I still remember the moment when I opened an email from Robin Richardson that accepted my story, “Toketwat”, for publication in Minola Review.
I remember the jolt of gratitude—the thrill of knowing a difficult female voice had found a home outside the perfect-mommy publishing industry. Robin’s validation encouraged me to keep writing in that raw, minor key that wound into Every Mask I Tried On.
When the print collection of Minola Review showed up in my mailbox, I sat down and literally snuggled it. Count me among the horrified, anti-cool-girl cotillion. Count me among the women who wanted to rip every seam in the garment fashioned to sell cool-girlness to a consumer society of desperate, hungry women groomed for the male gaze.
Cool Girl Writing Prompt
This prompt is simple. Read the excerpt from Robin’s introduction to the anthology (see image). Read the excerpt that defines Flynn’s “cool girl”. Then write into or about a space in which you (or someone you love) enacted her cool-girlness. Don’t write about someone you hate or resent—that’s too easy, too gratuitous, too invulnerable. Look in the mirror. Now tell us what you’ve done.
A few of the prose pieces I can’t get out of my head…
“Lullaby” by T. Kira Madden
“When My Father Left My Mother” by Meghan Rose Allen
“This Is Not a Short Story” by Jill Talbot
“Memory Palace” by J. A. Pak
“Runny Young Folks” by Mariah Stovall
“Acting Womanish” by Gay Pasley
“Liber Monstrorum” by Sara Patterson
“The Many Sick Mothers of My Heart” by Margeaux Feldman
“All memories start with a bird slamming into a window which is an omen” by Sara Patterson
“Perform” by Marianne Apostolides
And the poems that haunt me….
“First Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by Caitlin Cowan
“Teeth Marks” by Laura Page
“Palm Trees, Post-Rape” by Cade Leebron
“A Scene From Proper Spite” by Leah Umansky
“déjà voodoo” by Adebe DeRango-Adem
“White Paper Birds” by Shannon Bramer
“Were I To Prepare For Your Death” by Shannon Hardwick
“Claude Thornhill Arrangement” by Lauren Hilger
“The Actor” by Nicole Brooks
“[if not for the space between]” by Madeleine Wattenberg
“The Out of Bread Poem” by Emily Schultz
“Self-Portrait As a Pink Dressing Room” by Jenna Clarke
“Cool Enough to Sink a Ship” by Claire Kelly
“Diacritics” by Emily Osborne
“This Is Not An Epistrophe But An Epistrophe Without An ‘E’” by Tanya Singh
“Maidenwifemother Maiden” by Kate Finegan
Read Minola Review.
Purchase the print anthology.
Donate to help keep the journal alive.
Chase it on twitter.
Support writers and editors who demand a space in which women hold hands and perform for each other rather than the usual, male-dominated script.
And follow Robin Richardson to learn more about the amazing ways in which she writes and rocks the poetry world.
“Reader, sometimes I go to write a short story and just end up writing you stupid whore over and over. I once debated an English professor who required a psychological analysis of sleep teaching in Brave New World. Nobody ever believed just hearing something over and over in your sleep actually causes you to believe it. I told a friend that what I miss most about my old life is never being disappointed. She said that was the saddest thing she had ever heard. It was too familiar to me to be sad or disappointing. It just was. And yet there is an Irish saying, the thing about the past is it’s not the past.”
“to put some in your mouth
and find it has gone sour.
Imagine everyone decided
to wear the blue of a J-Cloth
on the same day, but you wore pink.
I leave flour on my clothes so
it looks like I’ve been touched.”
“She loves the man
who clears his throat
like the sea in Beowulf.
Into the neck of the gramophone,
she sputters housewife potency.
Have her feel like she is pushing up a bay from under.
Have her bow, and have NY pet her head.
As if it’s not enough to be alive,
she wants to be guided down a staircase.
The ring of bad news is in the outline of the tree branches.
Make up an excuse for them to talk.
Factor in the keyhole of the bedroom door. Factor in they have no key.”