I felt no need to search, to wander through a garden
of other exotic flowers. For the small red roses I held in my small brown hands were perfect,
perfect like a broken mosaic put back together, like a sculpture of glass.
It may shatter one day, as all things do, but it will never be imperfect.
The bump in my nose is a hill that leads to the ravine full of breath: my lips, small and imperfect.
The shake in my hands, in my bones comes from the anxiety bubbling in my belly like an unfurling rose.
My eyes, framed with dark lashes, black like a shadow, reflect like glass
my restless and eternal soul. Within it are visions of my past lives, prophecies of my future lives—they are my wrongs, my rights, my everything.
If I look within, ignore the hurricane of thoughts, the drum beat of my heart, will I see a perfect
being? Will I feel as if I am an intricately beautiful painting in a museum, a rose in a garden?
I wish I could find within myself confidence and sureness, like a garden
growing with every tick of the clock, not a desolate tract of uncultivated land filled with imperfect
creations, of crumbling rocks. I do not want rocks—I want perfect.
I want a bouquet of blossoms, of fulfillment, of a warm feeling on a cold day, of roses
with petals soft like silk and an aroma like rain. Everything
disappoints me, makes me feel as if I have become melted glass
which gleams with treacherous truth, which hides shadows and reflects light—a glass
mask, thrown on in haste: an effort to show the world the garden
I have not yet grown. I am working hard to plant seeds, to plant small pieces of myself, of everything
good, of everything that is an imperfect
reflection, of scattered and sharp thorns like swords on the body of a rose.
What I am is flawed, yes, and what I am not is perfect.
If I were to look at myself, if I were to see a carefully constructed human like a house, perfect
in the slope of the roof, the curve of the door—I would be alive but trapped behind delicate glass.
I do not want the fragile idea of perfect painted on my body like a tattoo of an incomplete rose.
I want the expansiveness of a library to define me, the powerful knowledge of words on a page like flowers in the garden
of my mind, nourishing my network of neurons. You see, I am not imperfect,
the same way I am not perfect. I am, I am, I am: a cryptic collision of everything.
Yes, perfect I am not, but everything
else, I am. I am human and thus I am fragile and I am glass.
I am human and as I am full of life, I am imperfect.
And while I may not be a rose, I am a dandelion, a wishful vision of hope in a garden.
The Proper Way to Shatter a Girl
ALIKAY WOOD
One of the topics Senjuti and I explored this year was perfection and its illusory qualities. I used some of the ending words Senjuti chose for her sestina to create a fictional piece that explores how abandoning false ideals of perfection can be liberating.
There was a girl who was made of glass. She was perfect, and she lived in the garden.
The garden was small and tidy. The girl kept it so, though being a perfect glass specimen required a certain level of caution.
Every day the girl filled a pail with water and sloshed it over the peonies and daisies. She plucked weeds, pruned branches, and turned the sunflowers toward the sun when they got confused.
Time passed. The plants grew. The girl grew restless beneath the glass. She pricked her finger on a thorn just to see what would happen. She let the vines grow high. She stopped helping the sunflowers find the sun.
There was no inciting incident. There was no hero’s call or villain in the village. Nothing changed at all except the girl let herself feel hungry.
So she grabbed a vine and she was not gentle. She clamped one hand over the other and shimmied up. The plants wailed and thirsted beneath her. What would they do without her?
The girl did not relent. She climbed until the greenery thinned and she could see that there was light and clouds and blue, but between her and all that wide freedom was a wall. This was not a garden at all but a cage.
She climbed until her hair grew wild and her muscles thick. Until her head bumped the ceiling. She reached up a fist and knocked, pounded, raged. She punched until the crack widened and the cage shattered around her and she fell and fell and braced herself for the inevitable fracturing the ground would bring.
Only—and this is where things get interesting—when she fell she was damaged, yes, less beautiful than before, of course, and hurt beyond imagining. But the world was before her. And she did not land on her feet, but she didn’t shatter, either.
She lived.
ANALISE GUERRERO
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: Middle College High School
BORN: Queens, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Girls Write Now is an amazing and supportive group. I felt challenged various times because I felt that I wasn’t a good enough writer. I felt so proud of the progress that others made, but I also looked down on myself as a writer because I felt like other girls were growing in their writing careers and I wasn’t catching up with them. My mentor, Catherine, showed me that everyone goes at their own pace. She most definitely has kept a smile on my face and encouraged me to keep writing!
CATHERINE LECLAIR
YEARS AS MENTOR: 4
OCCUPATION: Associate Creative Director, Gizmodo Media Group
BORN: Bangor, ME
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: My features have been published in Jezebel, Deadspin, Racked, and more this year.
