I realize how pathetic it is that the promise of them coming in defines my days. Staring back at my muted reflection in the window, I tell myself, for the first time in years, that something has to change.
REGINA FONTANELLI
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: Edward R. Murrow High School
BORN: Brooklyn, NY
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Gold Key and five Honorable Mentions; Posse Scholarship recipient
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: If there’s one person who deserves credit for helping me develop my voice and confidence as a writer, it’s Shannon Carlin. She’s such a hard worker and a lil’ competitive, but I am, too, so we fuel each other. She’s my FAVE to talk about the Oscars with (though we disagree about Lady Bird), and other subjects in general. THE LADY KEEPS ME SANE, BRO. Seriously, I came to Shannon a sweaty mess, and while I’m still sweaty, I’m not a mess. Truly blessed to have this extremely talented, confident woman as my role model the last two years.
SHANNON CARLIN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 3
OCCUPATION: Entertainment Journalist
BORN: Ronkonkoma, NY
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Bustle, Refinery29, Bust magazine, and wrote a feature on Rupi Kaur for Rolling Stone
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Regina spent this year writing about herself. First, with her college essay, which helped her get a full scholarship to Middlebury College. (I’ll brag for her in case she doesn’t.) Then her memoir, which is excerpted here. When we first met, Regina was a poet who wasn’t ready to tell her own story. Now, a year later, she’s putting her vulnerability on display with a confidence I wish I had. I can’t wait to see what she writes next, long after Girls Write Now and our weekly meetings. But I hope she knows I’ll always be here to give it a read.
Swing Sets
REGINA FONTANELLI
This is an excerpt from my memoir, Swing Sets. In the piece, I share many of my truths for the first time. In this particular section, I’m fourteen, struggling to accept myself and my situation.
High school is a welcome change. Here, dressing like you’re poor is cool and my long hair is beautifully feminine, though the reality is that I’m just too broke for a haircut. It’s not long before someone notices my glow sophomore year, and it all goes downhill. He is long, like a string bean, and pale as a sheet of paper. His Adam’s apple bobs awkwardly and his dark bangs contrast so greatly with his complexion that he looks ill. From the way he eyes me, I know he thinks I’m beautiful. Sexy. I sop up his attention like a sponge would water. Glance back at him, shy, the way I think I’m supposed to glance at him. It’s only a number of days before we are dating. By dating, I mean hooking up in his apartment after he gets me high.
The joint and his mouth taste bitter. Blacken the inside of my lungs, but I don’t care. My euphoria with freedom is becoming tiresome, and I wish I had a mother who didn’t vomit first thing in the morning, and ate meals at regular hours of the day. His parents, an art dealer and a music producer, have three well-balanced meals a day around a table. Whenever I kiss him, I think about how charming I’d be if I were to meet them, how I’d pass a porcelain bowl of snap peas to his dad and heartily laugh at his mother’s jokes. Like every ingénue on every show I’ve ever watched.
I take up drinking with him and his friends by the Gowanus and unknowingly tag along on trips to steal Triple C at Rite Aid. One boy with a triangle face and piercing blue eyes becomes a friend. I share with him how my boyfriend treats me, and he shares with me how my eyebrows are too dark. He tells me I’m fucking dumb, but only because he cares.
By March, I’m cutting myself with butter knives and razors. In my mind, I see myself going too deep, being too absorbed in the process, and slicing through my jugular veins, so tiny Bic blades and ribbed knives are all I use. Another cutter and I become friends, and we spend hours in her bed, counting scars and crossing each other’s wounds. My journal at that time, a fifty-cent marble with pages loose at the binding, soon fills with poetry about her. This is when I realize there may be more to the jittery feeling I get around girls.
On Easter Sunday, my mom cannot cheer me up. There is a small, momentary reversal in the roles we share. She applies blush haughtily in our toothpaste-flecked bathroom mirror, while I stare expressionless at my reflection. I do not put on makeup. I do not speak. I do not change.
“What’s wrong, Gina?” she asks. The holiday has rejuvenated her Catholic spirit and brought to life her favorite memories.
I say nothing. Pull down my pants to reveal where my thighs are marked and bleeding. The expression on her face falters, but her lips quickly resume their previous position. Her eyes take on a stony look.
“Go get dressed.”
So I do, but the next day, I ask my friend for her therapist’s number, because it’s clear no one is there to take care of me but myself.
Rebecca is a holistic Wiccan. In her drawer, there are salves and serums and lemon-scented lotions she makes herself. She’s on the skinny side, with a sunny face. In her office, I mourn the life I have always wanted. The one with the father who carries me on his shoulders and threatens to “take the bat out” on boys my age. The one who held my left hand while my mother held my right, and lifted me across the street. The one where my mother is an art dealer, or a kindergarten teacher, or a veterinarian who asks me how I’m doing every day after school, and always makes sure there’s food in the house. The one where we all sit in the library talking about the books we’ve read and the grades I’m getting and how I’m liking the drama classes they’ve enrolled me in.
