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…

• “If You’re a Girl and You’re Going to Have Sex with Another Girl, But You’re on Your Period and You’re Wearing a Tampon, Can You Still? Do People Ever Do That?” by Kara Vernor

• “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.

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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.

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