Giraffes Out!
- Frida Stavenow
- Nov 9, 2022
- 2 min read
When it rains, it pours. I found a home for the giraffe story! Yes, the one I named this blog after.
It was born out of an assignment given to me by Dodie Bellamy, who wrote a book called Academonia and another one called Cunt-Ups and who was my Experimental Writing teacher at San Francisco State University (before I had to drop out because damn, the US makes it hard to earn a living as a foreigner) and who is just as cool as you might imagine. Here, for example, is what her website looks like:
Why don’t you visit her.
We did all kinds of online guerrilla writing, creating psychotic characters in Trader Joe food reviews and inserting absurdist-suburban novels into threads on Lawnmower Tech Support forums. I remember my classmate Philip Harris (whom I have not spoken to in years, but who’s amazing, hi Philip, also go read him) wrote a fake hospital file or something for Britney Spears as his final project. Whatever it was, it was fucking brilliant. My final project was a manic ramble about sex and cats and leaving my ex-boyfriend in Ho Chi Minh City that had the entire lyrics of Catacombs by Cold Cave inserted in-between paragraphs. It was called “Archaeology” and is maybe my favourite story that I’ve written ever, but, as usual, it’s not published anywhere, because I sent it to GRANTA, The New Yorker and The Atlantic and when none of them wanted to publish it I understood I was a shit writer and stopped trying.
Anyway. I might even go send that story other places now, because I have changed and decided I am ready to share my work with the world even if it has to happen without the seal of approval of one of the world’s top-three literary magazines. I think this might be the most mature thing I’ve ever done, and it only took twelve years! Yes, that’s how long “Archaeology” has been tucked away in my proverbial desk drawer, aka Google Drive. Man, that’s sad. Really fucking sad. I just felt like unless I had that all-important seal of approval, I might potentially not be worth anything, might be shit, and who wants to show the world that they’re maybe a shit writer?
Obviously, me, in 2022. So I sent a story I wrote in Dodie’s class to a tiny, beautiful online literary magazine and they took it and now people can READ A THING I WROTE.
The task was: “Write (12) short segments about oranges (or something else) but ones that never get around to mentioning oranges.”
What did I write about, you ask? Well, the title of this blog is a bit of a spoiler, as is the pretty photo that typishly decided to use for my story. But I fucking love it. It’s so pretty. And I’m there, that’s my name, on a real page that’s not even my blog or anything! I exist!
That’s not even the story page! It’s the front page! I’m cool and used to success, obvs. Don’t really care, tbh.
Anyway. While I take some deep breaths, why don’t you go see what 2014 me thought about life / hot drinks?
Comments