In her office, I’ve killed the dreams of being beautiful, owning stylish clothing. The dreams where boys fawn over me, lust over me. Where I own jeans that fit my heart-shaped bottom perfectly. Where I wear PINK sweaters and have perfectly straight hair, perfectly straight nails, and perfectly straight sexuality.
I’ve put flowers on the grave of being everything I’m not. Set up a lovely ceremony; hired a priest to bury my Catholic upbringing; and invited the pew of old, wrinkly leather-ladies who made me feel I wasn’t light enough, skinny enough, woman enough to be beautiful. I’ve done my alms, burned my palms, got my last rites read, all under the concerned, squinting eyes of my kind, hippie therapist.
The Memories of My Mom, Hidden in Pierogi Dough
SHANNON CARLIN
At the Intergenerational Memoir workshop, I wrote about my mom and the power of food memories. It was mostly ramblings about pierogi, but after reading Regina’s memoir I wanted to turn it into something real.
My mom picks and chooses how she remembers her family. That’s the only luxury of them no longer being around. While my dad’s family boasts all six of his younger siblings, their seventeen kids, five grandkids, and his over-eighty-year-old mother, my mom’s family has been depleted by dementia and cancer. Worse may be those relatives who’ve just been lost to time, completely forgotten, to be remembered only through foggy hindsight once they’re physically gone.
My mom jokes, like most people do, that her family is weird, but in actuality, they’re gamblers, liars, and con artists. It’s hard to imagine this is Jeanne Lamb’s lineage. The woman who wouldn’t let me cheat at Pretty Pretty Princess, concerned it would lead to bad habits. The woman who once drove an elderly stranger around my neighborhood until she remembered where she lived. If there’s anything seedy in her past, she’s hid it well, but that wouldn’t surprise me. My mom’s memories are hers and hers alone, locked away, possibly forever. I know only what she wants me to know.
My mom will talk about her mom, Lydia, who tap-danced and played softball well into her seventies before Alzheimer’s made her forget who she was. My mom never will, though. My nanny and poppy, James Philo—a Boston Bruins farm player, hotelier, and a chef—are in every recipe my mom has managed to salvage over fifty-nine years.
&n
bsp; My mom makes pierogies every Christmas Eve and it’s in the preparation of those delicious Polish dumplings that I begin to understand where she came from. The care she takes when mashing the potatoes with a hand-me-down medieval tool and grinding in her ruby-red KitchenAid the brisket that she scoured multiple stores to find. That agony of finding the perfect replacement four-inch-diameter glass to cut the dough after the one my nanny used shattered. It’s all to keep the best parts of her family alive.
My mom used the “wrong” flour one year. “It’s always Gold Medal,” she said, barely audible over everyone’s chewing. But I understood, it didn’t taste like her mom’s, another sad reminder of how easily she could lose them all over again.
My mom keeps those memories hidden in that dough, tucked away so she doesn’t have to say them out loud. For now, I will quietly eat them, pretending that is enough.
MARIA RITA FURTADO
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: The Mary Louis Academy
BORN: Recife, Brazil
LIVES: Queens, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Honorable Mention
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: My mentor opened me up to new forms of poetry that are different from the classic schools of poetry I have learned in school or from my peers’ poetry. I never knew poetry could be the way it was until Emily took me to my first poetry reading and exposed me to more radical and expressive forms of writing. I was also inspired by the writers I met who were pursuing their writing no matter what.
EMILY PRESENT
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Administrative Assistant, Jefferies; Editor/Founder, Glitter-MOB
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Souvenir Lit, METATRON, Hobart Pulp, Cosmonauts Avenue
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: My mentee has inspired and challenged me to think differently about how to share and express experimental work to a younger audience. I was so thrilled to take her to an art exhibit at MoMA and a poetry reading in an artist’s studio. But above all else, she has constantly awed me with her creativity, her candor, and her courage.
The Colors of You
MARIA RITA FURTADO
This poem represents Generation F because it is about fierce emotions and not being afraid to express them. I believe this is something that embodies my generation.
Evil comes in all different colors
Especially the green in your eyes
And the golden specks of amber
That gleam in the moonlight.
But also in the faded blue of your jeans,
The ones that fit my hand just right
When I slip it into your back pocket.
It comes in dark brown—
That scar you got
From the last homecoming football game.
It comes in polished wooden brown—
your hair
whenever you run your hands through it,
or when you don’t run your hands through it.
I like it better like that anyways.
But mostly,
It comes in Fire Island orange.
Because I remember that as the last color I saw—
Before you turned off the lights
And everything went black.
Colored Death
EMILY PRESENT
My poem was inspired by my mentee’s poem—a representation of Generation F. A fiery sense of self—an ability to look at the uncertain and scarier sides of life unabashedly and with grace.
