Photo Credit: Joe Rodriguez
Before I sold a book, wrote an essay, or even knew I wanted to be a writer, I was defiant. As a toddler, when I did not want to be held, I would not be held. In fact, when an adult would try to hold me, I would head-butt them until they let me go. When my mother, at her wits’ end with my antics, would attempt to tame me by strapping me into my car seat, I would rock back and forth until the seat tipped all the way forward. Then I would walk around with the whole contraption on my back, continuing my path of destruction through whoever’s home I happened to be in at the time. My grandmother started to call me “Turtle” because she thought the car seat on my back looked like a tortoise shell. She would smile when she’d tell me these tales.
“Ashley, you never liked doing what you were told. I guess you just knew yourself.”
My grandmother was right. Few people like being told what to do, but it went deeper than that for me. I didn’t like being told I didn’t know my own mind. I didn’t want anyone else feeling as though they had a right to touch me if I didn’t want to be touched. And most important, I knew all my goals, dreams, and desires lived somewhere inside me that only I had access to. So when the adults in my life encouraged me to play it safe, I continued to resist them. I majored in English even when I was told I’d never make a living with that degree. I moved to Brooklyn with two bags, $400, and no permanent place to live. I started writing my opinions, first hesitantly, then with all the defiant fury I hadn’t been allowed to express until then.
But that was only the beginning.
Almost one year to the day after moving to New York, I got to meet several young women through Girls Write Now. They were brilliant and creative. They read stories that lingered in my mind for months, and asked questions I hadn’t even thought to ask myself. One young woman spoke of her mother, who had encouraged her to write the feelings she couldn’t yet speak. Still, she found the courage to read her story aloud before us all, and in her eyes I saw something familiar: defiance. Not the kind of defiance that takes the place of what you can’t or won’t say, but the kind that allows you to say exactly what you mean. She’d found strength in her words, and I found inspiration in her.
Girls Write Now has put together a book of the young women who have something to say. The same young women we all are or have been before. I am so excited for you to find yourself in the pages of this book. We’re all here, in every word, and in every story, connected by the inherent defiance of girlhood. Enjoy it.
Xo,
ASHLEY C. FORD lives and works in Brooklyn by way of Indiana, hosts a local news-and-culture show called 112BK, and is currently writing her memoir, Somebody’s Daughter.