Riot, Grrrls: Marisa Crawford on Why Feminist Lit and 1990s Girl Culture Need More Critical Attention

Marisa Crawford is the founder of the feminist blog Weird Sister, which highlights writing at the intersections of feminism, literature, and pop culture. This spring the Feminist Press released The Weird Sister Collection, a vital anthology that collects a decade’s worth of writing published on the blog. Contributors include writers such as Morgan Parker, Megan Milks, Virgie Tovar, and Christopher Soto.

In addition to being an editor and essayist, Marisa is a poet and her most recent collection, Diary, came out in the fall of 2023. Both the essays in The Weird Sister Collection and in Marisa’s poetry investigate and celebrate girlhood, nostalgia, and confessional writing. They also challenge traditional notions of what is considered “literature” and who is allowed to make “important art.”

In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the Weird Sister blog and anthology, as well as Marisa’s work as a writer and editor to give the worlds, cultures, and artifacts of women and girls the social, political, and critical attention that they deserve.

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Eleanor Whitney: I think a great place to start is the origin story of Weird Sister. I’m interested in how the Weird Sister website grew out of your poetry practice, and also is underscored by the other work you’ve done in journalism and creative nonfiction. What was the impetus a decade ago that made you feel you needed to start this project?

Marisa Crawford: I had been craving a space like Weird Sister for a long time. I discuss this in the introduction, but when I was a college student, I became a creative writing major. I was super interested in being a poet and was so excited about literature, writing, and poetry. I also started learning about feminism and it gave me a lens for understanding how messed up the world was that I had never had words or a framework for. But they felt super separate.

I loved my first creative writing instructor, but his syllabus had no women writers on it. I didn’t even think about it at the time because it included poets like Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsburg, and William Carlos Williams and I was excited to learn about all these writers.

In another sphere, I was learning about feminism, intersectionality, and privilege. Obviously, feminist writers existed, but I felt like in the particular literary world I ended up in, the experimental poetry scene, feminism and literature still felt all too separate.

When I started Weird Sister there were all these literary blogs where people were talking about books, poetry, and pop culture, but I just wasn’t seeing much feminist analysis woven into them. I was reading a lot of feminist books, magazines, and blogs, but I felt like that intersection with literature was missing. I wanted that space to exist and I felt like I had to create it.

EW: Very punk of you to create the place you want to see in the world! So, fast forward to the anthology. Weird Sister started a decade ago in 2014 and at the LA launch party a lot of the readers were reflecting on themselves as writers publishing with you a decade ago. So why did it feel vital to anthologize this work and what’s the impact of it coming out now?

MC: When Weird Sister started there were a lot of feminist and anti-racist activism and conversations happening both in the world at large and literary spaces, and the blog served as an archive for a lot of those conversations that still feel all too relevant ten or so years later. In the political and cultural moment we’re in right now, there have been so many attacks on reproductive rights, trans and LGBTQ rights, and it can feel very hopeless, but you have to continue to resist in different ways.

So the anthology feels important at this moment because it’s an act of resistance and it’s also archiving and historicizing these pieces of resistance. In doing so, it elevates them into literary culture in a more concrete way.

I also always wanted the work on Weird Sister to be accessible, and I think putting some of those pieces into a book makes it more accessible and brings them to new audiences.

EW: It’s not surprising that at this moment, given the culture of the last decade, that so many of those feminist, anti-racist, social justice oriented publications that were around at the start of Weird Sister have shut down. So as a feminist and intersectional writer it feels like there’s less and less places to publish.

MC: Yeah, with important feminist publications like Bitch and Feministing folding it feels like the spaces that were having feminist-minded writing and discussion are disappearing, which also reflects the state of journalism and media in general. I feel like the whole industry is in a perilous state, and while I don’t know what the answer is, I think putting out the anthology is part of that punk impulse you were talking about to create your own space.

I created this space and it ended up being this great community that had all these important voices involved. Now that it’s archived in this book, I hope that in itself will inspire people to keep creating spaces and work that’s important to them.

EW: I was thinking about zine culture in the nineties and how when I was a teenager I discovered a lot of zines through anthologies. There was one anthology called Girls’ Guide to Taking Over the World and there was definitely some controversy of who got in and who got left out that I found out later, but but for a relative outsider like me, it was evidence that there was these feminist girl, punk subcultures that were out there that I could join and participate in. So I think of The Weird Sister Collection as a document of a time and also a way to look forward to what comes next.

Speaking of the nineties, I’d love to talk about the aesthetic of your poetry and Weird Sister. A lot of contributors to the anthology are millennials or Gen X, so many of us came of age in the eighties and nineties. How does the era of your adolescence, and the aesthetic, culture, and the messages you received about being a girl percolate into the work you do?

MC: First of all, it’s so interesting to think about how you learned about Riot Grrrl from that anthology, because I feel at that time I was not tuned in to feminism in any way. I was, like, at the mall. I learned about Riot Grrrl through Seventeen Magazine. And probably for a lot of the people involved in the first wave of Riot Grrrl, that was the moment when it was over and it was co-opted by the mainstream.

