What Have Been Your Favorite Personal Essays Lately—Or Ever?
A crowd-sourced "Memoir Monday" while I travel. PLUS: Workshops from Lilly Dancyger, Narratively, Melissa Petro, Blaise Allysen Kearsley; plus two calls for submissions...
Readers,
As I mentioned in last week’s “Memoir Monday” roundup, I’m traveling this holiday 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. This has worked well during other weeks I was away.
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 while I’m away! I’ll be back Monday, June 2nd with another regular edition of the Memoir Monday weekly personal essay roundup.
🚨Announcements:
📢 Apply by June 4 for the next session of Lilly Dancyger's Essay Collection Incubator! (July 19-Dec 6)
Generate, revise, and prepare your essay-collection (or memoir-in-essays) manuscript for submission—with guest authors and industry professionals, craft lectures and exercises, and multiple rounds of workshop feedback.
📢 Submit to ’s new “How I Learned” magazine…
The How I Learned Series was a live reading/storytelling/comedy show created by Blaise Allysen Kearsley in 2009. The monthly series ran for a little over a decade with events in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and New Orleans, and included benefits for Emily's List and Housing Works.
Featured guests included Mira Jacob, Alexander Chee, Ayo Edebiri, John Fugelsang, Anna Sale, James Hannaham, Hugh Ryan, Sasheer Zamata, John Wray, David Carr, Starlee Kine, Taylor Negron, Issac Fitzgerald, Aparna Nancherla, Emily Flake, Dodai Stewart, Choire Sicha, Jami Attenberg, Maggie Estep, Rosie Schaap, and many others.
How I Learned has been "on hiatus" since the Covid shutdown. Now, it's being resurrected as an online magazine.
What to submit: Nonfiction essays: 1500 - 2500 words Flash nonfiction: up to 800 words.
Email subject heading: “Submission - How I Learned.” Add a brief synopsis of your piece. Attach your submission as a Word or Google doc. Send to: howilearned@gmail.com
Soft deadline: June 16th Hard deadline: June 20th
📢 Short + Slant: Playing with Unconventional Forms of Personal Essay | 4-Week Online Workshop for BIPOC Writers
The art of memoir and personal essay writing has evolved into an ever-expanding form of creative truthtelling.
Writers like Claudia Rankine, Ira Sukrungruang, Jonny Sun, Camonghne Felix, Tamiko Nikamura, and many others blow up the colonialized formulaic ideas of what memoir can be. Their voices challenge expectations and illuminate how well-crafted variations on the short-short form can contextualize and amplify lived experiences.
In this generative workshop we’ll play with braided, hermit crab, fragmented, lyric, hybrid, and intuitive essay forms to see what our first-person narratives can do.
This is an independent workshop.
Sliding scale and payment plans are available.
Wednesdays, June 4th - 25th, 2025; 6:30 - 8:30 pm ET Cost: $150 - $325
📢 At Narratively Academy: Queer Writers Memoir Workshop and Reading Like a Writer
Two new workshops at Narratively Academy:
Queer Writers Workshop: Memoir Is an Act of Resistance with Claire Rudy Foster—This five-week workshop takes place on Sundays from 12 to 1:30pm ET. Class starts on June 1 and ends on June 29. Cost: $395
Reading Like a Writer: A Book Study of Skinfolk with Audrey Clare Farley, with a visit by Skinfolk author Matthew Pratt Guterl—This five-week book study takes place on Wednesdays from 7 to 8:30pm ET. Class starts on June 4 and ends on June 25. Cost: $175
📢 ’s Esalen Workshop July 14–18: Writing for Shame Resilience: Turning Shame Into Your Superpower
What if your greatest vulnerability could become your greatest strength? This transformative language arts workshop is designed for anyone ready to level up by unlocking their authenticity.
The curriculum draws from the wisdom in the instructor’s critically acclaimed book, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, which explores how shame is weaponized in our culture to keep us from knowing our worth and achieving our goals. Through reflective writing, shared stories, and guided readings, participants will explore ways to break free from shame’s grip and reclaim their power.
Participants will be invited to:
Learn about their unique shame triggers.
Develop a greater awareness of how shame functions in our society.
Cultivate vulnerability by sharing intimate stories in a safe space.
Practice empathetic listening as others speak their uncomfortable truths.
📢 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.
📢 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.
Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.
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.
Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!
How do I narrow this down?! Off the top of my head: Meghan Daum’s My Misspent Youth, Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That, Nicole Graev Lipson’s As They Like It, Jonathan Franzen’s Perchance to Dream, Ellen Willis’ Next Year in Jerusalem, Samantha Irby’s essay on her mother (crying just thinking about it), many of Glynnis MacNicol’s essays, but especially the one on Burnout, every essay in Kelly McMasters’ The Leaving Season (can’t choose one!), the first section (long essay) of Darrin Strauss’ Half a Life, and Lucinda Rosenfeld’s true masterpiece My Adventures in Deconstruction.
Best ever? Jo Ann Beard’s Fourth State of Matter