Hot off the presses: A great new batch of personal essays!
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each personal essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
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Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse
by George Abraham (Photo by DYKT Mohigan via Flickr.)
"The present day: an ad for Lifta Boutique appears on my Instagram feed. Marketed with filtered pictures of romanticized sunsets and hillsides, it is a resort for tourists supporting the settler economy built over the paved wreckage of our village. When I wrote down Yacoub’s words, I didn’t know that they would, in essence, become vessels for a shattered memory of my land. That they would witness our land, suspended at once in pre- and post-apocalypse of a different now, a different here. Language as a collective offering, in the midst of our (lowercase-a) apocalypse."
Larger Than Orange
by Lucy Burns (Photograph © Chuck Patch)
"No sex for four weeks. No exercise for four weeks. No swimming for four weeks. No – I wouldn’t ride a bike. No lifting heavy objects. No grapefruit. No grapefruit juice. No aspirin. No alcohol. Do not take this pregnancy test until four weeks after your last appointment. No mefenamic acid. No St John’s wort. No alcohol. Would you like the abortion to appear on your medical records? Why not? Do not use public transport after the procedure. You must not use tampons. You must call a taxi. Do not insert anything into the vagina. No bathing. No recreational drugs. No smoking. Avoid tea and coffee. Avoid tight or fitted clothing. You must not walk home from the clinic after the second appointment. You should have someone waiting for you at home. No sexual activity. When you get home, you will feel the need to push. When this happens: go to the toilet, sit down on the toilet, and bear down. When you’re finished, don’t look in the toilet bowl. Just flush.”
Reclaiming My Beauty at 49
by Jennifer Barnett (Image courtesy of the author)
"I no longer own a scale. I stopped exercising to lose weight and now do it to stay healthy, both physically and mentally, with goals like maintaining my ability to walk up stairs and ride my bike, vital skills for living in Amsterdam. I stopped the cycle of food deprivation followed by binge eating. Since adopting these practices my weight has stayed steady, and I’ve learned to love and show gratitude for my body just as it is. I am even fine naked in the gym locker room surrounded by genetically gifted Dutch women, and if you can do that, you can do anything."
Lamentation For Songbirds
by Lindsey Trout Hughes (Art by Han Olliver)
"To parent a child on a suffering earth means learning that sometimes there will be connections, sometimes there will be answers. And sometimes, there will not—no sense of why an awful thing has occurred or what to do about it. There will barely be language for the things we face."
Lessons On Diasporic Identity from Meme Culture
by Ruth Madievsky (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
"Eldest-immigrant-daughter work involves driving people around and serving as a linguistic bridge in esoteric situations. It necessitates teaching yourself at a young age to correctly fill out high-stakes medical and financial paperwork whose gravitas you are too young to comprehend. It entails waiting in lines and sitting on hold with government agencies while your nonimmigrant peers 'kiss their dogs on the lips and 'watch TV until their eyes fall out.'"
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