Poisoned Apples

Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty, is a book of poems for young adults written by Christine Heppermann and published by Greenwillow Books. “A bloody poetic attack on the beauty myth that’s caustic, funny, and heartbreaking.” -- E. Lockhart, author of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and We Were Liars Order A Copy

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For Teenage Girls, Swimsuit Season Never Ends

When young women are prompted to reflect on their physical appearance, they lose intellectual strength, research shows.

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What I do regret are all the years I wasted feeling ashamed, having bought into the lie that if I didn’t feel ashamed, there was something wrong with me. I never want my two daughters to feel, for any reason, like they should stay in the shadows. I want them to live in a world where they feel free to share their stories, to reveal who they are, to not have to pretend. Because it can be cold and lonely in the shadows. Let’s step into the sun.

from On Light and Shadows by Christine Heppermann (via veronikelly-mars)

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This Is How A Professional Model Sees Herself

This week marks the release of Suited Magazine's latest issue. Here, we've reproduced the cover story, in which model, artist, and writer Myla DalBesio maps the history of her body and explores her perception of herself in "The Body Issue," a literary and emotional personal essay. When you catalog

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Today Greenwillow Press revealed the cover of Christine Heppermann’s follow-up to Poisoned Apples, a novel in verse called Ask Me How I Got Here. Christine also answered some questions about the book:

1. This is your second book for teenagers, and your second book of verse. Ask Me How I Got Here tells the story of one young woman, rather than many, but it deals with emotions and decisions just as heavy as those in Poisoned Apples. Does poetry allow you to tackle difficult topics in a different way than prose?

Ask Me started like Poisoned Apples did, as a collection of poems tied together by recurring themes. Gradually, a main character emerged who was similar to me in many ways, but also different. I realized Addie deserved her own story. For me, writing a novel in verse offers me the challenge of moving through a narrative moment by moment and really concentrating on what my characters are thinking and feeling in each scene. Ideally, poetry is a distillation of experience. Difficult topics lend themselves to that kind of intense focus, I think.

2. How would you describe, Addie, your main character?

Addie is a junior at an all-girls Catholic high school. Most of the time she just goes along doing what’s expected of her without questioning those expectations very deeply. Then she gets pregnant, and she’s forced to confront who she is, who she wants to be, and what she truly believes.

3. In Poisoned Apples, you used fairy tales to speak about issues facing young women. In Ask Me How I Got Here, you use a different set of iconography and stories. Can you tell us more about that?

When I started writing the poems that led to Ask Me, I was reading a lot of saint legends, many of which are darker and more graphic than anything from the Grimms. (The wicked queen dancing to death in red-hot shoes at Snow White’s wedding reception is mild compared to what the virgin martyrs go through!) The legends prompted me to consider the representation of women’s bodies as symbols—symbols of purity, corporeal wickedness, maternal love—versus the actual flesh-and-blood experience of being female. I love Virgin Mary iconography, and I began to write poems that presented Mary similarly to the way Sleeping Beauty or Rapunzel are presented in Poisoned Apples—as a real girl, not an archetype. Because of Addie’s religious upbringing and situation, I figured she’d be having such thoughts, too, so I incorporated those poems into the text in her voice.

4. Women’s rights are being widely debated and discussed right now. What do you hope young women will take away from Addie’s story?

I hope it will encourage young women not to define themselves by anyone’s rules or morals but their own. Taking stock of what you’ve always been taught and realizing that it doesn’t work for you, that maybe it’s done more harm to you than good, can be both liberating and terrifying. I didn’t have an awakening like that until college, when I left my cocoon and, for the first time, found myself surrounded by people from a wide variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. I still struggle to overcome fear and speak out for what I believe. Ask Me is a part of that ever-ongoing process.

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Author of POISONED APPLES, Christine Heppermann, Recommends Awesome Books for You!

Author of POISONED APPLES, Christine Heppermann, Recommends Awesome Books for You!

“Now, not all these are YA--Christine gives a wide range of must-reads. But I think they all contribute to the YA conversation, especially in terms of the much-needed diversity movement. These books are vital to illuminating society's treatment of marginalized groups and one step of many toward a greater understanding of how to change the system.”

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It’s The Thought That Counts

This piece was written as part of a series of posts for Self Worth Week at No Bent Spines.