There is death in every color
I proposed in a vitrine
It was faded purple and black
I proposed to, you
Do you remember?
There are little lies scattered in a death
Quiet and precise
My heart renders itself useless
and you accept
You put a tiny rose on my finger
and kiss it gently
I want you to bow to me and say
you’ll Encase me in gold
When I return from my peril
But you don’t and I’m quiet
Thinking my spaceship solitude
The rose has left a mark; a sketch of itself
And a few faint scars
Quiet, red
But you are a child’s laughter in an office room
And I am learning to grow a new limb
I am learning to denounce my color
And learning rather, to live
MARIAH GALINDO
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: New York, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: During one of our sessions, Nikki set a timer for ten minutes and the both of us were to freewrite. Prior to the free write, our discussion fueled an angry fire in my soul. Nikki handed me a piece of paper. That one piece of paper turned into eight pages. Eight pages of my personal feelings toward being a minority and comparing myself to others more fortunate, diving deep into my insecurities and making myself aware of how self-conscious I am. As a result, I came out of that practice knowing much more of myself than I did before.
NIKKI PALUMBO
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Comedy Writer
BORN: Union, NJ
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Upright Citizens Brigade, Funny or Die, Reductress
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: This year, Mariah and I made vulnerability a priority both in our writing and in getting to know each other on a deeper, more honest level. Crazy idea, I know! But with every emotional roller coaster, there’s a great reward. And I’m so proud of the topics we’ve been able to tackle that were previously very walled off—even to ourselves.
Dejar Pasmado
MARIAH GALINDO
My writing piece is influenced by actual events that happened within my family. These events caused strained relationships and continue to affect the next generation with underlying judgment between siblings.
Flora woke up to the sound of yelling outside her bedroom door. Two voices clashing against each other, intertwined with the feeling of hatred and hostility. Aimed at each other. Flora stood still, listening to their shouting.
“You’re not my father! You never were!”
Flora got up from her bed and quietly opened the door. She hadn’t seen her sister in two days. Her sister was dressed in a tight black shirt, her hair flat-ironed. She wore a necklace laced with gold and a little diamond at the end. Her nails were acrylic and smelled new.
“Then why did you come back?”
Flora’s father yelled back. His stance was crooked and faltering—back and forth. In his hand was an empty Corona bottle. The two continued to argue, voices rising. Until her father raised the empty bottle and brought it down with a smash over Flora’s sister’s head.
“Linda!” Flora yelled.
Linda couldn’t hear as she got up and dug her nails deep into her father’s face. He yelled in pain and the two continued to fight. Flora’s eyes opened wide, not knowing what to do. Instead, she went back into her room and put on her clothes. It was a Monday and she did not want to be late for school.
Flora’s room was tiny. She shared it with her mother, who slept on a mattress on the floor. Flora often felt guilty for having an actual bed but couldn’t do anything about it because her father wouldn’t buy a bunk bed. After she was dressed, she looked at the full-length mirror where she criticized herself, daily. It was part of her routine to judge what was reflected back in the cracked mirror whose wooden frame was chipped away. It was a gift from her father. He found it on the street with his friend Marco.
Flora took a long look at herself and hated it. She was large in the wrong places and hated wearing shirts that showed it. She pulled up her jeans, hoping it woul
d tuck in her rolls. The least she could do was flat-iron her hair and put on hoop earrings that highlighted her above-average face. She couldn’t see it now, but she would turn into a beautiful woman. But even so, she would always feel overshadowed by her sister, whose beauty was apparent and treasured.
She skipped breakfast, later gorging herself on dinner. As she walked to school she bumped into her friends along the way.
“Hola, Cuy!”
A short boy with long black hair greeted her.
“Hola, José,” Flora responded.
On the inside Flora hated that nickname, Cuy, but would never say so. She instead looked behind and saw her sister stumbling out of the apartment building, clutching her hair. Flora turned around and walked away, leaving her sister to wander out in the morning alone.
Linda didn’t know exactly what set off the fight, but she was sure that she needed to get out of the house. She slowly walked toward the end of the block, the wind blowing out her hair. She delicately examined the bump forming in the middle of her head, wincing at the pain. Her feet blistered in the heels she’d never worn before. She chastised herself for needing to have these shoes. But she was interrupted when she saw a man walking toward her.
“Linda, hurry up, we’re late.”
Linda quickly walked up to him, swaying back and forth as the shoe tag poked her heel.
“Why are you walking like that? It’s weird.”
Her face grew bright red as the man’s arms pulled her close. He was wearing a black shirt that hugged his chest, showing the outline of his chiseled body. His brown skin glittered under the sun, the Virgin Mary permanently apparent on his arm.
He held Linda tight under his arm as if he was a boy holding on to his favorite pet, making sure no one else got a hold of it. As they were walking, Linda’s back twisted in his tight grip and her courage mounted with every step, until she could free herself from his hold. When she did, he grunted and glared at her.
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