However, I was this seventh grade girl who was listening to music by women like Hole and Salt N Pepa, but I didn’t know anything about feminism as an activist movement. In the article there was a photo of a girl who had written “Riot Grrrl” across her knuckles and I remember doing that and thinking, I don’t even really know what this means, but it felt really powerful.

In the nineties I grew up with all these weird messages about what it meant to be a girl. Definitely it was not cool or you were dumb if you were into being feminine in any way. So speaking like a girl, dressing like a girl, listening to girly music, watching girly TV shows, I didn’t want to go near any of it because it meant I was not cool or smart. I just wanted to align myself with boy culture, or whatever you would call the music and movies and pop culture that had a kind of patriarchal stamp of approval, as much as possible.

So in my writing I’ve always been interested in taking the worlds, cultures, and artifacts of young women and girls seriously and treating them with respect. I want to give them the anthropological, social, political, and poetic critical attention that they deserve.

With Weird Sister I think about this idea of holding a glittery nail polish middle finger up to this arbiter of culture that says that the worlds of men and boys are to be taken seriously and are real art and the worlds of girls are not. There’s a lot of pieces in the anthology that are looking at “girl culture” and giving it the celebration, deep thought, and critique it warrants. Flannery Cashill has a piece looking at Pretty Little Liars and she’s basically saying, I don’t want to watch a man hit his edge like in Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, I just want to watch teenage girls push a car off a cliff.

Or Naomi Extra’s piece about what she calls the “Bad Bitch” archetype, Toni Morrison, Destiny’s Child, and Waiting to Exhale, or your piece looking at Riot Grrrl and Virginia Woolf. I think the writers in the anthology connect what’s supposedly lowbrow to what gets to be considered highbrow and then ask who makes those rules and why do we have to abide by them?

EW: That’s also very punk! For me, discovering artists like Ani DiFranco and then later Riot Grrrl were pushing against the idea that it was shameful or weak to be a girl. I think a lot of Riot Grrrl’s power was appropriating the trappings of mostly white, adolescent femininity and throwing them back in your face. It’s so important for an anthology like The Weird Sister Collection to say that girls’ and femmes’ experience of culture should be taken seriously.

We still see this with writing by adult women and femmes, it seems like every six months there’s some hand wringing about women’s essays on the internet and like, oh my god, the personal essay, are we over it? Is it dead? Do we need more memoirs?

Your work as a poet, essayist, and editor of Weird Sister and also We Are the Babysitters Club anthology is clearly on the side of yes in showcasing the experiences and voices of women, queer people, and others who are marginalized in mainstream culture. Given this continued patriarchal response to personal narrative, what, in your view, is the continued power of the confessional?

MC: Of course we need more people writing about their lives and their experiences in all different forms and genres! I think it’s very much a question of what gets considered literary. Historically and still today women’s personal writing and artwork is more likely to be seen as confessional, self-indulgent, and diaristic than work made by cis men.

Diary, my poetry collection that came out in the fall of 2023, is an exploration or a love letter to the confessional. I’m really deeply interested in this question of who gets to write about their life with an unvarnished TMI personal quotidian style and have it be considered “literary” as opposed to “just confessional,” you know?

Speaking of the nineties, I feel in my heart that Alanis Morrisette is a patron saint of my poetry book. She was not cool in the nineties and she was so messy and confessional. I mean, then I was like “Oh, I hate her,” but secretly I was really like, this is so interesting.

In Diary I was pushing that idea of what is the confessional and what is literary. In the past with my poetry, I could veil what I was writing about, so I could write about my ideas and my life, but also hide them. But with this book, I wanted to push it, to have a woman speaker just talking about walking around on her lunch break, going to work, and having her period. An open and messy narrative of life.

EW: You’re reminding me that I published a personal zine for twenty years called Indulgence. And I titled it that because my sophomore English teacher was like, “We’re living through this moment of the most indulgent personal writing ever.” She referencing what we would call the nineties “memoir boom,” with writers like Mary Karr and she was both like endorsing it, but wringing her hands about it too.

So being a sarcastic teenager I was like, well I’m gonna appropriate this for my personal zine so you can just go ahead and just dismiss it as self-indulgent. And of course, the”place” of personal writing in literature was a debate then and it’s a debate now, because there’s still a cultural desire by those in power to dismiss the personal narratives and experiences of those who are not cis white men.

Speaking of being a teenager, I find myself returning again and again to those teenage moments of identity formation in my writing. Why do you think nostalgia, and I suppose what we call girlhoods, is so compelling to you too?

MC: As a teenager in the ’90s, I didn’t have a feminist lens or framework to understand the culture surrounding me, and I think in part that’s why I keep going back to it. I’m so interested in looking at the work that was important to me from that era, music or otherwise, and thinking about what messages I was getting from that work and how I built my identity around that.

It is funny though because the older I get writing about so-called girl cultures, the further removed I am from actual youth culture. But to paraphrase Judy Blume, I love what she said about how some things change about being a teenager, but your feelings don’t change.

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The Weird Sister Collection edited by Marisa Crawford is available via Feminist Press.