Your Weekly Compendium of Personal Essays, Workshops, and Calls for Submissions...
Including from Literary Liberation, Off Assignment, Margaret Juhae Lee, Alexander Chee; and calls for submissions: essays on Sinéad O’Connor, infidelity, and Literary Liberation.
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, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.
Goodbye to All That, where I continue 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.
*While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
Memoir Land is on Substack Notes and BlueSky.
Essays from partner publications…
What Photography Teaches Me about Surviving the News Cycle
by
“I take my camera out when I’m feeling anxious about our world and what the future might bring, because it quite literally forces me to focus on my mental health. Photography is not just my job; it’s how I meditate.”
Letter to My Teenage Self: You Will Be Saved by the Power of Your Words
by
“But here’s what you need to know, young one: Something extraordinary will happen in that darkness. Eventually you will recognize the mask you wore for so many years, pretending everything was OK. You will start seeing it on the other people’s faces, and it will ignite something within you. With the fervor of a born-again preacher, you will begin sharing your story of being harmed and causing harm, and in doing so, you will encourage others to share theirs. You will create a support group right there in that armpit of hell, a solitary confinement cell in Texas. You will return to your first loves — reading and writing — and build a writing group that gives voice to the voiceless.”
Being a Writer Shouldn’t Require Me to Exist Without My Children
by Megan Leonard
“The day my daughter decides to make a lemonade stand with her friends, I am supposed to be doing a self-paced writing retreat from home. It is summer, and my four young children are also home, every day, all day. Summer childcare for four children is a financial absurdity that was never even on the table for consideration. I also work for pay from home. And I also maintain my writing life, including this self-paced writing retreat.”
What Kind of Birds We Are
by
“On the drive from the airport to my sister, I kept seeing birds. I am not a birder. Friends laugh at my inability to identify much beyond robins. But I saw birds flying over the road, sitting on fence posts and telephone lines. Hawks, crows. And when I got to the assisted living, sat with my sister, I was still seeing birds.”
Essays from around the web…
4 The So-Called Avant-Garde: The Life and Afterlife of Jean-Michel Basquiat
by
“Jean-Michel Basquiat told loving stories about his mother taking him on journeys through the city as they travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, The Met or the Guggenheim where they spent hours surrounded by the secret worlds captured in the canvases of Caravaggio, Picasso and Cy Twombly. Silently mother and son stared at the vibrant images on the walls as though the pictures whispered vast secrets about our world as well as heaven and hell.”
What we give — and receive — with the words, 'I'm sorry'
by
“The moment stunned me. His apology felt sincere, like he saw the hurt he’d exposed me to and wanted to fix it. It couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes, and is now nearly 30 years ago, yet that apology is a moment I think of often. It was a first for me — when someone, unprovoked, said ‘I’m sorry.’”
Death of a College Roommate
by
“Sue had said she did not want overnight guests, but Christy has brought a suitcase anyway. I, less optimistic, have only a week’s worth of meds. But it is obvious that Sue should not be alone, so Christy and I stay. We change the sheets and do laundry and talk for hours. We drink out of Sue’s Dudley Do-Right and Boris and Natasha glasses and serve her broth using the good china with swirling pastels. We watch old movies, a ritual at Sue’s…”
The App After Life
by
“My husband tells me often that my problem is I expect the world to be a logical place, but logic fails me here. I do not believe in ghosts, but my dead father is haunting my phone. I can stop this, but I don’t. I wonder if the haunting is intended to make me believe my father is dead. There was a memorial gathering at the local craft brewery’s taproom in Sunriver —I even helped organize it—but I remain unconvinced that my father isn’t still in his apartment in assisted living, pretending not to know how to answer his phone.”
