Kristen Holt Browning " The True Story of Erosion Girl"
I wrote “The True Story of Erosion Girl” not long after reading Dani Shapiro’s memoir Hourglass, which contains the eye-catching and eye-opening lines, “It had been a time of erosion. I’d begun to see in metaphor.” I’m not entirely sure why yet (and maybe I’ll never be), but the metaphor of erosion lingered with me. At the same time, I had been marinating for weeks in the fantastic and fantastical short fiction of women including Maria Carmen Machado, Roxane Gay, Sarah Hall, and the wise goddess of them all, Angela Carter (I return to her again and again). So I was already thinking about women and fairy tales, the ongoing power and relevance of those old stories, and how we might tell new iterations of them, when I also began to focus on the metaphor of erosion.
I hope that “True Story” conveys or suggests a sense of the archetypal and universal in (some) women’s experiences—because generally, of course, the universal is simply the male. At this moment at the close of 2017, especially, I think it’s worth reconsidering the stories we tell, the people who inhabit those stories, and how our telling of those stories can help or hinder the ongoingness of the world.
I hope that “True Story” conveys or suggests a sense of the archetypal and universal in (some) women’s experiences—because generally, of course, the universal is simply the male. At this moment at the close of 2017, especially, I think it’s worth reconsidering the stories we tell, the people who inhabit those stories, and how our telling of those stories can help or hinder the ongoingness of the world.
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Kristen Holt Browning holds a BA in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing from Connecticut College, and an MA in English from University College London. She lives in New York State’s Hudson Valley, where she works as a freelance editor.
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