Your Weekly Dose 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. *THERE WILL BE NO NEWSLETTER THE WEEK OF AUGUST 14TH AS I WILL BE TRAVELING.*
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Re-Parent Trap” by
.
Re: submissions for First Person Singular, here’s some good news: The week of August 7-14, Katie Kosma, my fellow former Longreads editor, will be open for submissions of essays of 1.5K to 3K words. Katie will be editing one essay per month here. I’ll share Katie’s email for submissions on Monday, August 7th. Get your pieces polished in the meantime!
Here’s what Katie Kosma says she is looking for:
Completed, previously unpublished essays of 1500-3000 words.
I'm especially drawn to bravery: bravery to fully tell all the parts that matter to you, bravery to reexamine those parts and life-fulcrums with candor, and bravery to push creative boundaries.
(*I’ll probably do a limited submission period, soon, too, likely in the fall. So many pieces came in last time I had my submissions open that I’ve still got more pieces to respond to.)
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I published an essay of my own (a reprint from now defunct Catapult, RIP), “How—After 15 Years—I Stopped Panicking, Started Declawing, and Finally Published My Memoir.”
Essays from partner publications…
Honey Church
by Angela Pelster
“I’d never heard of not even mosquitoes before you. Hadn’t ever imagined that much care extended to those smallest of annoying lives…And then two years later in Baltimore, our kitchen and its ants. In the butter, in the flour, even in the fridge, and somehow, miraculously, inside the screwed-shut jar of honey. I’d bought a bottle of ant killer to stop the rising tide of them…Please, you’d said. Just give me a day. I’ll figure out what to do instead.”
One Day It Will All Make Sense
by Tabitha Lasley
“A writer gets in touch. This looks portentous written down, like the inspector who comes calling, or the postman who always rings twice. But it’s a fairly normal thing to happen. Writers do get in touch with each other, from time to time. They know that writing is a boring, lonely job, that it fosters an unslakeable thirst for contact.”
Am I Too Old For This?
by Ilana DeBare
“For publishers and agents and booksellers, the debut label carries a hope that this will be the first of many. The writer will not be a one-hit wonder; their career will unfold and deepen over decades. Literary-minded editors hope they’ve discovered the next Faulkner or Morrison, while their colleagues on the business side hope for the stellar sales and marathon stamina of a Stephen King or a Jodi Picoult. Debut authors inspire the same kind of dreams that parents have for their infants: this child could become anything, an Einstein or Beyoncé or Obama. They are pure potential.”
What I Learned From a Summer of Not Catching a Single Fish
by Marni Jackson
“In the rest of life, we strive in the direction of many things at once: to be better people, to capture someone’s love, to succeed at a project. The striving is generalized and subliminally anxious. But, in a boat on the surface of a calm lake, all one’s striving channels like lightning down the length of the slim rod, down the nylon line and into the hook. The goal is simple: to catch a fish. And, for an hour or two, this patiently aggressive act releases you from the need to strive in any other way.”
The Burden of Truth: Fictionalizing My Father’s Years at a Federal Leprosy Treatment Center
by Wendy Chin-Tanner
“There was a secret in my family when I was growing up. We could talk about it at home, but we couldn’t mention it to anyone else, not even to other relatives. In 1954, at the age of sixteen, my father was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, commonly known as leprosy, and sent to a federal institution for treatment in Carville, Louisiana where he stayed until 1963.”
The Star Dressing Room
by Alan Shayne
“…he took me up to Ricardo’s dressing room. I stopped for a moment in front of the door. It was white with slats that made it look like a shuttered door in the West Indies. Ricardo’s name was painted in black letters above the doorknob. At the top of the door was a huge gold star marking it as the star dressing room. It’s about to be mine, I thought. I took a deep breath and felt a shiver of panic. I stopped it. I mustn’t think about it now. I opened the door to find Ricardo’s dresser standing there, smiling, waiting to help me.”
How—After 15 Years—I Stopped Panicking, Started Declawing, and Finally Published My Memoir
by
“For years I felt as if I were suspended in amber. But while as a writer I was frozen, as an editor and teacher I was busy encouraging others to be brave in expressing difficult stories that involved other people.”
Essays from around the web…
Migration in Four Acts
by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
“At some point you’ve been out in the wind. Do not return to the stove; inside is where the wildness is…Oh ------—, stranger, do not accidentally set yourself ablaze. Remember, it is someone’s sixth birthday. The mineral solvents have as low a flashpoint as charcoal starter fluid…What has all this traveling come to? It is the year when they eat from the dog’s bowl.”
We Are All Foxes, We Are All Hens
by Elizabeth Bolton
“I too was born with all the eggs I’ll ever lay, which is to say: there once seemed to be so much possibility for the future of my family, and for the family of my future. But someday very soon, and that day may well be past, I will no longer have any decisions to make.”
What Is this Burning?
by Seth Lorinczi
“Many years ago, in Washington D.C., there was a bar and nightclub called d.c. space. A grotty little place at the corner of 7th and E, stuffed into the first two floors of an ancient brick building. Everyone just called it “space.” But it hosted some of the most incendiary shows the nation’s capital has ever seen, like that one night in 1989: The night Fugazi ripped through the songs that would become their first album, Repeater, on space’s tiny wooden stage only a few feet in front of me.…I didn’t come here by accident. While there could have been any number of paths that brought me to d.c. space’s door, there was only one that did. It was a chance interaction a couple of years before, with a woman I barely knew. She wasn’t one of the older punks or the torched-out downtown artists propping up space’s bar; she wasn’t even a friend. She was a teacher at my high school. But without her, I might never have made it.”
This Barbie Is
by Jenny Lau
“Many of us are finally doing the thing we always dreamed of; to write the book, start the ceramics business, curate the exhibition... Yet it’s now that biology and society conspire to screw us over. Everything constantly reminds us that irrelevance is around the corner - if it’s not the invisibilisation of women in their 40s then it’s the last scramble to freeze eggs or find partners, or the barrage of targeted shapewear ads that point out flaws we never knew we had.”
The Fisher Space Pen
by Kristen Paulson-Nguyen
“After Quang passed away, on December 11, 2019, Vinh gave me his Fisher Space Pen. I don’t know when or how Dad came to own the pen, but I know that astronauts used one just like it on the Apollo 7 mission in 1968. I imagine that as an engineer and lifelong tinkerer, Dad admired its ability to write in zero gravity, underwater, over grease and in extreme temperatures. I imagine that he imagined it traveling through space, floating, weightless despite its solid-brass heaviness, hitching a ride across the galaxy.”
London A-Z: A Memoir
by Áine Greaney
“That first night in London, you opened your bedroom door to find a large dog lying on the landing. Alsatian. Standing there in your floral nightie, the breed name dinged through your sleepy brain, conjuring old school textbook chapters on Nazi-occupied Germany…This dog thing happened in Autumn 1986, just after your 24th birthday. Even though you were in your nightie and your bladder was full, this wasn’t really your bedroom. Instead, that second-floor room with the pale pink walls came with your new barmaid job, and you had woken and stumbled across to that door because you needed to pee. Now, with this dog lying there, you tiptoed back to your single bed where you lay on your back and listened to the London night traffic.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Electric Literature will be offering manuscript consultations for short fiction and essays of up to 6K words. “The editorial staff of Electric Literature is pleased to announce that we will be offering in-house manuscript consultations! For the first time, up to 50 writers may enroll to receive a comprehensive manuscript review, with detailed notes, and a video call with an EL editor.” Enroll August 1st.
📢 Take my Skillshare workshop in blending the personal and universal 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!
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