It’s the Thought that Counts Christine Heppermann

Socks and underwear: when you’re a kid, those are the absolute worst presents to receive, right? You tear off the wrapping, open the box expecting some cool toy, and what do you find? A six-pack of Fruit of the Looms. Gee, thanks, Mom and Dad.

Normally that would have been my reaction, but in fifth grade, believe it or not, my best friend and I put underwear at the top of our Christmas lists. Specifically, we wanted training bras. Not that we had anything to fill them with other than cotton balls and Kleenex. (And socks! We should have asked for those, too.). But like the characters in one of our favorite books, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, we had big aspirations. Double-D aspirations, to be exact.

Santa didn’t disappoint me. My body did. I wore my new training bra every day, hoping my chest would get the hint. I watched my friend grow into and then out of her gift, while I remained an unwilling  member of, in the words of a novelty t-shirt sold at Spencer’s Gifts, The Itty Bitty Titty Club.

Now, thirty-five years later, at a safe distance from that painful desperation, I can look back and see the humor in it. I even wrote a poem about training bras for Poisoned Apples. The poem is called “Sweet Nothings”— an actual line of Maidenform bras—and this is how it ends: “How stupid that all I have to do/ is grow two squishy lumps and suddenly/ I’m man’s best friend.” Because, objectively, it is stupid, isn’t it? It’s ridiculous that the size of two glands matters so much in our cultural perception of female attractiveness. It’s ridiculous that I had so much going for me in middle school and high school—I could run fast; I got good grades, especially in English; I won awards for creative writing—and yet, because of my flat chest, I felt defective. No matter how much I accomplished, I still managed to feel like I owed the world an apology, when in reality it was probably the other way around.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if The World could approach everyone who has ever felt judged for his or her physical appearance—in other words, all of us—and, head bowed, mumble, “Um, yeah. Really sorry about that?”

The stand-up comedian Tig Notaro has received a lot of respect and attention recently, with a comedy special on HBO, “Boyish Girl Interrupted,” and two recent documentary films about her life, “Tig” on Netflix and Showtimes’ “Knock, Knock, It’s Tig Notaro.” In 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. When she started performing again, she joked that her small boobs must have gotten fed up with her making fun of them over the years in her act, and decided, hey, we’re out of here. After the mastectomy, she opted not to have reconstructive surgery, so now her chest is completely flat. Is she embarrassed? Ashamed? Nope. In fact, in the middle of her HBO special, she removes her shirt and continues to perform, topless. By exposing her scars, she intends to defuse their stigma. Or, as she said to Conan O’Brien on his show, “It’s our bodies. It’s no big deal.” And her audience seems to agree. Many told her later that, after the initial shock, they got used to how she looked and relaxed. She was just Tig, a person telling them funny stories, making them laugh.

I deeply admire Tig Notaro’s courage and self-acceptance. I wish I could send some of it back to eleven-year-old me, so that maybe she would revise her Christmas list. So that when she pulls that rectangular package out from under the tree, it’s something wonderful, something she truly needs. Like a great book.

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Critic Kayleigh Hughes on Amy Winehouse and the eating disorder that hastened her death.

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I don’t know how many school assemblies I’ve done over the past 12 years. 200-300 is my best guess. Something I’ve found is that boys feel okay booing and mocking things they see as “for girls” but that girls never mock the “boy” things. Here’s an example. This exact scenario has repeated at every...

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(Or: I finally get angry enough to blog)

Last Saturday, I went to a really excellent book event. It required driving for 6 hours, and I would totally do it again.The bookstore was that great.

I had one truly nauseating encounter. I don’t want to dwell on it, because I don’t want it to overshadow…

[thatlauraruby]

This whole post is amazing: “This man, who will approach three award-winning authors in a FREAKING BOOKSTORE and talk down to them, is a problem. He is not a problem that I can solve. If I have learned anything from Vice article debacle and a career of watching superhero movies, it’s that apparently after a certain point, it becomes very difficult to teach a man something without hurting a woman in his general vicinity, and I am just not down with that.”

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This post is going to be a mess, because I’m just …untidily angry right now. It began with a series of tweets I made today about my ever-broken Datsun. The mechanic had told my husband that he was “working on that Datsun just as fast as I can because now that I’ve met her I can’t wait to get that...

