About the author:

Laura Godfrey
Graduated with a BA from York University in 2008, where I worked as the Assistant Arts Editor at Excalibur, the university's community newspaper...

Tags:

book launch (2), feminism (2), Gladstone Hotel (2), Pride Week 2009 (9), Shameless

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Between Tiger Beat and Seventeen, fad diets and makeup tips, the typical teen magazine doesn’t normally give young girls much credit. That’s why Shameless, a feminist teen magazine, reaches out to “young female readers who are often ignored by the mainstream: freethinkers, queer youth, young women of colour, punk rockers, feminists, intellectuals, artists and activists.”

On Tuesday night, the magazine launched its new book She’s Shameless: Women Write About Growing Up, Rocking Out and Fighting Back at a prom/anti-prom celebration featuring live readings and music at the Gladstone Hotel Ballroom. In an uncanny recreation of my own high school experience, the DJ played ‘90s classics from the likes of Blur and TLC, while a vintage episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer played on a projector screen in the background.

She’s Shameless, a compilation from emerging and established female writers, shares honest, intimate, sometimes embarrassing stories about growing up. Edited by Stacey May Fowles and Megan Griffith-Greene, the magazine’s publisher and editor-in-chief, this book talks about things most people experienced in their teenage lives but were too ashamed to speak up about.

“Most teen media tends to reflect a fairly negative and pessimistic idea of what teens are all about – that they’re only into shopping and boys and being embarrassed by their bodies,” Griffith-Greene said. “… It’s amazing the number of people who come up to me and say, I wish this [magazine] had been around when I was a teenager.”

Leading up to the evening’s launch, four local youth took part in a writing workshop with Ibi Kaslik, author of Skinny and The Angel Riots. After each preparing a personal piece, they took the stage along with contributors from the book, baring their souls before a supportive crowd.

Shannon Webb-Campbell, one of the book’s contributors, read her short story “Think Pink.” The story recounts her transformation from an insecure young girl, trying to “get Buns of Steel and shape [her] body like Cindy Crawford,” into a proud and confident lesbian.

“Not only am I a woman, I’m a pink woman,” she read. “I’m a pink woman who loves the pink of other women.”

She’s Shameless was created for teenage girls, but women (and men) far beyond their teenage years came to the Gladstone Hotel to support a book that takes teens seriously and respects their ability to make decisions. According to Fowles, the idea of the book was to give a venue to people who may not find a voice in the mainstream media.

“When we were formulating the idea for the book, I wanted to create something that said, It gets better,” she said. “No matter what your life experience is, when you get older, you can use it and learn from it.”