PARENTAL GUIDANCE

I am very excited to report that I conducted my last interview for Late Bloomers!

My subject was a young woman, around 25, who throughout her life maintained a very difficult relationship to her mother, who suffered from mental illness.

She told me some really sad details about her mother acting angry and sad all the time, as a result of depression, and only saying goodnight to my subject while sleeping. My subject told me she would crawl into her mother’s room every night to say goodnight, because even if her mother was not awake and possibly did not mean it, she wanted to hear it. 

I think the interview is great for the story I am going to write, as a theme many young women can probably relate to is a difficult relationship with their mother.

I am relieved in a way to have this inteview done, but this means I have to start the writing process which, admittedly, is getting a little easier.

I wrote out some plans for the structure of each story today and I am going to continue to work on it. I am hoping to come up with some rough drafts by next week so I can submit them to my advisor at school and get them edited. I also have a photoshoot planned next week, so I will post a sample photo from it most likely. The concept is a little risque so I am hoping for feedback through comments and messages.

THE REAL SLIM SHADY

I apologize for not blogging last week -- Hanukkah usually doesn’t get very busy around my house but this year we had a lot of guests passing through.

My mother gives my brother and I each a few small gifts for the holiday, and one of the gifts I got (after asking for it a million times) was Eminem’s Recovery CD.

Slim and Hallie

I am conflicted about my love for Eminem, and especially the way he has inspired Late Bloomers. 

I hate that his music is violent, and I hate that the violence is usually directed towards women (I have a hard time listening to Stan all the way through). It would appear Mr. Eminem, as MJ used to call him, goes against many of the things I strongly believe in.

However, I admire his honesty. When I listen to his music, I believe what he says. He reveals himself through his art honestly, and it takes courage to do that. I also like listening to him because he makes me consider the role of autobiography in art, which is something I have given some thought to when it comes to my own collection of short stories. I have asked myself how much I should let my own personal experience be part of the collection, in addition to all the inteviews I have conducted. 

I am also very interested in and impressed by and in love with his brilliance as a lyricist. I love how he can make the word fuck sound beautiful, and the world love sound evil.

Well, I am going to listen to the CD now again for the fiftieth time since I’ve gotten it. I can’t get enough of the real Silm Shady.

p.s. It’s not on Recovery but listen to When I’m Gone, and watch the video. His best work in my opinion.

LANA

The following photograph is an extra from the latest photoshoot I have done for Late Bloomers. 

I am thinking about using it for a story about standards of beauty for females in North America, or maybe she can even represent God in my story inspired by Shoshy. She looks pretty divine. 

The models name is Lana, by the way. I have known Lana since university, and I always though her inner beauty was at par with that on the outside. I admired her a lot as she coordinated the peer support group I was a member of, therefore making sure students of the University of Winnipeg had access to peer counsellors, and making sure we, as the peer counsellors, knew how to listen carefully and open ourselves to helping others. 

p.s. Yes I wear my jeans like that on purpose.

THE ALMIGHTY FEMALE

I can’t believe it’s already December and Hanukkah starts in a week. 

A personal update: I submitted my application to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for their MFA in Filmmaking program. I am looking forward to hearing back. It’s an exciting time because I am also on a 3 week work placement for school right now, and I am working at Tripwire Media, which is a company that makes beautiful videos and they are based right here in Winnipeg.

My friend Shoshonna, who I call Shoshy, and I have a tradition where we get together to exchange Hanukkah gifts the week before the holidays starts, and we did is a little early this year, and she drove over on Tuesday night. We usually only give small gifts and this year she gave me a hand-decorated ashtray, and I gave her a vintage alarm clock. 

While she was over, we drank tea and talked about our trip to Israel that we went on in 2011. It was a birthright trip, meaning the Israeli government and two private sponsors paid for us to go. All Jewish people between the ages of 18 and 26 (I believe) have this opportunity, but it was a very special one for Shosh.

Shosh had struggled with the relationship she had to other family members for a number of years. She is a creative soul and her family has a number of doctors and lawyers in it, and it was hard for her parents, especially her father, to accept that she did not want to pursue anything other than a fine arts degree from the University of Manitoba. It really strained their relationship and Shosh told me she stopped praying altogether, because she could not bring herself to believe in any kind of God while experiencing some of the things she faced, and learning about the condition and political climate of the Middle East through books and artwork. 

