She's Shameless: Women Write About Growing Up, Rocking Out, and Fighting Back

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:07:00 +0000

Edited by Stacey May Fowles, Megan Griffith-Greene

Shameless is the magazine I needed as a teen. Instead, I relied on zines picked up from all-ages shows and record shops, with Ms. to fill in the gaps. Zines and Ms. have their place, but it’s heartening to see a need being met so well. In Shameless, young women have a chance to read (and write) about issues of real importance. The magazine’s title comes from its efforts to counter mainstream teen magazines, whose advertisements and features too often encourage shame of our bodies, brains, and differences.

Two of the magazine’s staff, Stacey May Fowles and Megan Griffith-Greene, have compiled the anthology She's Shameless, a slim book containing twenty-five short essays on living up to expectations, getting to know our bodies, developing relationships, learning from failures, and most of all, the power of the creative act. Most pieces are 2-3 pages long and will leave you wondering how anyone can say so much in so few words. In fact, my only complaint is that, with about 114 pages, the book ends too quickly. Contributors include previously anthologized writers, visual artists, activists, and musicians. When I read the contributor biographies I took copious notes because I look forward to reading the other work produced by these talented writers.

These stories are bravely, beautifully honest, the kind of honest that, in reading material as a teen, I only got from Changing Bodies, Changing Lives. As I read these stories, I could relate to so many experiences that I began talking aloud to the text. One story described the confusing experience of being fifteen with perfect poetry: “I had read The Story of O. But I had also just seen Disney’s The Little Mermaid.” I clapped my hand over my mouth in surprise, because I had the same pairing in my past.

My teen years were vivid, with seemingly ordinary moments transformed by Technicolor depths of pain, longing, confusion, and joy. The authors in She's Shameless let me know I am not alone in my clarity of memory. If we'd had this book, the creative women with whom I came of age would have read this anthology aloud to one another, shocked by how well these strangers could know our minds and hearts.

Written by: Lisa Rand, November 23rd 2009

Fear of Fighting

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:49:00 +0000

Stacey May Fowles, Marlena Zuber

Invisible Publishing

Fear of Fighting is a short novel about a woman living and working and looking for love. It reminds me, oddly, of Chuck Palahniuk's novels, though it's more comfortable with its queerness. It's got the same distasteful-yet-oddly-satisfying-in-their-rawness details and images (a half-boiled chicken's leg rotting in a refrigerator, filthy bathrooms, and all too much vomit), the same recklessly self-destructive and improbable obsessions and compulsions. It's got the same artful lists full of suspiciously quirky details, and the same intentionally, beautifully repetitive and sad images of emptiness and loneliness and the alienation of consumer-driven, urban American life.

But Stacey May Fowles balances her portrait of the grossness of human misery with beauty. There are adorable characters galore, plenty of non-gross sex, and lots of details that paint a stylish, hip mise-en-scène. The story is enriched by its characters' charmingly developed and sensitive relationships with animals. The art by Marlena Zuber is lovely and effective—and it adds a lot to the book, making it feel very much like an art piece and not just some novel. The prose is easy and elegantly spare, at times poetic. And at times Fowles' self-reflective musings and fancies work to great effect, as when—spoiler alert—the narrator illuminates the story of an abortion with great subtlety. When Marnie says in her diary-like voice, "To cope I used horrifying, shame-filled phrases like 'get it taken care of,'" she's not just explaining what she's doing or how it made her feel, but, more interestingly, is also revealing her feminist interpretation of her life.

This window into the complex inner life of a very real-feeling woman is refreshing. She lives an ordinary life that, when closely examined—like all ordinary lives—is extraordinary in its details. Similarly extraordinary-in-its-ordinariness is Fowles’ sweet little book; its honest and unassuming acknowledgments and author and printer profiles reveal a collaborative labor of love between independent creatives. The result is a a pleasure to see, to hold, and to read.

Written by: Ari Moore, March 17th 2009