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. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Mirrors” by
. A new essay is coming in the next few weeks.
*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 published an interview with Hysterical author and newsletter writer .
Essays from partner publications…
Poetry of Witness: Documentary Verse by Five Homeless Poets
by Kaia Sand, Daniel Cox, Randy Humphreys, Michone Nettles, George McCarthy, Bronwyn Carver
“While homeless, McCarthy gathered food anew every day, whether by grocery shopping or attending meal services because he couldn’t lug perishable food that would attract rats. Now, he marvels, he only has to buy groceries once a week. What is he going to do with all that extra time?…Write, he tells me. I have so much time to write.”
Voices on Addiction: Where the Heart Is
by Mary Ann McGuigan
“It took a long while to finish Little Women. I had trouble believing any of it. Poverty with a glow. Everyone grateful for their blessings. No one questioning the way life can slap you around.”
The Limits of Self-Care
by Victoria Chan
“I remember finding a drawing my dad had faxed to my mom after a gruelling day at a job that required him to spend weeks at a time away from us. Hunched over a desk and piles of papers was a man whose black curly hair and moustache resembled his, and he looked exhausted and defeated. Just as no words accompanied that drawing, no words were ever exchanged between us about it.”
In Memoriam: Remembering Frances Levine Epstein, 1945-2023
by
“Once, when her new and very sensitive urological oncologist was giving her bad news about her latest scan results, she interrupted him, touched his arm gently and remarked soulfully, ‘And you have to do this every day?’ His head fell a bit as he allowed, ‘It’s not the best part of my day.’”
What Does It Mean to Write after Having Children?
by Lightsey Darst
“The outcome of Thailand’s general election on 14 May 2023 brought joy to tens of millions of people, as the top two parties were pro-democracy parties. Thai voters have consistently shown strong support for democratic ideals before, but few of us anticipated this historic result; the party that won the most votes turned out to be the newly-formed Move Forward (‘Kao Klai’ in Thai), a party more progressive in its principles than any previous election winner.”
Every Pregnant Person Walks a Tenuous Tightrope Between Life and Death
by Jane Dykema
“The experience of pregnancy is paradoxically even more singular and isolating. Your experience is both marginalized by and mingled with someone else’s as you temporarily share a body. A compounding of two singular experiences, a quadrupling of impact like a head-on collision. You can say “my dreams are crazy, I can smell things miles away, I can’t lift my legs to put my own pants on, I’m treated differently by everyone around me, I’m worried about my job, I’m wondering when the last time I felt the baby move was,” but how do you describe the feeling of being cellularly connected to someone? Of sharing blood, fluid, calories, and chemicals?”
Memory of Light
by Prabda Yoon
“The outcome of Thailand’s general election on 14 May 2023 brought joy to tens of millions of people, as the top two parties were pro-democracy parties. Thai voters have consistently shown strong support for democratic ideals before, but few of us anticipated this historic result; the party that won the most votes turned out to be the newly-formed Move Forward (‘Kao Klai’ in Thai), a party more progressive in its principles than any previous election winner.”
Mirrors
by
“After a bit he stuck his head out the front door. ‘You’re leaving me aren’t you?’…His words frightened and exhilarated me. ‘Yes,’ I said, to him, but also to my future.”
Essays from around the web…
Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison
by Joe Garcia
“During that time, I heard tracks from Red, Swift’s fourth studio album, virtually every hour. I was starting to enjoy them. Laying on the top bunk, I would listen to my cellmate’s snores and wait for ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ to come around again. When it did, I would think about the woman I had lived with for seven years, before prison. I remembered bittersweet times when my sweetheart had visited me in county jail.”
How Starting an Investment Business Nearly Got Me Indicted
by
“When my business began to do well, weird things started happening. Someone from my building's cleanup crew told me off-duty cops were entering my offices at night, doing who knows what. At one point, we had to sweep the office for bugs…I didn't know it, but my company's success put me on the radar of the state’s securities regulators.”
Kichdi, Operations and Freedom
by Farah Ahmed
“What I remember most from those coup days was our meals and what was discussed at the table. Mrs Shah prepared the same simple dish for lunch and dinner; khichdi. This is a dish made from equal quantities of dried, split moong beans boiled together with basmati rice, and is flavoured with salt. After the mixture is properly cooked and the lentils are soft and rice grains no longer separate, a spoon of ghee or butter is added. This greenish grey coloured preparation is given a vigorous stir with a wooden spoon until it is almost close to a mash.”
Bad Witness: What I Didn't Say About Reporting on Chinese Christians in Kenya
by April Zhu
“I was born into Christianity as I was born into America. In my childhood, there was the church and the diaspora, and I could not imagine one without the other. I grew up in Chinese immigrant churches, where the vast majority of members were the first in their families to leave their home countries and to find Christ, usually in that order. I took these two things as inextricable, that salvation happens in borderlands and transit, that to sow seed in good soil, first the seed must be carried by wind or water.”
The Property Bug
by Evelyn Fok
“So idyllic, so picturesque; we were blocks away from where an Oscar-winning movie was filmed. It was a childhood I never had, in the city where real estate was too precious to be ceded for children’s play. I remembered that my father never invested his money: he believed investing was money made without generating any real value to society.”
Operation Dog
by Elizabeth Jannuzzi
“From the car’s window, I watched New Yorkers walk with purpose up and down the cobblestone sidewalk of Fifth Avenue. Beyond the brown brick wall that borders Central Park, trees were beginning to bud. Although only a block away, this area felt like a different part of the city than the hospital entrance on the Madison Avenue side. Here it was quaint and quiet. Like you’d be at Mount Sinai for a stay to rejuvenate from stress, not to recover from a suicide attempt.”
🚨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!