Fall Dictionary
by
“Parakeet: Noun. A small, cherished, green bird that dies slowly, feet pulsing open, pulsing closed, clutching the tan plastic perch, as though death were the bottom of the cage. The bottom of the cage is a slope of millet shells. If you watch the bird, it will not die. If you sleep, it will flutter down to the soft millet and be buried inside it. You decide to never sleep. And then your boyfriend—before, his words always sweet, wholesome, you thought he was a heart walking around as a person in a plaid barn coat, in a pale green baseball cap with a curved brim, in a T-shirt for a microbrewery that just said Magic and you believed it—he says, “I can finish this.” And then he is forever a different person. You look at him as if to say How could you? He looks at you and gestures as if to say, I could snap its (noun: small, green, cherished bird’s) neck.”
Lima, It’s Been a Year
by
“If I had to choose one word to describe my life in Lima, I would choose bifurcated. More often than not, I feel like a character in Severance except I can’t tell what version of me is the innie and which one is the outie.”
How I Learned to Read: An Abecedarian Primer
by
“To be honest, I really, really learned to read when I realized that some people read to know and not for what’s possible—to understand the world as it is, not as it could be. They see words as strict, neat, forgetting that language holds a history and a spirit, that it burns through silence. They don’t sing words the way I do, they don’t love language for what it is: vibrant, evolving, survival. For some, language isn’t just powerful, it’s a way to hold power over others. To fixate, think rigidity can keep people in their place. Some people are uninterested in progress and possibility.”
Woman Naps with Book
by
“This loss, I knew, was the deepest. Not simply because it was her child, but was the unnatural end of a frayed yet enduring relationship. One that broke both their hearts. For all the unconditional love my aunt bestowed on me, she held her own children to standards, expectations. Many of which my cousin never met as she faced life with her disability. My aunt could only see the world from where she stood, a place where ill-fate was a test, a measurement of fortitude, of imagination. I knew she loved her daughter with the passion of any parent, but she also dug into her positions. So, as is often the case, when you continue with your imperfect love, as love always is in degrees, thinking of the day it will be made right, you are stunned when there are no more.”
The Inevitable Imperfections of a Long-Time Relationship
by
“What made Nancy so bad at dying was what made her so good at living. She delighted in small things, like the weeds that turned out to be mint in our backyard. She embarrassed our daughters every time she lay down on the front lawn, her arms spread wide like an angel, her chin lifted toward the sky. Some days she returned from chemo to sit on a chair in the middle of the snow-packed yard, wrapped up in her knitted cap and down coat, seeking to experience whatever dim glimmer of sun could be found in a Michigan sky. She doled out candy to the kids and set up firework displays at Fourth of July parties, while the rest of us tut-tutted.”
The Things We Leave Undone
by
“As I watched my mom and dad struggle even more in their older years, as I watched everything becoming undone and knowing there were no other siblings to help, I could no longer in good conscience keep up this distancing act. Gradually I re-engaged with them and tried to find a safe place for them to live, despite their fierce resistance to addressing what was going on. In addition to the spectacular amount of “stuff” that was crammed into their house, they had virtually no cash flow because of a large second mortgage and home equity line of credit from a number of years earlier. It was a perfect storm of difficult conditions—they were living at poverty level in squalid conditions.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 “Nuts and Bolts” Seeking Sinéad O’Connor essays…
To celebrate the July launch of the anthology Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us (One Signal), with contributions from notable essayists including Lidia Yuknavitch, Porochista Khakpour, Rayne Fisher-Quan, Megan Stielstra, and many more, anthology editors Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne will be running a series of additional essays about Sinead on the Substack "Nuts and Bolts." To celebrate and explore the legacy and impact of Sinéad O'Connor's music, protest, spirituality, and example of living her truths. Please send pieces of 2,000 words or fewer to sineadanthology@gmail.com, with a deadline of August 31, 2025. Pieces selected will appear in Summer 2025. All rights revert to the author after publication, and previously published essays are acceptable as long as the author holds the rights. Compensation for those chosen for publication will be one copy of the hardcover anthology.
📢 Two New Workshops from :
1. “Your silence will not protect you” — Join our Sister Outsider Study Circle
As leaders, creators, and change-makers, we often think staying quiet keeps us safe. Lorde's Sister Outsider challenges this assumption with fierce wisdom that remains startlingly relevant.
