Your Weekly Batch of Stellar Personal Essays...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, 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. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Re-Parent Trap” by
. A new essay is coming this Wednesday.
*Submissions are currently paused for First Person Singular. I’ll do a limited submission period this fall. Stay tuned…*
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I launched “The Prompt-o-Matic,” a new series in which I occasionally share a writing prompt, and paid subscribers can respond with a paragraph in the comments.
Essays from partner publications…
My Time Machine
by Arthur Asseraf
“I am not convinced that we live at the same time as the people we love. I cannot be the only child who felt like their grandparents came from a different planet. Growing up, the entirety of the human past appeared to fit in one person: my grandmother. A combination of family estrangements and premature deaths meant that she was the only person of that generation around to raise me. My father’s mother was evidence of a world before me and my parents, a world contained to her apartment.”
You Get A Barbie Movie! You Get A Barbie Movie! Everyone Gets A Barbie Movie!
by Terry Crylen
“A day or two later, however—after neighbors and friends who’d also seen the movie weighed in when I asked in a conversational tone—I had the chance to peruse several of the many “think pieces” that had surfaced online in the wake of the film: they quite often put forth the idea, in layman’s terms, that Barbie was its own kind of inkblot. An inner voice, one that had often brought me insight, now prodded me to consider this question like each of the ten cards drawn from the full Rorschach set: Hadn’t Barbie offered up a kaleidoscope of visual images—all of which illuminated many kinds of ideas—the kind only a film could offer?"”
Good Writing in a Bad Place: How One Incarcerated Writer Feeds His Craft
by Robert Lee Williams
“One evening, I walked out of the cellblock through white hallways to do some research in the prison’s general library. I live in Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison tucked in the Catskills. The library is spacious and bright, with rows of fluorescent lights that bathe bookcases of 12,000 books. I dropped three book returns on the inmate clerk’s desk, as Ms. Fishman, the librarian, swiveled her chair in my direction and greeted me with her Bronx accent. I smiled and asked for Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.”
The Extras
by
“I’m wearing a two-piece. I have never graduated to a one piece, though I did get the memo that at a certain age—an age I’m well past—you’re supposed to stop wearing bikinis. I don’t like the cold wetness of a one piece when I get out of the water, and that’s that.”
I Didn’t Hate Cooking Palak Paneer, I Hated the Patriarchy
by Hina Imam
“If I gave in to one thing—in this case, cooking—I’d fall into the vortex: the vortex of the binary where gender is rigid and there is little room for fallacies. Cooking wasn’t for me. Getting settled wasn’t for me. I wasn’t interested in any of it. It was a pipeline to becoming the perfect Pakistani girl.”
Essays from around the web…
Putting All My Eggs in the Boyfriend Basket
by Deborah Way
“Ten months out of college, I was sitting in a tiny hut in a Mexican beach town, taking a break from my identity crisis long enough to smoke a joint with my boyfriend, when a knock at the door changed everything.”
Why We Fight
by Linda Button
“If I told my friends what I was doing, they’d shake their heads. You can’t stand the sight of blood. True. I walked out of the theater during Reservoir Dogs. I fainted at my root canal. Yet, the idea of a brawl both terrifies and lights a small fire in me. I can’t win an argument with my husband, but I will take a blow to my head.”
On Breastfeediing
by Camille Bégin
“I breastfed my baby on a cot beside my father’s deathbed. My son’s absolute refusal of the bottle, even one containing my own milk, meant that I could not leave him with the various friends and cousins who offered to babysit. It might have been for the best as it distracted us from the intensity of the situation. We put Arthur on my father’s strong side and took pictures of the two of them. I changed my baby’s diapers in the room dedicated to families and hard conversations.”
Bursting a Bubble
by Scott Hurd
“Thanks to the Shah of Iran, I attended elementary school at a small Christian academy in west Tennessee. Four decades later, that experience adds perspective to what I see going on today. Not in Iran. But in the US. ”
Homecoming
by Siobhán Duffy
“I don’t know how to describe the journey except to say that the road went on and on. And even though we longed to get there, at the same time, we longed never to arrive at all. To wind the clock back so that everything spun in reverse: the plane un-landing, my car reversing back up the road, the phones going silent, the shock evaporating into air. Just another day where nothing remarkable happened...”
The Lasting Legacy of Medical Trauma
by Gretchen Lida
I kept quiet because I didn’t really understand that I was assaulted. I thought it must be part of the process now that I had hit puberty. I told myself that I was overreacting. I could be a gregarious kid. Conversely, I also preferred animals and alone time to other people. I was also known for bursting into tears when I got frustrated. I thought this terror was just another moment where I was, as the adults said, ‘being too sensitive.’”
🚨Announcements:
📢 The Resort writing community is hosting its first IN-PERSON retreat for writers. Come to Your Senses is designed for NYC-based writers and writers who will be in NYC on Oct 7-8, 2023. For two days, get inspired and reconnect to your creativity with chef-prepared food, soothing acupuncture, art viewing, craft making, lots of generative writing prompts, and more. Hosted by Resort founder Catherine LaSota, this retreat is open to all genres and experience levels. It is limited to eight participants and priced to be as accessible as possible, with a payment plan available.
📢 Take my Skillshare workshop on blending the individual and the collective in your essays!
📢 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!