A perfectly joyous and askew collection of flash fictions for the autumn weather today. The writer Hilary Smith was once known as THE INTERN, and while her blog was marked by sharp insights and warm humour (+many other lovely adjectives, of course, but these two for now), I think it’s her fiction that charms me…

A personal essay today, from Kristen Stone. If you’ve ever suffered from anxiety (I have), you’ll know a little of this feeling – the overwhelming sense of your own vulnerability – and worse, that of those around you. How it can spill over into ritualistic behaviours, crossing the border between the acceptable and unacceptable fears.…

Some Girl Lit from me again. An excerpt from my ms Flesh of the Peach, which I completed just over a month ago. It’s a novel of flight, guilt, love and lovelessness. Sarah Brown is an older girl – late twenties, just at the border of accepted girlness. She qualifies, I feel. A girl holding…

Below is a tense piece of the domestic from Laura Tansley. I love her use of detail of life in an early nineties household, and the subtle ramping of stress between the woman and girls, even as they are introduced as a single unit – it appears as if they are, in fact – like…

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan + How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland Girl lit we’ve covered. So what’s a bad girl and how do we talk about her fictionality? Oh, you know, employ stretchy terminology. Ping the elastic with your teeth. So let us say to begin, a bad girl is someone who…

This is an excerpt from a novel ms entitled Rambler. Rice writes with fine-tuned sensitivity to how natural landscapes shape identity. I’m watching the grey autumn rains fall here, but here’s the alchemy of fiction, the transmutation of senses: I can feel instead the desert heat, see the glints off a hot car chassis, the…

Below is a story of teenage self-destruction, rock and roll, drugs and punch ups – a fairytale of all these things, from the hand of Kirsty Logan, fellow The Female Gaze Review writer and inhabitant of Scotland. She writes lustily and skewed, injecting old forms with modern feeling. And in her explorations of marginal spaces,…

The first essay on Literature of the Girl! At first sight, these two novels seem to be without a great deal of overlap, but they do have one theme in common – relationships, and specifically, the liminal time before and while a girl is betrothed. I use betrothed for its dusty, weighty quality, hinting at…

As promised, Girl Lit as written by Kristen Stone. Below are five short pieces that I can’t begin to quantify, but to let you know, they are all from her Domestication Handbook, which I shall hopefully be writing about here in greater length. + More notes for a suburban memoir I grew up near a…

Below is the first Literature of the Girl fiction I want to share with you. It’s from my first ms, Kilea, an early draft of which formed a large part of my Creative Writing thesis. I think it will go nicely with tomorrow’s fiction by Kristen Stone – I know! A departure already from the…

Autumn comes in with a high gale and here I am this September to write away with you on an exploration – of girls in books, of inner and outer landscapes. Like the best adventures, though not perhaps the best essays, it is likely that borders and edges will be misted over, vague, malleable. Come…

It has been a great pleasure to gather and present to you all these stories from Atlanta fiction writers. Still, I wasn’t able to corral every fiction writer who lives in Atlanta. There are so many budding fiction writers coming out of this city. I chose to include those writers actively at work. And still,…