Introduction
For our seventeenth issue, we are thrilled to share the works of authors exploring womanhood. Womanhood is not a monolith. Rather, it is filled with multitudes—possibilities, contradictions, pains, and powers. Our authors trace these complexities in the lives of historical figures, Biblical characters, myths, and real women of all ages.
Colette Tennant reaches back to women’s origins, asking, “Were our mothers’ wombs brushed with the same color/ from generation to generation, all the way back to our first mother?” (“Permanent Colors,” 24). In Sigrun Susan Lane’s “When Mother Took Her Hair Down” (7), we experience the layered wisdom of a mother’s hair through the eyes of the child narrator. Elizabeth McCarthy tenderly holds the liminal space of being a teen in “Small Town Girls” (8). Darlene Young encapsulates what it is like in middle age to feel the youthful nostalgia of a pair of pink roller skates (“At Age 50, She Buys Pink Roller-Skates,” 41), while Christa Fairbrother imagines this “gradual slide into invisibility” in the figure of the Witch Queen of Angmar (“Witch Queen of Angmar,” 59).
Sandra Salinas Newton and Adrienne Stevenson (“Bridge club,” 50) muse on the delights of “Being Old” (44). Lauren Cox urges us to see anew the forgotten women, like “The Lunatic of Étretat”—“My garments are soft with age,/ and they bear the stuff of living” (20) Alixa Brobbey (“Eve,” 65), Merryn Rutledge (“Eve Celebrant,” 5), and Chloë Rain (“from eden,” 23) reimagine Eve and Eden. Elizabeth Cranford Garcia and Ariel Mitchell Williams powerfully convey the terrible losses women face.
No matter how you engage with this issue—all in one sitting or over a few days—we hope you’ll be as inspired by these thought-provoking pieces as we are. Thank you to each of our wonderful contributors for making this an unforgettable issue!
Happy reading,
Sarah Page and Elizabeth Pinborough
Colette Tennant reaches back to women’s origins, asking, “Were our mothers’ wombs brushed with the same color/ from generation to generation, all the way back to our first mother?” (“Permanent Colors,” 24). In Sigrun Susan Lane’s “When Mother Took Her Hair Down” (7), we experience the layered wisdom of a mother’s hair through the eyes of the child narrator. Elizabeth McCarthy tenderly holds the liminal space of being a teen in “Small Town Girls” (8). Darlene Young encapsulates what it is like in middle age to feel the youthful nostalgia of a pair of pink roller skates (“At Age 50, She Buys Pink Roller-Skates,” 41), while Christa Fairbrother imagines this “gradual slide into invisibility” in the figure of the Witch Queen of Angmar (“Witch Queen of Angmar,” 59).
Sandra Salinas Newton and Adrienne Stevenson (“Bridge club,” 50) muse on the delights of “Being Old” (44). Lauren Cox urges us to see anew the forgotten women, like “The Lunatic of Étretat”—“My garments are soft with age,/ and they bear the stuff of living” (20) Alixa Brobbey (“Eve,” 65), Merryn Rutledge (“Eve Celebrant,” 5), and Chloë Rain (“from eden,” 23) reimagine Eve and Eden. Elizabeth Cranford Garcia and Ariel Mitchell Williams powerfully convey the terrible losses women face.
No matter how you engage with this issue—all in one sitting or over a few days—we hope you’ll be as inspired by these thought-provoking pieces as we are. Thank you to each of our wonderful contributors for making this an unforgettable issue!
Happy reading,
Sarah Page and Elizabeth Pinborough