“It changed when I went to Israel, though,” she told me, and I already knew the story because I remembered seeing Shosh cry at the Western Wall. 

The Western Wall, sometimes called the Wailing Wall, is located in Jerusalem and the idea is that you put a prayer in the wall and it goes to God. 

“I met Her that day,” she said, explaining to me that God, or at least her God, is a woman. “I negotiated with Her about my life.”

That’s only a snippet of the interview I had with Shosh, and I am going to use what she told me as inspiration for a character in my story that is governed by the theme of relationship to a higher power. 

Shosh and I riding a camel in Israel.

MERELY AN UPDATE

This week I was thinking a lot about the progress I’ve made on Late Bloomers, my Independent Professional Project. 

Overall, I am proud that I have comitted to blogging at least once a week to keep my audience updated about the project, and hopefully garner interest in case I decide to launch the collection at a local bookseller. 

I am proud of the people I have contacted and interviewed, and of some of the photoshoots I am planning to use for it. 

But admittedly, I am a little intimidated. I have gathered so much information that I am having trouble deciding how best to do it justice; how to write these stories that I consider to be important and meaningful. All I can do is take it step by step at this point, and I have my last couple interviews scheduled for the next couple weeks so I will keep you posted.

SEX FOR CRACK

I remember starting this blog and talking about how I would interview both people who I know, and those who I would meet along the way.

I met a woman who used to work in Winnipeg’s sex trade while I was at work. I saw her sitting by the doors of the store I work in, and we started to talk.

Her story literally broke my fucking heart, and she told me about doing anything to get crack and wishing some of the men she slept with for the drug would have just killed her instead. 

I am going to try to relay this interview into a really powerful story. I feel blessed to have crossed paths with her, and her story deserves to be shared.

AILEEN

This post is one about inspiration, and I admit before you read further, that what I consider inspiring may not be what you consider inspiring.

I have recently been reading a book called Dear Dawn, and it is a collection of prison letters written by Aileen Wuronos, who was executed in 2002 after killing a number of men while working as a hitchhiking hooker. 

My admiration for Aileen started when I was 13, and my mother showed me the movie Monster, which was an idependent film that ended up getting Charlize Theron the Academy Award for best actress in a leading role. 

Contrary to what one might think upon me saying I admire Aileen, I do not admire what she did. I understand, as the foreward in Dear Dawn acknowledges, that to some radical feminists Aileen is a kind of outlawed Jesus -- the foreward describes her actions as what extreme feminists talk about, except she actually did it. For me, it is not like that. I admire Aileen’s unwillingness to give up on loving another person, despite what her life was like.

If you are interested in learning about her, watch Nick Broomfield’s 2002 documentary called Aileen: the life and death of a serial killer.

Image from Google

I can’t really explain what makes me feel so intensely when I watch movies about her or read her books, but I think it’s because I sympathize with her, on a smaller scale. She wanted to be loved, so she stopped at nothing to sustain that. She was failed by a number of systems, and she was looked down upon by society. 

As I noted previously, it was on a very small scale, but I feel as though some of the emotions she may have felt throughout times in her life, I have felt, too. In my early and middle years as a student I was told a number of times that parents of other students told their daughters to “stay away from me,” and I remember teachers who spoke to me in ways that, looking back on it now, were unfair and inappropriate. I feel I was failed by that system, and in the “society,” of elementary and middle school, I was looked down upon. In many cases I gave into peer pressure because I wanted my friends to love me, and I had a new boyfriend, another sexual experience, almost every other week. 

Aileen is an inspiration to my project because she represents resilience of the female spirit; to me she represents a naive and almost primitive way of looking at the world despite all the ugly things she saw in her life; she represents beauty hidden beaneath the dark and scary circumstances that have, in many cases, defined female adolesence, and she represents social change in the context of the documentary films Broomfield (a personal hero of mine) made about her.

p.s. I actually got to talk to Dawn, her best friend and the woman who all the letters are addressed to. I messaged her on Facebook in the summer and she told me some stuff about Aileen that I didn't know. It was cool. 