Yomalis Rosario is facilitating this Study Circle (not a traditional book club) to engage with this essential text through feeling and deep reflection rather than academic analysis. This approach emphasizes embodied learning—seeing the text through the lens of our daily experiences and professional challenges.
Dates: Sundays, July 13-September 7, 1-2p ET. Price: $80. 8 seats left!
2. Geography of Joy
For the inquisitive and joy bound: Geography of Joy invites you to trace the sacred coordinates of your becoming. We're archaeologists of delight, mapping the places where we discovered our power, felt our beauty, found our sanctuary.
Four sessions. Personal joy-maps woven with community celebration. The corner store conversations. The park bench revelations. The dance floors that held our freedom.
We're not just writing stories—we're honoring the landscapes that shaped us, celebrating the communities that held us, resisting narratives that forget our joy.
Dates: Saturdays, July 19-September 6, 11a-12:30p ET. Price: $175. 10 seats available.
📢 "Writing the Book Proposal" with Off Assignment
A book proposal must do the seemingly impossible: Pitch a project that doesn’t fully exist, while anchoring it in practical details like structure, audience, and timeline. It must function as sales document, project plan, and creative vision—all at once. How to craft such a thing? This five-week Masters’ Series course, led by essayist and journalist Raksha Vasudevan and featuring guest authors Elisa Gabbert, Anni Liu, Noelle Falcis-Math, and Lauren Markham, will unpack why proposals matter, how publishers evaluate them, and how this strange hybrid document can actually support the creative process rather than stifle it.
The course includes close readings, structured assignments, and sample proposals that led to book deals. By the end, students will have a working draft or detailed outline of their proposal (25–35 pages, not including sample chapters), and a deeper sense of how to shape it into something that excites agents, editors, and themselves. Open to writers at any stage, this course is designed to transform the proposal from a daunting publishing requirement into a generative, guiding force for the book to come. Scholarships are available, and asynchronous participation is welcome.
Dates: Mondays July 14 - August 11, 7-9 p.m. EST. Price: $400 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)
📢 Eliciting Stories: how to talk to your loved ones about the past with Margaret Juhae Lee via Corporeal Writing
Workshop Sunday Aug. 17, 2025, 11 am to 1 pm (PST) over Zoom (a recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period)
In this workshop, we will explore how to approach and speak to loved ones about the past, especially when painful memories are involved. Designed for writers in all genres, we will delve into creative approaches to opening up real (and imagined) conversations with family members, in particular, reticent elders—and even those who are no longer with us. A combination of writing exercises and practical advice from a seasoned journalist, this offering focuses on eliciting stories from those who might not want to remember, including ourselves.
📢 Craft Seminar: How To Write An Essay Collection with via The Shipman Agency
“This is a lecture class in two parts with suggested but not required readings and 6 writing prompts, 3 per class, that I have used to write essays for my next collection. There is no workshop component. Students will be sent a suggested reading list after registration. Reading the collections under discussion is recommended but not required.”
Two Sessions: Sundays, July 13 + 27 1:00-3:30pm ET; $200
📢 Call for Contributors to an Anthology about Infidelity
Tentative title: Stepping Out: Writings on Infidelity
Editors: Susan Ostrov Weisser, author of LOVELAND: A MEMOIR OF ROMANCE AND FICTION and Nan Bauer-Maglin, editor of GRAY LOVE and LOVING ARRANGEMENTS
This essay collection explores the enduring and complex issue of infidelity in romantic relationships, a topic that remains taboo and emotionally charged despite the evolving norms around love, commitment, and sexuality. The book will feature personal essays from those with direct or thoughtful insights into infidelity, whether as participants, victims, or observers. Analytic essays approaching the topic through psychological, sociological, historical, or literary lenses are welcomed. Reprints will be considered. Please send inquiries or a 1–2-page description to both Susan at weisser@adelphi.edu and Nan at Nan.Bauermaglin99@ret.gc.cuny.edu by August 31st. Be sure to include a short note about your previous writing, your profession, and any other relevant information about yourself.
📢 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.
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thank you so much 🙏🏽🤎
Thank you much for including my piece. It's an honor.