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: This year, it has been amazing to witness Analise grapple with the writing process, from pushing through self-doubt to working on revising and critiquing her own words. Her excitement for and true appreciation of the beauty of the world around us (she even likes pigeons!) has inspired me to find more moments of joy in everyday life, and her ability to be her vibrant self in a room full of people makes me want to be more genuine and present always.
Identical
ANALISE GUERRERO
I wrote this piece to show that it is ridiculous for others to judge based on a choice that doesn’t affect them. This relates to Generation F because we as a generation represent a future that should be free of judgment.
We as a human species are beautiful
All full of life and color
Handcrafted with the most precise decorations
It’s wonderful to be a part of something so great
So intelligent
And yet
When two men are seen holding hands
It is looked down upon
When two women show affection to each other
It is ‘disgusting’
It’s shameful to witness people today act so foolish
When we die
We become nothing but bones
Or ashes
We cannot look into a dead corpse
Or in a jar of ashes
And know whether that being was an alcoholic Mother
Doctor
Gay
Transgender
What does it matter what someone else’s passion is?
A gay man
Would not be able to serve his country
Until 2011
A transgender man
would face the same problem
Until this year, 2018.*
Why is it a punishment to love someone because others do not find it normal?
We are such a unique species
Developed from nothing
And will go back to nothing
We are not robots designed to follow a code and perform wha
t we are told
We are our own creatures who have a mind to pick
And choose
* This story was written before the transgender military ban was announced.
Blender Night
CATHERINE LECLAIR
The following is an excerpt from a longer essay about my relationship with the generations of women in my family who precede me, as told through the story of the night my aunts discovered frozen alcoholic beverages. Generation F inspired me to consider my own relationships with past generations of women as I also witness the future generation of women through Girls Write Now.
I come from a family of mothers. There is a fierce, packlike protectiveness that binds us all together, no matter that we consist of many nuclear families, each with their own matriarch, sets of rules and expectations. As a toddler, I was grabbed out of the sun and slathered with sunscreen by each of my aunts as if I was their own child. I’ve been fed squishy PB&J sandwiches on pillowy white bread that were made by the dozen and handed out to our grubby herd without any designation as to whose kid was whose. Those delineations mattered less here. Now, as an adult, I can feel the love with which my aunts dutifully fed us and protected us during our childhood years translated into genuine interest in our adult-sized lives.
As the night continues on, the blender drinks get stronger and stronger. You see, my family drinks in spite of its alcoholism. In the ’70s, in the span of one year, my grandmother and her sister both divorced their first husbands, who turned out to be violent, dangerous alcoholics. Their ex-husbands’ tumultuous relationship with alcohol is how they both found themselves single mothers, my grandmother raising three daughters and my great-aunt five daughters and one son. So they moved in together, their two nuclear families splitting open and sewing themselves back together into one big family, with two sisters as the heads of the house. They even shared the master bedroom. Their tiny, overstuffed home was far from ruled with an iron fist, and as my mother puts it, “They had lost control of us by the time we were fifteen.” They have stories of skipping prom, crashing cars before they had their licenses, and plenty of underage drinking. They were sisters and cousins, each other’s best friends and partners in crime. And if it sounds like a weird cult mixed with Full House, that’s because it was.
Every booze-fueled night of hijinks is a way for us to challenge our family’s history of addiction and say, “You haven’t made us victims yet!” But it’s also temptation of fate. It is somewhere in the murky hours well beyond the third or fourth round of daiquiris that my aunts decide that the time has come for all of us women to burn our bras. Now, before you begin to paint a picture in your head of the women in my family as renegade women’s-rights activists, the kind who quote Gloria Steinem or have opinions on Lena Dunham, let me continue. Because the burning of the bras is not limited to the women at the fire. Oh no, the men are told to burn their underwear, too. And while this perhaps undoes any possible feminist symbolism you could have read into this, it does feel a bit more inclusive, doesn’t it?
GIANNY GUZMAN
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Sophomore
HIGH SCHOOL: Academy of American Studies
BORN: Long Island City, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Honorable Mention
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: This year I had my first performance outside of Girls Write Now. When I went up to that stage I was confident and as I walked off I was proud of myself. Before I met Hermione I was too intimidated by crowds and had anxiety about sharing my work with strangers. I used to be ashamed if I was proud of myself because I never wanted it to make me look conceited or obnoxious. Hermione taught me how to be proud of my work and share it with confidence. I will forever be thankful for that.
HERMIONE HOBY
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Professor, Columbia University; Journalist, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Novelist
BORN: London, England
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Neon in Daylight (Catapult, 2018)
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: This year Gianny was invited to participate in a public poetry reading in Manhattan. As she took to the stage with confidence and read her work with conviction and passion (to much applause) I was reminded of her telling me only a year or so earlier that she didn’t feel she could ever write a poem. It continues to be amazing to watch her challenge herself and push past a sense of limitation. I’m so proud of her.