CAN WE TALK?

I got down two interviews this week, so I am feeling pretty good.

I interviewed Erik, my friend from Montreal who I was with when I saw Madonna. We talked about gender identity and some of the struggles he faced grrowing up and being unable to define himself according to one gender. 

I also interviewed a close friend of mine on the topic of being comfortable with your own sexuality. The friend, whose name I agreed not to release, discussed with me how important it is to love yourself, and how she would like to see some of the negative connotations associated with female masturbation abolished. She talked about how part of being sexually healthy as a young woman, to her, includes loving yourself honestly.

Both of the interviews were very interesting and I am looking forward to developing characters and plots that will speak to some of the issues that were raised through our conversations.

ROAD TO SAFETY

I worked on something this week with Melissa, one of the girls who has agreed to model for my project, and who I blogged about a couple weeks ago. 

In photography class at school, I am developing some of the skills (namely using a lighting kit, becoming familiar with my camera and its settings, and working with a model) that will come in handy for Late Bloomers. 

I have been putting a lot of effort into the assignments for the most part because photography and storytelling through this medium are things that I care about and want to take pride in, so I was thrilled to learn one of our assignments was a photographic essay.

I thought carefully about what I wanted to do for the photographic essay, and the only thing I could think of was my fundamental objective for my art, whether written or visual: provoke thought and create conversation, because those are the things that lead to change.

So I chose to explore the topic of domestic violence through the photographic essay. I worked on the photoshoot with a team including Melissa as the model, my sister’s boyfriend Kyle as another model, and Loren Hansen (a friend of mine who is also a MAC artist) for makeup. Kirah Sapong, a friend of mine from school, also assisted setting up lights on the shoot, and I photographed and conceptualized it. 

The subject matter is heavy and the most common reaction to the finished work was people grimacing, which is exactly what I wanted. I did not want people to feel comfortable when they looked at this photographic essay, I wanted them to become uncomfortable and comment on how uncomfortable it is to know that domestic violence is a reality for hundreds of thousands of women across Canada, so the converstion will not come to a stand still and awareness will continue to be raised. 

I also chose to explore this topic because it is something that has defined my life in a way. My mother, sister, and I were all victims of domestic abuse, so I have seen it first hand. I know what it feels like to feel unsafe in a place where you are supposed to lay your head to sleep, where you are supposed to call home. This issue is important and I do not want people to fall silent about it. 

BREAKING NEWS

I have decided that I want to write seven short stories for the collection, and I think I have settled on the themes (make sure to comment or message me because I would like your feedback on this):

1. Being what you believe about yourself

2. Relationship to a higher power
3. Relationship, or lack thereof, to parents
4. Death
5. Standards of beauty for females in North American culture

6. Role models
7. Gender identity

I am really excited to have narrowed these down, but I admit I am feeling overwhelemed because these are big topics to cover, and I want to do them justice. I would appreciate your feedback, and I have some cool interviews I have lined up for the next few weeks so I will be sure to post about them.

DELICATE BUT ROUGH

I am moving ahead with the collection and I am even surprising myself a little bit about the initiative I am taking. 

For the photographs, I want to capture girls who I consider to be beautiful, and that can mean many because as I’ve noted previously, my taste is eccentric.

This week I met with a girl named Melissa, who I knew of growing up, but had never actually met until tonight.

We met for a glass of wine and I asked her if she’d be willing to model for some pictures I am going to use for the collection. What I like most about Melissa is her smile: she has the most beautiful, straight teeth I’ve ever seen, and she is altogether a beautiful girl and I love that she looks like a bad ass, too. She is the perfect combination of delicate and tough -- to me, those qualities together create the unique beauty I associate with young women I admire.

She was kind and a careful listener, and we talked about our lives and all the people we both knew while growing up in the North End of Winnipeg. 

That’s pretty much all the progress I have to report on the collection at this point, other than keeping my senses in tune to oberving people around me and trying to decided what my ideal audience (young women in North America) would want out of a short story. When writing, I not only have to imagine things from someone else’s perspective when I am actually writing the story, but also when I am thinking about people who are going to be reading it.

What will they want to know? Feel free to comment!

MOTHER COURAGE

Hooray! I conducted another inteview for Late Bloomers. 

The interview was with a girl I’ve known since elementary school named Stephanie. 

I remember Stephanie, and always have despite us not being close, because her mother died when we were ten. I could not believe it when the teacher, after reading us another chapter of James and the Giant Peach, told us that Stephanie and her brother would not be at school for the week because their mom had suffered a heart attack. 

I was very close with my mother as a young girl. Although our relationship has often been shaky, she means a lot to me and I remember thinking that death was impossible. It just was not possible for a ten year old girls mom to die. 

So I met with Stephanie at Baked Expectations to talk about it, since one of the themes that will govern a story, I’ve decided, is death. This was not only an opportunity to gain insight into the mind of what will become a protagonist in a story I am writing, but one to ask questions I have contemplated literally for most of my life. This event affected me even though I was not involved.

Needless to say we were both sobbing by the end of the interview. 

“Unicorns were always special to my mom and I,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I walked into a store, not far from here last summer, and saw a little, white unicorn figurine. I knew I had to get it, and the man at the till told me that someone was watching over me. I don’t cry about it that much anymore, but then I did.”

She also told me her mother wrote her a note when she was a little girl, and she reads it on her birthday every year. When the family moved houses, however, Steph though she lost it.

“I have literally never been afraid of anything more in my life,” she said, before telling me she later found it. 

I was so thankful for Stephanie opening up to me. I feel as though young women who have mothers and who don’t will be able to appreciate her story and I can’t wait to listen to the interview again (I tape recorded it) and start creating my character.

BEAUTY STANDARDS FOR GIRLZ

I recently returned to MAC as a makeup artist, and I’ve worked some shifts this week. It left me thinking about standards of beauty for young women, and women in general, in North American culture, and how I would like to create a story for Late Bloomers centered around that. 

I am starting to put together a list of qualities that contribute to our collective definition of traditional beauty, and here is what I’ve come up with thus far (feel free to add to this list, or comment on something I’ve added):

Long, thick hair

Big eyes
A small nose
Big lips

Strong bone structure, although not “too” strong

a long-ish neck

thinness

long legs

small hands

almost all eye colors, now that I think about it

small ears

straight, white teeth

And obviously there is more. I find this topic intriguing since I consider myself someone who absolutely appreciates female beauty, although I find myself attracted to few of the qualities I understand to make up traditional beauty. It might be because I have eccentric taste, though. 

Anyway, I am thinking about developing a character who is not traditionally beautiful, but is interesting in terms of looks, and has a questionable yet lovable personality. I want to express how people see this person and how she sees herself. 

I am working on that, and trying to narrow down the themes I want to govern each story. I admit, it is a big task and I am feeling intimidated because this project is something that I care very much about. I think I am going to start making some outlines of each story and really work on the structure.

I went back into my creative writing notes from my second year of university and I remember how much more important structure was than the actual writing itself, so that’s something to consider as I work towards what I feel like right now is a massive project. I think I feel that way because things at school in my other courses are also piling up, and now I am taking on shifts at MAC as I mentioned before. 

To close, I leave you with a picture of something I consider to be pure beauty: By the way: yes, it is Dog the Bounty Hunter’s Wife, and yes I think she’s very sexy. I wrote a poem about her in the summer for my friend Alison who is in Creative Communications with me and who also loves her. I will post it eventually.

Image from Google. 

MY FRIEND, MARA

I met with my friend Mara last Saturday. 

I have not seen Mara in months -- we met when we were living in Montreal in August 2010 as part of the explore program. She was 19 at the time, the same age as me. We used to go to Cabaret Mado together, the drag cabaret in Montreal’s gay village that I mentioned in the second post on this blog. She is free-spirited and beautiful, although not in a traditional way. I see her as a statement. And Mara and I talked about love.

Mara has not always had what most would consider to be an “easy” life -- as she grew up her mother, who raised Mara and two siblings alone, struggled financially and the relationship between Mara’s parents, before it ended when Mara was 3, was one defined by domestic abuse.

