The Monthly Theme Essays are a collection of essays written each month on a predetermined theme. These essays are always published during the last week of the month. To submit a Monthly Theme Essay check out our upcoming themes.
Interested in sponsoring one of our monthly themes? Check out our media kit.
The airplane skims over a monotonously beautiful carpet of lakes, clouds, forest, and fields. The Land of Midnight Sun (well, actually, one out of five possible Lands of Midnight Sun; each Nordic nation with its twenty-four hours of summer daylight technically qualified to claim the title) reveals itself to you in puffs of white, geometries of emerald, bowls of aqua. It’s only a matter of minutes before you land and have to start apologizing.
Read MoreThe road unfolds in front of us, a black ribbon of tarmac glittering in the summer heat. It is one of many roads I have taken. The rearview mirror reflects the same view, a yellow dotted line that connects us to the next destination, and the previous. Were we ever there? Over a hill, the road disappears, and I wonder if we too will disappear as we follow it.
Read MoreWash your hands after using the bathroom, before using the bathroom if you’ve been outside first, before dinner, after playing with any toys, instruments, or feeding your fish. Even if you’re about to take a bath, if you’ve just done
Read MoreI remember being you. Being you, with your hands tucked under your thighs in skinny jeans that never quite fell to the ankle. I remember those hands, & how they wanted to wander over into his & how you told him with your lips that you would always wonder what it would be like to kiss him, but your lips stayed tucked together. He said he'd always feel that way too, and you let the moment pass, utterly kissless.
Read MoreI am so sorry everyone deconstructs and changes your beautiful,
complicated name. The pieces of your soft “ca” and lopping “o”
rebranded into southern alternatives like Caroline or Coraline or Carol
or even Carly once, after the doctor said the only Carolyn he’d ever heard
Dear me from one year ago,
I regret to inform you that tomorrow will be one of the worst days of your life.
Tomorrow you will reset the password to log into your joint bank account. You asked him for the password many, many times. He always says, “Oh it’s on my phone… I don’t remember it…I will get it to you when I have time…I can’t do it right now.”
Read MoreThere is no time for pleasantries, let’s get to it.
You will fight a good fight from a place of absolute terror. You will list improbable reasons why you might be the person for whom antidepressants just really aren't the solution. You will throw pseudoscience and bad journalism against a woman with twenty years’ experience and a prescription pad. And then you will give in.
Read MoreSince the library is closed to the public due to the pandemic, I have nowhere to spend my lunch hour. On rainy days, after I wolf down my peanut butter sandwich at my desk, I cut through the woods behind my office and duck into the grocery store where I try to spend forty-five minutes buying a bottle of soda. It has become increasingly difficult to not feel like I’m doing something wrong by loitering in the greeting card section pretending like I’m looking for the perfect birthday card or killing time in the least-shopped aisle–the one with a meager offering of generic packs of underwear and cotton tube socks sandwiched between a selection of dusty light bulbs and bottles of motor oil.
Read MoreAt Indian Rocks Beach, we stay in an oceanside ranch house. It is small, flat to the ground, and the walls are painted sea green. The living room is covered with sandy, shaggy orange carpet. We are vacationing with my dad’s family: his parents, his sister, her many, blonde children. Absolute chaos.
Read MoreAt a beach on Madeline Island, my son and daughter searched for skipping stones, flat and smooth, perfectly sized to fit their little hands. They would have been six and nine that summer. We had gone to the island to sightsee, a day trip to visit a friend of my husband who had retired there. She drove us to a quiet inlet tucked safely away from the mighty waves of Lake Superior, and there we walked across the rose gold sand and there we found the stones.
Read MoreA jumble of buildings squatted some distance away, dark, and low. Not a sight I, at my ripe old age of eight, imagined part of Dad’s homeland. Funny how things stick in your mind, from all those years ago, still sharp now, from so many decades ago. A time of our walkabout. Through ominous towns dotted trying to overwhelm desert landscapes. So different from down south coast dairy farm where I grew up. Possible to glimpse pieces of blue-gray Ocean away in divots between hills.
Read MoreA small engraved bell with a clapper sat on the teak coffee table in the room where my father lay dying. He no longer had the strength to call my mother so this was the instrument he used to summon her. I heard it from the kitchen and went into the living room.
Read MoreShe promised me the good wine. The bottle her boss gave her as a reward for staying late on a Friday. But when we arrived at her Brooklyn apartment, she instead grabbed an open bottle of white in her fridge. I didn’t care. My vulva was pulsing like a heartbeat.
Read More“Well, Ms. Song, I have to say, you’re pretty darn unlucky.” I thought about reminding her again—for maybe the 50th time—to call me Julie, but after two years of her ignoring my request, the point was moot. Besides, I couldn’t remind her, I was weeping again. Mike took two steps across the tiny doctor’s office and grabbed a tissue from the box, wiping the salty black tracks that muddied my cheeks. Dr. F pursed her lips, tightly holding back any words of wisdom or comfort she might have had. Her face said it all: pity and boredom. This was just another day as an infertility specialist.
Read MoreIn El Dorado you drive for hours, just to feel like you’re going somewhere. Your dad tinkers with cars and he’s given you one he loves, a 280Z. It’s too fast for you. You get reckless and twist past the pines. Once, you skid in a ditch on a zigzag turn. Another time, you open the throttle on a straight highway and rear-end a brown pickup full of stoners. No damage, dude. They’re the only stoners you’ve ever seen in Arkansas, and when you drive away you start to wonder if they were even real.
Read Morewhited sepulchres which appear beautiful outward
but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness
Read More“How do you feel about your breasts?” my closest friend asked me as we gathered for a drink after work on my patio. I didn’t have to dig very deep for my response. My feelings about this part of my body haven't changed in the forty-two years since I first felt the beginnings of my breasts rubbing against my shirt as an eleven year old.
Read MoreWhen we were young and budding, we smiled as the girl’s body began to change. She was a skinny little thing without an ounce of fat or a wiggle to her bum.
Read MoreI was seven when I ran past my mother and grandmother, who were talking about whatever two grown Black women talk about when no one else is listening, when the protrusions from under my tank top caught my grandmother’s attention. “Oh! She got milks,” she said in a confounded, awe-inspiring voice mixed with a bit of intrusion and knowingness. I was only seven.
Read MoreYanking at the placket of yet another men’s dress shirt, I tug until I’m able to close the last three buttons around the apex of my chest. Even in a TomboyX compression bra, which works better for someone my size than any binder on the market, the buttons gap and strain. To find a shirt my breasts will fit in, I have to size up and up until the collar of the shirt looks like a gaping, cavernous ring around my neck. The arms sag and cover my hands, and the length guarantees I’ll end up with wads of material bunched up under my waistband when I tuck in the shirt.
Read More