Darkness and Dolls
GIANNY GUZMAN
In this coming-of-age fairy tale, I tried to illustrate the best way I could how a girl transitions to a woman instantly and sometimes even if she doesn’t want to; how there is so much we are kept in the dark about, then forced to know all at once.
The little girl sat in the middle of a wide room playing dolls with the darkness. She has never seen the light and craved seeing it. She could not tell the expressions of people in the dark. She could not see what someone was doing a few feet away in the dark. She was oblivious to it all in the dark.
She knew she had a huge window overlooking the world, but she was content with playing with her dolls.
From one day to the other the darkness did not want her to play anymore.
It held the girl’s arm tightly and her yells were too soft to be heard. It dragged her to the window and dragged the curtains open.
Light spilled in and for a split second she was blinded and then she could see.
She saw her own reflection. She saw the facial expressions on everyone passing by and she saw what everyone was doing.
The girl never thought about how her eyes were too small for her face or how her lips were too thin or how no matter how far she pulled her head forward there was still a flap of fat underneath her face. She was scared because she didn’t want to be the girl in the reflection, but just moments ago she was fine with who she was.
The girl never saw how behind everyone’s eyes was desperation and sadness because no one can ever get everything they wanted. Some even less than others. But they continue to move through life even with the scraps of dreams they once mapped out.
She pulled away, scared with what she saw, and tried to escape the light. The curtains wouldn’t close and even if she shielded herself from the light, she saw it all behind her eyes, playing like a broken record.
She glanced around her room. She looked at her doll discarded in the middle of the room and walked toward it. Her mind thought it knew what to do, but her body shivered in anticipation. The doll was gently placed in the back of her closet, with the doors closed and the darkness, alone.
The girl remained alone in the middle of her room, nowhere to hide in the light. She walked out the room, leaving her doll behind; and the darkness that concealed the world from her and her from the world was left behind, too.
Excerpt from book in progress
HERMIONE HOBY
This is taken from a novel in progress, whose narrator reflects on the upheavals of 2017 from his deathbed in 2064.
There can be a kind of gratification to a really bad birthday. Toward the dull and lurid end of 2016, the year all our idols died, I turned twenty-two alone. I spent the evening failing to read a book in the eggy lowlight of a deserted Chinatown bar and I deemed this non-event, in its solitude and misery, so much more preferable than, say, drinks with a few people mustering anemic cries of “Happy birthday!” or, god forbid, trying to sing it, a song that was always too slow, maddeningly so, always went on longer than you thought possible, groaning toward that final, protracted lift on the “birth” of the penultimate “birthday” with wincing strain, all while I stared at a lone candle shoved in a cupcake and waited it out. I’d hoped that being alone might feel sort of heroic. Or at least dignified. Or, at least, grown-up.
An overweight barmaid had cajoled me into ordering the house cocktail, which arrived in a small coupe glass, an embarrassing
ly fruity shade of puce, a mocking strawberry spliced and listing down the side. I’d grinned, sipped it, suppressed a shudder as I felt it sheath my teeth with sugar while I wondered where glory had gone.
It was November, a nothing month, the weekend after Thanksgiving, and I remember rain, a vague but unremitting overlay of pathetic fallacy as the nation failed to accept the reality of what it had done. The sky had a sort of passive-aggressive quality: bruised clouds, withholding their light while telling you they were fine not to worry about them you didn’t care about them anyway. Ahead lay the grotesquerie of the reality-TV boor who would soon be in the White House, eating McDonald’s and watching TV in his bathrobe. A bad joke. The worst possible joke that was now the forty-fifth president, executive producer of The America Show as it barreled ever faster, with more and more improbable drama, to its season finale. The ratings were great. Later, Zara would say, in that flattened-dead way that made the notion of “joke” quail, that they’d all peaced out because they knew what was coming. They’d ducked out before the shit hit the fan. Prince, Bowie, Muhammad Ali.
In November, though, I was newly arrived in New York, with few friends, or, at least, nobody with whom I’d wish to eat pie and turkey or celebrate a birthday. After Dartmouth, least impressive of the Ivies, I’d been eager to delay adulthood a little longer, and had spent a year at Oxford, during which my impressionable speech became infected with the rounded vowels of rich English youth. English youth who fetishized me, ribbed me, paid me attention, ultimately, for being “a bloody Yank.” In those first months in Manhattan, then, I was mistaken, frequently, for an expat. Often, I went along with this, murmuring the lie of “London” with a diffident smile when a cashier or barista asked where I was from. In truth, I was from Ohio, an only child, a former fat kid, an English lit, major, son of a physiotherapist named Marjory—a woman whose life had been a slow cavalcade of disappointments, a landslide, chief among them my father’s departure ten years ago, closely followed by my own callous and total refusal to remain in Toledo and lend a little succor to her sadness. She’d christened me Luke. The day I arrived in Oxford, I became Luca.
Generation F Page 14
