Memoir (and)

SUBSCRIBE TODAY
For the most innovative and imaginative literary journal exclusively dedicated to the exciting genre of memoir! Complete your collection by adding back issues to your literary library. Or give the gift of memoir to your favorite friend, memoir enthusiast, newlywed, co-worker, teacher or grandchild. You know whom you have in mind….

Click here to subscribe by credit card.

To pay by check or money order, mail payment to:
Memoir Journal, 1316 67th Street, #8, Emeryville, CA 94608

Two Years (4 issues): $39
One Year (2 issues): $20
Single Issue (current issue): $12 

Renew Your Subscription:
Save when you renew: $5 off when you renew for one year, and $10 off when you renew for a two-year subscription. Please click here to renew your subscription.

Library and Institution Information:
EBSCO # 563-732-810
Single: $15 | One-Year: $25 | Two-Year $45 (frequency is twice per year)
Contact Sarah Schafer for help placing your order.
Email: sschafer [at] memoirjournal [dot] com  Phone: 510-594-1059  Fax: 510-594-1849

CURRENT ISSUE
Issue 9
Single Issue: $12 

When I was born the priest and the young woman ended their affair. What little is known of that particular history entered a memoir I would write long after I grew to draw grid patterns and interpret the vague maps of my unconventional parentage. In Belgium at The Children’s Home, and named Colette after Saint Colette, a great Franciscan nun and the author of the Colettine reforsm, I was a ward, round faced, snub-nosed, a short upper lip like my father’s whose heart stopped before his spirit flew over the rooftops of Paris.”.

-Excerpt from “Mother Country” by Issue 9 Grand Prize Winner Colette Inez

BACK ISSUES
Issue 8
Single Issue: $12 

The house smells of ammonia. It’s the smell of zoos and pet shops, of places where they keep wild animals in close quarters. On the kitchen island I find a heap of bills, letters, bags of dog food, poems or the attempts at poems. A ferret darts under a trash bag. Field mice shiver beneath a pile of dirty clothes. Hard to say whether a person has broken in or the animals have broken out.

-Excerpt from “Flight Patterns” by Issue 8 Grand Prize Winner David Norman

  Issue 7
Single Issue: $12 

My wife, Mariuccia, she has the high blood pressure, she coughs all the time, always she clears her throat and blows her nose, sometimes she keeps me awake at night with all her noise. She should go to the doctor when I tell her, but she doesn’t listen. Now she has chronic sinusitis. She doesn’t take good care of herself the way I do.

-Excerpt from “Tangled Up in Blue” by Issue 7 Grand Prize Winner Laura Fonda Hochnadel

 Issue 6
Single Issue: $12 

For then she might have understood that we are owed nothing, that the world asks permission of no one, and then she might never have given herself to him, that sad and terrible man with the rainwater eyes, the one who loved her better and harder than you, than anyone. She might’ve settled for the quiet boy, for morning chores and afternoon cigarettes, for every once in a while rolling up her jeans and wading barefoot in the cold river beneath the stars.

-Excerpt from “On Oblivion” by Issue 6 Grand Prize Winner Joe Wilkins

Issue 5
SOLD OUT! 

Things started to fall apart the year the girl was murdered up on Pig Road, little more than a rutted trail, and along it the charred remains of a pig farm that had burned down so many years before that no one remembered.  My sisters and I played there, among the ruins, inside the blackened cement foundation, digging around for treasures: canning jars, leather shoes, pieces of cloth we folded and stuck in our pockets. 

The rest of the road was undeveloped; woods on one side, marsh on the other.  The air was heavy with a rot that made us feel drunk as we ran through the weeds, our legs scratched and bitten beneath the cheap shorts we wore. 

-Excerpt from “Pig Road” by Issue 5 Grand Prize Winner Cinthia Ritchie   

Issue 4
Single Issue: $12 

“Calm down or you’re not gonna play.”  I know he won’t continue to wiggle and risk exclusion.  I’m right.  While Oklahoma’s winter winds plead against the windows, he is quiet.  He awaits instruction.  “We are playing Slap the Face.”  He looks confused.  “I’ll go first,” I continue.  He looks a tiny bit terrified.

-Excerpt from “What I Did to the Littlest” by Issue 4 Grand Prize Winner Jess Wigent

Issue 3
Single Issue: $12 

At the bottom, the name is all the gestures he has in him and presents to the world.  Who is this man, at root, to go so carelessly into the New World with this new name?  The title seems to have reconciled a silent deal that was made at Ellis Island.  It was the last balance to be transferred.  You agreed, Frank Torch.  You walked away from the inspection desk and into Manhattan with it.  You wandered into the Lower West Side with it among other peoples, tall buildings, small crowded streets.  Frank Torch fit all the possibilities of the here and now. 

–Excerpt from “The Naming of Frank Torch” by Issue 3 Grand Prize Winner Rafael Torch

Issue 2
Single Issue: $12 

Special Double Issue: Two Grand Prize Winners!

I am returning to Laos.  It is 1993.  I lived here as a child, a ten-year-old transplant from an Oregon farm.  It was 1963.  As the wing of the plane dips right, I press my head against the window.  I see the silver snake of the Mekong, see rice fields of dry gold, see coconut palms that cluster near villages, see roads of burnt orange.  I am home. 

–Excerpt from “The Warp of Memory” written by Issue 2 Grand Prize Winner Nancy Penrose. 

Issue 1
Single Issue: $12

When I was a toddler, I used to gather minute pieces of lint off the front lawn and bring them to my father, who would happily stuff them in his navel. I know this is true, because I’ve seen it on home movies:  Me, pudgy, intent, butt-up in the green grass, retrieving something too small for the camera to record; him in a lounge chair, seeming to examine it, tucking it into his navel, and giving me a big grin.  Well, some of us are Daddy’s girls or aspire to be, and if lint was what it took, lint it would be.

–Excerpt from “The Thread of God” written by Issue 1 Grand Prize Winner Candy B.K. Schille