Waiting for the Parade 

They would not leave me alone; the lonely virgin who stumbles on a breast feeder’s group and decides to pose as a mother and stay, the aging beauty queen who covers all her mirrors but helps a friend with Alzheimer’s remember what it felt like to be sixteen, the mother who finds an unlikely way to deal with her grief when she picks up drumsticks. 

So I wrote about those women. I worked on other stuff too, a collection of linked stories about a photographer traveling the South. I sent the photographer stories far and wide. But I couldn’t find a home for them. 

One day it occurred to me I had a pile of stories about women and girls. Stories that were quirky, funny and alive. My collection Lost Girls was born. I sent it out and a year and a half ago, and on my husband’s birthday, I received an email saying it was accepted for publication.  

I was surprised to find that I was happy, but not “win the lottery” happy. I was “I’ve been climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and made it to the top” happy. An exhausted happy. An “I put in the work and here I am” happy.  

My publication day looms, and I remember reading Anne Lamott’s description of the anticlimax of publication day. She talked about hoping to wake up to the phone ringing off the hook and the sound of the Blue Angels precision flying team overhead. What she got was an aching quiet.  

There aren’t enough bells and whistles, pomp and circumstance, to feed the part of me that wants to be seen. So I will look to what has served me well.  Maybe the quiet of the day should match the quiet of creation. Lost Girls is the tangible product of my surrender to the creative process, my ability to work and rework, to train myself as the mountain climber trains. The joy is the journey. Those moments when I found the right word or image. When I helped my characters discover and decide and saw them come through it changed. 

On publication day, I’ll be thinking of Sandy, Abby and Laura, of all the women and girls in my stories, on publication day. I’ll urge them out the door, wish them Godspeed as they find their way to readers. 

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LOST GIRLS

In her debut collection, Lost Girls, author Ellen Birkett Morris takes a deep dive into the lives of women and girls, artfully mixing humor and insight to illuminate relationships and characters with crisp, elegant prose and wit.

In these 17 short stories, Morris explores the experiences of women and girls as they grieve, find love, face uncertainty, take a stand, find their future and say goodbye to the past. A young woman creates a ritual to celebrate the life of a kidnapped girl, an unmarried woman wanders into a breast feeder’s support group and stays, a grieving mother finds solace in an unlikely place, and a young girl discovers more than she bargained for when she spies on her neighbors. Though they may seem lost, each finds their center as they confront the challenges and expectations of womanhood.

Stories from the collection have previously appeared in The Antioch Review, The South Carolina Review, The Tishman Review, Lunch Ticket and others. Religion and After the Fall were nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Ellen Birkett Morris is an award-winning writer, teacher and editor based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The Antioch Review, The Notre Dame Review, and The South Carolina Review, among other journals. Her commentaries have been heard on public radio stations across the United States. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for Short Fiction and the recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. Morris holds an MFA from Queens University-Charlotte.

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Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of the short story collection Lost Girls. Her short stories and essays can be read in Antioch Review, Shenandoah, The Butter, on National Public Radio, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @birkett_morris or Instagram @ellenbirkettmorris

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing