Lessons Learned by Diane Malk
“there’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny and there’s no Santa Claus—remember, we’re Jewish!”
Category: Family
No Loss of Life by Jennifer Fliss
“Do you want me to shoot myself?” My father asked me, thick metal in his thick hand—loaded, I knew. It was always loaded. After one or two drinks, the gun was d...
2018 #Guns And People Runners Up/3 Minute Read/Contests and Prizes/Family/Grief/Guns/Loss/nonfiction/Regret/The #Guns and People Award Winners
Death and Grief by Patricia Woodell
I had been looking out of the window, just ten feet away. I had been at that spot since they began shooting and I knew I hadn’t moved, turned my head nor blinke...
2018 #Guns And People Runners Up/10 Minute Read/Contests and Prizes/Family/Guns/morality/nonfiction/On Memory/Society/The #Guns and People Award Winners
Deerstalking: Contemplating an Old Tradition by Page Lambert
“That’s his heart,” they said, needing no answer. It was warm in my hands, the pulsating memory still strong. I had never seen blood so red, not even my own.
15 Minute Read/ACEs/Childhood/Contests and Prizes/Family/Guns/Inspirational/Literature/Loss/Memoir/nonfiction/On Memory/PTSD/Survival/The 2018 Memoir Magazine #Guns Essay Award Winners/The #Guns and People Award Winners
And Nobody Died That Day by Norah Vawter
We are real people. We live in the aftermath of violence. We live with the consequences of too many guns and too few regulations. And the story doesn’t end the ...
15 Minute Read/Adversity/Black Memoirs Matter/Escape/Family/Justice/Literature/nonfiction/On Memory/personal essay/Refugees/Society
Besos, Not Borders by Ana M. Fores Tamayo
She needed to know more about where I began: my past as a refugee child.
Letter to My Husband Who Died Suddenly by Felice Aull
I want to tell you about your death because I feel some guilt about the final events of that night. I have repressed the guilt in order to keep living but I nee...
2018 #MeToo Runner Up/10 Minute Read/ACEs/childhood sexual abuse/Family/Loss/#MeToo/MeToo/Rape Culture/#SAAM/Society
What Insomnia Told Me by Märtha Custis
Fear silences our voices and daily we convince ourselves that life is fixable, that it gets better and becomes whole again. But the fact is that it doesn’t, at ...
Lies My Mother Told Me / Lies I Told My Mother by Daniel Uncapher
You must go to school. I’m too sick to go to school! I have eyes on the back of my head. I missed the bus! We can’t afford cable. I wasn’t watching TV!
2018 #MeToo Award Winners/10 Minute Listen/ACEs/Contests and Prizes/Family/Girls & Women/Memoir/#MeToo/On Memory/#SAAM/The 2018 Memoir Magazine #MeToo Edition
#MeToo Essay 1st Prize Winner: It Starts with Blood by Emily Finn
It starts with blood. Mine. So red and stickysweet that my jean shorts catch to my chair in band class. This is womanhood spilling over, me tying a sweatshirt a...
She Could not be Happy By Julie Ann Wenglinski
"Diana could not be happy because her mother was a grizzly bear and Diana was a human and they could never understand each other. From the time she learned to s...
48 Hours By Grace Jasmine
The ex-Catholic in me keeps repeating the words “mortal sin” and the day is filled with unimaginable annoyances. Considering myself an empath and being so compl...
Skylark in Tawny Mist BY Julie Ann Wenglinski
Before surgery, a rabbity young man in a white jacket hurried by and put his hand down the front of my dress, then bustled away. On my gurney to the OR, a chatt...
Getting Lost By Seth Pilevsky
Many years later, when Grandpa followed her into the abyss, I'm convinced that he whistled for her and she reached out to him.
The Desk By Sara J. Sutler-Cohen
My room was the base of operations for Dad’s drug dealing enterprise, a career he must have selected—I imagine in hindsight—to sustain his life as a musician
Feeding Piper by Melissa Woods
It is physical, the restlessness from starvation. Like an animal foraging for survival, the starving individual has heightened senses, increased activity, and a...
Myths, Lies and Matches: A Quest By Mary Ellen Gambutti
At 6, I suddenly knew I was adopted by the telling of a fairy tale. Not only did I belong to my parents, but also someone else! The myth of the adoption agenc...
Under Construction By Anthony D’Aries
I sometimes wonder if I’d given Otis a different name, something like Bronson or Butch, he’d have been born with more brawn than soul. Otis is only two, for Chr...
The Silcox Decision, the Living Wage, and the Grand Prize Slogan by Sandy Schuman
Watch and listen as Storyteller Sandy Schuman takes you on a delightful audiovisual journey to his father's 1936 Manhattan, where unions are formed, while men's...
Waiting By Karen Zey
We are fortunate, I keep telling myself. Dennis has chronic leukemia, a rare type called LGL. I barely remember the initial shock the first time the oncologist ...