Monday Matter: Short and sweet for Labor Day
Your biweekly Foreign Bodies roundup (public)
Every other Monday, I send subscribers and gift recipients of immigrant mental health and storytelling newsletter Foreign Bodies stories I recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz. Today’s very short holiday issue is public.
First things first
A little housekeeping (or babbling)
A single mom who works 10 jobs 🎶
Good afternoon, dear readers. Today’s edition of the Monday Matter is going to be very short (and hopefully very sweet). And it’s available to both free and paying subscribers! I’ve got about six deadlines to make before Sunday and no idea how I’ll make it happen before my guests and pet sitters arrive, but here we are. A huge shout-out to my neighborhood coffeeshop for keeping me company on this quiet Monday with their new cardamom iced latte and delicious quiche.
A musical start to your Mondays 🎧
One song to groove to, cry to, drive to and share
I’m simply in a Beach Boys mood and this song was playing on my rewatch of The Bear, so…
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool (*storytelling opportunity)
*Scalawag Magazine is accepting pitches for the Salt, Soil & Supper section of its inaugural Fall Almanac issue. The Southern magazine is open to fiction, non-fiction, and poetry submissions, as well as multimedia short film, audio, digital art, multimedia & photo essays, and social media specific content. Submissions should “broadly consider the ways in which Southerners both rely on traditional and new means of preservation in the face of environmental catastrophe, antiblack, white supremacist violence and state terror.” Deadline for submissions is Sept. 8. Pitch by filling out the pitch form here, or send an email directly to tea@scalawagmagazine.org.
*Barrelhouse is open for fiction, poetry and nonfiction submissions from Latinx writers for a new online issue on LATINE MONSTERS, guest edited by Ofelia Montelongo. Accepted writers receive $50 (plus no subscription fee). Deadline: Sept. 21. Hat tip to Sonia Weiser’s Opportunities of the Week newsletter for this gem!
*Newslines Mag wants essay pitches for its new weekly series, “The Past, the Present and Beyond.” Essays should examine an overlooked or misunderstood part of history. Pitches and submissions should be sent electronically to submissions@newlinesmag.com.
Read this!
Personal stories and poetry I’m loving
The Limits of Self-Care (Victoria Chan, The Walrus): “Sharing a bedroom with the people who raised me felt like living in a fishbowl; I yearned to recover a sense of privacy and the ability to carve out my own identity, which seemed lost in limbo... Between my physical circumstances and my cultural upbringing, I began to tie my identity to the selflessness I grew up with. My childhood led me to internalize the idea that I should always consider the feelings of others before my own. By the time I became an adult, I was hungry for a sense of self that wasn’t tied to others—so I began to embrace a radical form of self-care.” I think many of us here will relate to Victoria Chan’s memoir essay. Read here.
I Can’t Offer Up My Culture for Consumption (Christine Kandic Torres, Electric Literature): “How can I explain that growing up in Queens, we didn’t go to dumpling houses in Flushing or on Queens Boulevard; that there had to be a special occasion to even agree to spend money at a restaurant… How one of my earliest memories is in fact sitting beneath a stained-glass lamp inside an old Pizza Hut and eating a slice with green bell peppers on it—an exotic American delicacy to me. How one of the first times my mother brought me to eat a meal outside of our house that wasn’t a fast food restaurant, she brought me to the vaguely Greek, Georgia Diner for my fifth grade graduation, and that to be honest, she’s still not entirely comfortable ordering off a menu to this day.” A must-read from The Girls in Queens author Christine Kandic Torres on refusing to “offer up my culture to be consumed without context.” Read here.
My Time Machine (Arthur Asseraf, Granta): “Growing up, the entirety of the human past appeared to fit in one person: my grandmother,” writes Asseraf. “She told me, for instance, that she had been born in Morocco. As far back as we knew our family had lived in North Africa. She would also say that at some point the family ‘came back’ to France. I could not understand how you could return to a place you had never lived in before. She would show me pictures of palaces and say, look, this is where I was born, we were rich then, then we were poor, then we were rich again, then we had to leave… I never told my colleagues the truth: that I knew colonialism not only through reading books, but also because its representative served me fish fingers after school.” Oof, this essay on dissolution of memory and family dynamics is so worth your time. Read here.
Bookshelf
Books and collections I’m currently reading (plus reader-recommended works!)
Currently re-reading: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, one of my all-time favorite novels spanning the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the multi-generational Buendiá family.
Recs on recs from Hannah Bae in this Datebook listicle, featuring Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias, This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara, What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim and more heavy hitters, many of which have conenctions to the Bay Area
Did you absolutely hate this? Notice any link snafus or grammatical issues? Open to criticism and suggestions.
Special thanks to our growing Foreign Bodies Sustaining Members for keeping this newsletter going through all my ups and downs