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On April 18, 2018 By Vol.1 Brooklyn Essays

Merge Conflict

On April 4, 2018 By Vol.1 Brooklyn Essays

The Starfish

On March 21, 2018 By Vol.1 Brooklyn Essays

Orcas in Space

On March 7, 2018 By Vol.1 Brooklyn Essays

Glossophobia

On February 27, 2018 By Kait Heacock

phobia

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them.”–Margaret Atwood

Glossophobia: the fear of public speaking. It’s derived from the Greek word glōssa, or tongue. This is the closest phobia I can find to “fear of speaking up.” I’m not talking about eleventh grade speech and debate, imagining your audience in their underwear. I’m talking about the fear every woman has experienced when she knows something wrong has happened but she’s too afraid of the consequences for opening her mouth.

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Adronicus, Lavinia’s rapists cut out her tongue so she cannot report them. The tongue is a powerful weapon. A person who wishes to silence a woman knows that and uses their own weapons to hurt it: their power, their threats.

Sometimes on darkened sidewalks, I negotiate with my tongue, willing it to stay still. There are moments when I can speak up, and there are others when I become acutely aware that the tongue is just another part of my body, and bodies have a way of bringing trouble to a woman.

I wish for just one day, a man could know what it feels like to exist in a woman’s body. To know how hard it is to unknow it. We never for a moment forget it’s there because there is always a man nearby to talk about it or touch it, to deem it worthy or unfuckable. Women do not have the privilege of having a body in the public sphere that goes unnoticed. As soon as we step outside our front door, the world forces ownership onto our bodies. I observe it every day when I watch men stand too close to women on the trains and tell strangers they’re beautiful as they pass on the sidewalk.

There are times when I have responded: when a ‘roided out gym rat got into an argument with me over the volume of the TV and I told him never to call me “girl”; when a bus driver walked behind me in broad daylight during my afternoon run and told me he wanted to rub sunscreen all over my body. When I turned around, pulled out my earbuds to better hear him and said, “What did you say,” he repeated [...]

Pollyanna Problems: On Katharine Butler Hathaway’s The Little Locksmith and the Pitfalls of Excessive Optimism

On February 21, 2018 By Vol.1 Brooklyn Essays

covers

Pollyanna Problems: On Katharine Butler Hathaway’s The Little Locksmith and the Pitfalls of Excessive Optimism
by Ashley P. Taylor

I. Two Pollyannas

To be “a Pollyanna” is a complicated thing. According to Merriam-Webster, a Pollyanna is “a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything.” The original Pollyanna, the protagonist in Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel of that name, suffers endless bad luck but copes by playing “the glad game,” which consists of finding reasons to be happy about anything and everything. Pollyanna’s father teaches her the game one Christmas when Pollyanna, who is hoping for a doll, instead receives a pair of crutches from the missionary barrel. Through the game, Pollyanna decides that she is glad re: the crutches because she doesn’t need to use them. The Pollyannas and Pollyanna-ish of the world are the same way: They manage to be happy or at least optimistic about situations that others would deplore.

The Blue House

On February 7, 2018 By Vol.1 Brooklyn Essays

Imagine Me And You, I Do

On January 24, 2018 By Vol.1 Brooklyn Essays