Her family, like mine, is Jewish and we discovered while living in Montreal during the summer that she grew up in a neighbourhood not far from the one I grew up in. 

She approches style with a sense of humor, but she manages to look beautiful and sexy, even when wearing funny, and potentially offensive garments like sequined bikini she wore into a 7/11 on Main Street last summer when we went to buy cigarettes, or the black shirt with holes in it she was wearing when I met her for breakfast in the village last weekend. It said Fuck you, you Fucking Fuck.

Mara worked as a stripper when we got back from Montreal and I even went to see her dance one night, although it made me sad. I felt like underneath her tough exterior that, on that night, was characterized by a huge fur coat over a sparkling champagne panty and bra set as we stood outside the back door of the club sharing a smoke, she was afraid. I don’t think she wanted to be there depite that she joked, in her very Mara way, that she didn’t care and that the cash was good.

“Maybe I can stop driving around this fuckin‘ beater if I stay long enough,” she said in her husky voice while laughing and pointing across the street to her 1987 Honda Civic. 

She ended up falling in love with her boss, who was a woman, although she told me on the weekend when I asked that she does not consider herself a lesbian. Plus, she met someone recently.

“I met a guy,” she said as we sat at Kawaii Crepe and she ate a Milky Way. 

She started to smile and we both had that look on our faces that keeps us friends -- the one that says one of us is up to no good and the other one is probably all for it. 

“Oh yeah,” I said, already laughing. The best thing about Mara is her sense of humor, which comes through even when she finds herself in circumstances that are less than ideal.

“He’s older, though.”

I asked how much older and Mara told me he is nearly 60. 

We found this funny although I could tell Mara was not laughing in a malicious way, and maybe that became clear to me because of the way she talked about him.

“I love who he is,” she said simply. This was strange because Mara usually provides a ton of explanation, as I tend to do too, which is why our conversations often last hours. “And he treats me nice.”

She told me that she appreciates that he drives her home. After Mara quit working as a stripper, she had to sell the Civic. We went for one last smoke cruise (a term we used to describe driving around to no where, usually in the summer, smoking cigarettes and listening to the song about San Francisco that came out in the 60’s. We usually close such events with a nice round of Would you rather?)

Now, she works at a grocery store in the North End of Winnipeg, not far from where she lives with a roomate, and she said sometimes her new friend will drive all the way from his affluent neighbourhood in the South End to make sure she gets home safe. 

She told me they’ve driven around to cemeteries and talked about nothing when his wife was at work, and although he acknowledges Mara’s beauty and sensuality, he refuses to have sex with her. She said he sees her more like a young person who was never really nurtured, or something like that. He is also trying to help her look into places that might want to sell the ornaments she makes in a glass blowing class she attends once a week, so she will profit from her art.

“I like it, but I don’t get it,” she said about their friendship. “I don’t know what someone who drives a fuckin’ Mercedes, and who shops at specialty grocery stores, and whatever, would want with a kid like me.” 

And I got what Mara was saying, although I didn’t agree with it. To me, Mara is beautiful on the inside and out. She has a thick mane of long, black hair, a mischevious smile, and blue eyes. Additionally, she has a caring and compassionate side to her that is the result of a life where people have not always “treated her nice,” but she has turned it around to make sure not to make others feel the way she has, although that is not always obvious unless you know her story.

At the same time, however, Mara was born on the same side of the tracks as me, and our similar life experiences keep us together because we have an understanding. So I saw why she was confused, and I wished in that moment that she wasn’t so oblivious to her own beauty.

I am using the conversation Mara and I had as inspiration for some of the stories I will be writing for Late Bloomers. She gave me permission, as long as I depict her as “wild and free,” although she already is. I don’t imagine I will base one story on her, but there is a quality and a beauty about Mara that I hope to see in all of my characters, so tidbits of her life might find their way through all of the stories.

Mara won't let me take her picture, and she told me I am only allowed to share her story if I post the following to represent her, although, for what it's worth, I think Demi does not compare.

Image from Google

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSPIRATION

This week I am learning about photography and image editing at school, and I am starting to think about how it relates to Late Bloomers.

Something I have neglected to mention since beginning the blog just over two weeks ago is that the collection is also going to include photographs that will help tell the stories I am writing.

I proposed this aspect of the project because my ultimate professional goal is to become a filmmaker. I have thought about what it means to be a filmmaker, and a significant aspect of it is being able to tell a story through an image. After all, that is what movies are: pictures in motion. 

In a class I am taking as part of the Creative Communications program called Image Editing and Web Design, we had to design and hand in a collage of photographs we created using Photoshop. I put on my headphones, listened to a song called Video Games by an emerging female artist, Lana Del Rey, and put the collage together.

I felt inspired, and I felt comforted. It is always nice to be reminded that you love what you are doing, and it made me look forward to the photographic aspect of my project. 

Something else that has made me feel incredibly inspired is the work of a young Canadian photographer named Petra Collins.

Her photographs focus on precisely what I hope to convey through my short stories: the reality of (some) young women, but the themes are universal enough for almost every young woman within North American culture to relate to on some level.

Here is some of her work. Enjoy, and find more of it featured on www.rookiemag.com, where she contributes regularly. You can also find these photographs and other work of hers at her website, www.petracollins.com. Don’t forget to check out The Ardorous, Petra’s web space where she features a variety of female artists.  

Petra Collins

Petra Collins

Petra Collins

GIRLS WILL BE BOYS AND BOYS WILL BE GIRLS

I submitted my proposal for the short story collection.

At school, each student must submit a proposal for their own Independent Professional Project. It’s exciting because each student gets to choose the project they want to do, so there is tons of room for creativity. I see it as an opportunity to create an original work of art, and the instructors in the Creative Communications program encourage students to try something they may never get to do again.

As a follow-up to my last post, yes I saw her. I saw the queen of artful self-expression and it was not everything I hoped for, surprisingly.

She is currently on her MDNA world tour and I found a few things disappointing. Before I talk about those, however, it is important to bear in mind that I discovered Madonna through my mother when I was around the age of eleven, in 2000. I was introduced to her early work from the 80’s and the work that came later in the 90’s.

I was disappointed first and foremost because there was an extremely violent portion of the tour, which involved Madonna shooting a number of different men with a rifle. I was shocked and disheartened because the Madonna I know and love has always used her fame and power to express messages that are often not given enough attention, but that have the ability to provoke positive social change; like when she hung from a cross while singing Live to Tell and brought attention to dire situations in developing nations through thousands of photographs that flashed on the screen behind her during her Confessions tour. It was beautiful and moving and it made a statement that I will remember, unlike this one; which I hope to forget.

I feel as though Madonna has become self-conscious because of her age, too. To me, that is incredibly disappointing because the thing I have always admired most about her, and a theme I am going to explore through many of the stories in Late Bloomers, is that of confidence. I feel as though she is worried about her record sales and public image, so rather than creating trends, Madonna is now following them. 

The experience in Montreal was amazing for so many reasons, however. A theme that defined the trip for me, and that will also govern one of the short stories I am writing for the collection, is gender identity.

There is a club in Montreal’s gay village that I frequent when I go called cabaret Mado. The owner, Mado, is one of the most beautiful beings I have ever seen. I tell her that incessantly and bring her makeup whenever I go to visit (I work as an artist at MAC). She is truly a walking work of art, and it is interesting to hear her speak in French about her own gender identity; she neither considers herself male or female.

The standards are changing in North American society; two distinct genders will slowly not exist as the only options anymore, and for that I am thankful. 

I have never struggled with gender identity personally, but Erik, who I stayed with in Montreal and who took me to see Madonna, has. He was teased growing up because of his feminitity and at night, he is no longer Erik, but Tranna Wintour. 

Mado

Erik and I sat on my bed, also known as his couch, in his cozy Montreal apartment. His walls were plastered in pictures of Madge herself, and of Dalida and of Liza and Cher and Barbra. It was the early hours of the morning and we were laughing, quietly, about how we met at Cabaret Mado only a year earlier.

“I have a question,” I said, eating a piece of peanut butter toast.

“Yes?”

“Do you consider yourself male or female?”

Erik thought about it for a minute.

“Biologically, I am a male. But my soul is female,” he said. “So I guess not one or the other.”

Knowing Erik, and considering Mado my personal heroine in life, are some of the reasons I am happy that the lines between genders are blurring. Niether of them fit perfectly into one gender, and the combination of the two makes Erik Erik, or Tranna, and makes Mado Mado, or the very private man he exists as during the day, and whom I’ve tried to spot around Montreal to appease my sense of curiousity, but have thus far been unsuccessful. I love all of the aspects to those two people I think it is important to carry on the discussion about gender identity and its status in our culture today.

That is my goal, anyway. I will be interviewing Erik in the future as part of this project, and creating a work of fiction based on his experience. 

I feel a little nervous, admittedly, because it will be challenge to try to write something honest from the perspective of a role that I have never assumed in real life, but I will overcome it and try and do it justice because I continue to believe in the importance of being part of redefining what our culture considers to be a young woman.

THE ANTI-TABOO

I always get nervous about the first thing I will say on a blog.

It’s important if you think about it -- it will create the overall tone of the blog until there are enough posts to fade it out into a page that is too far back for anyone to care about reading anymore. So, when I think about the first impression I want to create with this blog, the first thing that comes to mind to say for setting the tone is the following:

Young women are unique, beautiful, and complex beings. 

I say that from experience knowing young women, from being a young woman, and from observing young women. And that is the first thing I want to say to set the tone here because that’s what this blog is about: young women and their uniqueness; and particularly, the way they are often oblivious to their own beauty. 

In a way the blog will be a celebration of young women. However, the experience I mentioned in the above paragraph has lead me to discover that there are aspects of being a young woman that often go unspoken. These aspects tend to be defined by sadness and vulnerability and I would argue appear in the lives of most of the young women around the world; whether it’s a struggle with confidence, identity, sexuality, faith, family, or the standards of physical beauty young women across the world are held to on a daily basis. 

When I say some of these experiences that may appear in the lives of young women are defined by sadness and vulnerability, that does not mean that they are also defined by weakness. I believe in the young women I know as an ecclectic array of resilient humans who exhibit beauty on the outside but also on the in; who own a particular type of strength. Growing up and becoming an individual in the world is difficult for anyone, and there are particular challenges young women are subjected to every day. 

That leads me to what I want to accomplish with this blog: I am writing a collection of short stories about the experiences of young women who are trying to create their place in the world. It is what it called an Independent Professional Project in Red River College’s Creative Communications program. I am a journalism major in my final year of the program and I am very excited because the project was approved by my advisor today and I have considered many aspects of it already. It will be called Late Bloomers because I have come to see that  young women, at least in North American society, are held to a specific set of cultural expectations: obtaining an undergraduate degree by age 22, for example. Marrying with 2.5 kids by the age of 28, or identifying with a single gender. When these are the standards, everyone become a late bloomer in one way or another. 

Image from Google

I am going to use this blog to discuss the process of creating what will be a work of fiction based on interviews I have conducted with some of the most interesting and free-spirited girls I am lucky enough to call friends, and with others I meet along the way. I will also post about women who inspire this project so we can celebrate them by acknowledging whatever quality it is that speaks to the human condition from the perspective of a young female.

I also want this blog, along with the collection, to be a forum for speaking out on topics that are in some way related to being young and female that may be considered taboo -- anything from female masturbation to rivalry between friends to discussions about domestic abuse could appear on the blog. I believe the first step to creating change is to start a conversation; and a topic can only be addressed when people are no longer afraid to talk about it. 

So I hope you visit often enough to watch the project unfold, and to contribute to it by sharing your thoughts and experiences in the comment forum.

I will close the first post by saying that tomorrow I am leaving to Montreal to see the queen of self-expression, of bringing to light issues that often remain silent out of fear of talking about them; the  anti-taboo. I am going to see Madonna. 

Madonna is naturally an inspiration to my collection of short stories, and it is her fearlessness that inspires me. I admire her bravery to speak out on a variety of topics, namely females empowering themselves through their sexuality, despite the potential consequences speaking out on these topics may carry for her career and public image. 

ALL HAIL MADONNA.