Walt Whitman, a home for unwed mothers, and explaining genocide
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each 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.
We Are More: The Docent and the Novelist
by Chris McCormick (art by Abdel Morched)
I’ve been explaining the Armenian Genocide all my life. My mother immigrated to the United States from then-Soviet Armenia at nineteen, and met my father—a white, Midwestern transplant—working at Sears in Hollywood. Because I grew up in a desert suburb far from any Armenians, many of the family stories I heard growing up had to do with a place none of my friends at school knew existed.
Lineal Gaps
by Esther Hayes
May 5, 1967, a girl is born to a girl in Manitoba. The girls—the mother and the baby—are weak and cold and alone. A woman—Patty or Mary or Betty or Ruth—has driven down from her home up north to scoop her new baby into her arms. This has barely been arranged. Only a few months has the woman been on the list, but there are plenty of babies to spare. There are so many Jeans and Lindas and Susans here at this home for unwed mothers that the girls go by numbers: Jean #4, Linda #5, Susan #2.
On Great Literary Loves and the Joyous, Complicated Brilliance of Walt Whitman
by Mark Edmundson
My feeling of gratitude to the wonderful writers I encountered when I was 17 years old had no boundaries. I loved Hunter Thompson and Ken Kesey and Malcolm X and Susan Sontag and many more. All I wanted to do was to read. I recall skipping school and sitting at a desk in the Medford Public Library with two books open in front of me so as to get all I could right now, right now. I do not recommend this practice. You end up reading not two books, but no book, and get up with a headache to boot. In time, I settled down and began to read books one at a time. What worlds opened up to me.
The Queer Diary of an Extreme Heterozygote
by Sarah Neilson
Cheryl was the reason I thought plants were cool, and she was the reason I learned how to grow them. After Cheryl, you’d find me kneeling in a spinach bed or slicing zucchini from the vine with a red-handled knife. In Grundéns rain pants in a carrot field, or with rubber-banded wrists snapping kale stems or basil stalks, quickly banding them, tossing them into orange Home Depot buckets and into the shade of the truck. Pulling sugar snap peas from their hollow tendrils, talking softly through the trellis netting to my friend Lily on the other side of the bed who is telling me about kissing a girl. Our knees wet from the oat grass that serves as a living mulch in the pathways, our caps pulled low to block the sun, that pastel-yellow light of 6 a.m. in July. I don’t say anything back, just finger the bright green pods to see if they’re filled out. Lily’s bucket fills; I have never been the fastest picker. She doesn’t know it yet, but Lily gives me sunlight, roots me. I thought I would use this earth to bury, but she nudges me to grow from it instead.
Writers’ Resources
In the latest Voices on Addiction interview at The Rumpus, Erin Khar interviews Lilly Dancyger about writing addiction with empathy
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