners behind indie collective publisher Quilted Press, is making a short film based on an essay in their collection, Entwined: Essays on Polyamory and Finding Home. You can help by contributing to their Indiegogo campaign…

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📢 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:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. The name of the author and, (NEW) the author’s Bluesky Handle.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

4. 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.

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