Editors’ Note
In a world where girlhood is depicted as a temporal state, a precursor or rehearsal for womanhood, we were interested in a more transformative, transgressive, and expansive framing of girlhood. We live in the era of the “girl,” and yet girlhood is so often depicted as an infantilized state, or as a stage of life in which you are taught — and when you are supposed to internalize — that the violence of the world is “natural” and acceptable.
But what would it mean to reject the rules of our world? What would it mean to keep resistance alive? What would it mean to curate pieces in which girlhood was resurrected, or troubled, or explored in ways that would excite and inspire us as writers and people who are obsessed with the possibilities of girlhood? We were interested in possibility rather than definition; we wanted to ask questions more than we wanted to answer them. We were excited and thrilled by the multiplicity of the pieces we received, and we hope that as you read these pieces, you feel as delightfully disoriented, transformed, and born anew as we did. The pieces we’ve chosen are all kaleidoscopic, powerful, and destabilizing in the most thrilling ways.
In Ariel Chu’s flash piece, emotions move beneath and above the surface, churning and emerging from the depths, and the ending is a masterclass in the uncanny. Yvette Lisa Ndolu’s story is an utter knockout, riveting and searing, exploring what happens when women are forced to swallow their rage. What do you do with a choice to either align yourself with a world that drains you or to embrace your own hunger? Rae Rowe’s mythic story is a glorious incantation, a chorus both liberating and full of grief. The theme of grief continues in Jenevieve Ting’s multifaceted piece, filled with ghostliness and so brilliantly attuned to the living nature of loss.
In all these pieces, girlhood takes on the form of a ghost, not ethereal or gossamer but alive, full of teeth and grief and rage and desire. In Sara Santistevan’s poem, interactivity exposes the limited choices we have about our bodies, and the ways in which girlhood, womanhood, and femininity are socially reinforced in restrictive ways. Similarly, Andy Lopez’s poem uses a found form in a new and exciting way; here, playfulness and rage combine to bring us a new language that allows us to turn both inward and outward, toward the personal and the collective, demanding response from a world that so often refuses to answer for itself.
Populated with ghosts and their hunger, this anthology is ultimately an invitation, an act of speculation.
We hope that it summons you to the threshold to a new world, a new way of being, and a new horizon of possibility.
Table of Contents
What’s inside “On Girlhood”? Editors-in-Chief K-Ming Chang and Hairol Ma describe each piece that is in their anthology.
Ariel Chu’s uncanny flash fiction story Stinger explores the alien in all its forms — what it means to be alien to a person, a place, a creature, a world, and ultimately to oneself.
In Yvette Lisa Ndolu’s short story Bad Apples, a mother decides to become a vampire, and a daughter must wrestle with the choice between self-sacrificial, oppressive goodness (and the silence that comes with it), or the ever-present risk of being exiled, punished, and othered.
Rae Rowe’s Birth Marked is a mythical story that subverts and expands what the form of the short story can do — at once collective and deeply intimate, bodily and spiritual, history-making and future-building, this is a story about creating and connecting with ancestry and appetite in the past, present, and future.
Andy Lopez’s poem “Lightning Round Q&A” for the Chosen One” is a lightning strike, playful and wild, heavy-hitting and stunning, pulsing with livid and living energy. Taking the form of the Q&A, its voice is dexterous, playing many tones and hitting so many brilliant notes, all the while interrogating the rigged world as much as its imagined reader/self.
Sara Santistevan’s poem “diet plan as restrictive mad lib” is a glorious and powerful example of formal innovation. Bodily and disembodied, dissociative and visceral, this poem brilliantly and precisely explores the ways in which choice can be illusory and limited.
Jenevieve Ting’s “Griefhood” is full of precise language, and yet it is also abundant and generous, constantly transformative and transforming. Every line is sonically stunning. These words alone resonate across time and space: “When I look back, grief was my girlhood. That’s why I’ll always be a girl, because I’m still grieving.”
Close"On Girlhood" original call for submission
This is the call for submissions, which is what the published contributors submitted work toward:
Girlhood is often defined as a universal experience, depicted in simplistic, regressive, or romanticized ways. But the narrative of girlhood demands to be set free, to be given the space to be transgressive, expansive, newly possible, or transformative.
As the poet Yanyi once wrote, “Womanhood is the country I come from, a home I reach back for to reproduce, recreate, replenish.” In a similar vein, what does it mean for girlhood to be the country you came from, left behind, or are still traversing or transforming within?
For this anthology, we’re looking for all possibilities and interpretations of girlhood: as the space of becoming, as a place to destabilize, and as the grounds for discovering who you are, even if it means leaving it behind or destroying it from the inside.
We’re open to writing of all genres and all forms that are interested in the topic of girlhood. We invite the peripheral, the strange, the rageful, the loving, the destructive, the tender, the critical, the resistant, the hesitant. We invite writers to approach the idea of girlhood from any and every angle that excites them.
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