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All of the guest posts for our second annual “About The Girls” series at Stacked wrapped up today. Kimberly and I each wrote our own posts to round it out, coming tomorrow and Friday, along with a round-up of links from around the web that are relevant.

I’m exceptionally proud of this series. I have never seen such dynamic discussions and sharing on social media for a series we’ve run. 

The timing was fortuitous, given the recent discussions of gender and sexism in the YA community, but this felt like the right kind of response to that. Posts ranged from why we should let girls choose their reading material because it allows them the opportunity to practice saying no when they’re uncomfortable to why we need friendship stories, to why we need to talk about intersectionality, to why it’s important for those with privilege — white cishet men — need to sit back, listen, and be curious. 

If you haven’t read these posts and you’re passionate about feminism, about girls, about girls and reading, about finding means and tools to combat sexism, take the time to do so. Share them. I don’t say it lightly: these are some of the most powerful, moving, and thought-provoking pieces I’ve had to honor to share on STACKED. Each time one landed in my inbox, I wondered at the brilliant voices, perspectives, and insights this community has to share. 

You can find them all right here.

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Body Positive Art

Here’s an excerpt form a great interview with artist Vanessa Papastavros from Proud2Bme.org:

MN: Why is body acceptance and feminism important to you? If you don't mind, could you share a bit about your own experiences with body acceptance?

VP: I have struggled with poor body image, low self-esteem and disordered eating from the onset of puberty. These factors really limited my potential to feel happiness through my teenage years. I often look back with regret when I remember how much damage I did to myself physically and psychologically in order to hold myself to a standard of perfection.

Sadly, most of the girls my age had the same insecurities and struggled with body comparisons. There were few body-positive role models in the mainstream media at that time. Body acceptance is important to me because it is not a message that people hear enough, especially for women. I want this culture to change. The negativity surrounding women’s appearances robs us of our joy, and it is not the way human beings were designed to live and thrive.

Feminism is important to me because I am a woman, and I want to see all women treated with the dignity, opportunities and respect that all human beings deserve. When it comes to body image, it has hugely empowered me. Feminism destroys the misogynistic narratives that say a woman’s value is found in her appearance and her attractiveness. It expresses the simple truth that a woman is significant because she is a human with skills and insights. Feminism helped me to accept my own body, and to appreciate it as something wonderful and worthy of celebration. It’s helped me to care less about how I look, and that is a liberating feeling.

Vanessa’s Tumblr is here.

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I always want to write about the unique pressures girls face. I want to challenge and deconstruct gender-based stereotypes and expectations. I want a girl who picks up my novels to think about those things, and if she’s experienced them, I want her to feel less alone.

Author Courtney Summers on feminism and her work (via badassladiesyoushouldknow)

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Thursday evening an editor at Vice.com invited me to share comments with her regarding the discussion of sexism in Andrew Smith’s comments in their interview. She sent me a few questions and I answered them. Just now, she posted her article with comments from myself and a few...

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No on wants to read your shitty books. I hope you get fucked over by white men as bad as you are fucking them over you slanty eyed whore.

And so it begins…

Sorry everyone, but I’m going to have to close anonymous asks off until the ugliness that is going on in the YA community blows over.

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I see the admonition for YA to be “kind” only meant for women to stop questioning male authors who treat women like an alien species, but not for racist asshats to spew abuse.  Right.

Kindness and niceness is always the stick used to shut women up.  Always.  It’s to the point that I side-eye anyone who gets too hung up on whether or not someone is being nice enough.  Let’s stop worrying about suitable levels of niceness and start worrying about whether there is something valid and constructive in critiques, because dammit, the people who get silenced by calls for niceness are the people who already are oppressed.  

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This requires no more introduction than saying it’s a handful of thoughts worth considering and working through after the last week. 1. My feminism isn’t about making you comfortable. As a feminist, I am not obligated to make you comfortable. As a feminist, what I owe is...

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My advice? Retell your own stories. Keep pushing your way through the trees, and I promise that, eventually, you will come to a clearing. And then you can dance.

Christine Heppermann, author of POISONED APPLES (Greenwillow, 2014), a 2015 Amelia Bloomer List selection

(via ameliabloomerproject)

Proud to be today’s featured Bloomer book.