As March ends, so does Women's History Month, and we here at Apex don't want to let this month pass without acknowledging the importance of women's voices, not only in writing, but in the world. We're delighted to share a piece written by Kristi DeMeester, an exclusive just for us, about her experience as a woman in horror. We hope you enjoy!
#
I am seventeen and my AP Literature teacher has our class open to a certain page in our textbooks. We are studying poetry, and the girl I think I hate but actually want as my best friend has successfully identified a metaphysical conceit. Everyone else is bored. I am jealous. Also, probably, maybe a little bored as well.
I flip forward to an unassigned page in our book because I am bitter and resentful that this girl outshines me in every capacity and this is the only act of defiance I am brave enough to dare.
Our textbook is filled with poems from pale, long dead, European men. Rhyming couplets and stanzas and metric lines of verse that leave me uninspired. But this, this poem I have landed on, is short, written by a woman named Marge Piercy, and titled "Barbie Doll."
I read it, and then, immediately read it four more times. Each time a new cut. Each time my breath catching in my throat as I tip the words inside out. As I take them apart to see their heart.
I have always been a reader. Grown up on a healthy mix of Anne of Green Gables, and The Boxcar Children, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Nancy Drew series until I graduated to Anne Rice and Stephen King with the addition of the requisite classics demanded of my Honors Literature classes. Shakespeare and Fitzgerald and Hawthorne and Brontë (both sisters feature heavily in my sophomore year). The Horror genre already had its claws, its teeth, in me, but so many of the women in the books and stories I'd read (horror or not), had never examined, never discussed their bodies, their inherent femininity, like this. The horror enacted on those bodies and how it became so internalized that they absorbed it into themselves. It was an honesty and a bravery about existing within a woman's body I'd never seen before. And I wanted more. I didn't quite know how to articulate what I was seeking, but I recognized it when I saw it, and I devoured those books like ripe fruit, juices dripping down my chin; a feral daughter set loose into the world.
I am eighteen when I read Flannery O'Connor and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Nineteen when I read Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier and Toni Morrison. Twenty-two when I read Joyce Carol Oates and Angela Carter. The years pass, and I gather these writers into my heart, my belly, where they burn and burn. Helen Oyeyimi, and Sarah Langan, and Julia Elliott, and Carmen Maria Machado, and Sophie Mackintosh, and Mona Awad, and Sarah Moss, and Lisa Taddeo, and Frances Cha, and Emily Carroll, and Rachel Harrison, and Jessamine Chan, and Ainslie Hogarth, and Elle Nash, and Megan Abbott, and Kate Brody, and Elliott Gish, and Otessa Moshfegh, and Camilla Bruce, and Eliza Clark, and Rachel Yoder, and C.J. Leede, and Livia Llewellyn, and Nadia Bulkin, and Karen Russell, and Han Kang, and Sarah Rose Etter, and Kelly Link, and so many others I'm certain I'm forgetting.
We need these voices because stories are important. All stories. The stories we keep hidden because we think we are the only ones with such dark thoughts. The stories we let die on our tongues for fear of being called "other." The stories that are monsters wearing bright lipstick and lace with skinned knees and hair cut too short. The stories and names I'm asked for every year in list form should be inscribed in stone and set up on some sort of altar so that no one will ever forget and ask for it again.
#
Kristi DeMeester is the author of Dark Sisters, Such a Pretty Smile, which was selected as a Georgia Author of the Year finalist, and Beneath. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as The Dark, Black Static, multiple volumes of The Year's Best Horror, Year's Best Weird Fiction, and in her short fiction collection, Everything That's Underneath. She lives, writes, and makes horror-themed candles in Atlanta, Georgia. She is represented by Stefanie Lieberman at Janklow & Nesbit Associates. She is at work on her next novel.
Visit her website here and pick up Everything That's Underneath here!
#
Happy Women's History Month!
