How This All Started
As with many good things, it started with a Mom. My Mom, Bessie. She’d juggle parenting with becoming the 1st (and youngest) F500 Art Director before starting her own design agency while somehow still finding the time to teach me how to cook, paint, design, and even take Judo lessons with me. I’d always grown up interested in adventure and hero biographies, but collected my own unique heroes over time, pillaging some of my mom’s library or hearing about some greats from Her; explorers, writers, philosophers, warriors. The most interesting heroines are included in GloryGirl- from explorer Freya Stark, to Samurai Tomoe Gozen.
I’ve been writing (and designing and building) since I was a kid; I attended the New England Writer’s Workshop (the admittedly preppier version of IOWA writer’s workshop) at 15 before college for creative writing and international studies. Later, I moved to San Francisco, I gravitated towards advertising with design & writing, but moved into my own designed products. But writing and exploring was always my first love (I’d written for Boing Boing, Wired, etc, and published in some journals).
Flash forward a decade. I now have a new GloryGirl in my life, my daughter Ella. We share a lot in common (playing and collecting) music being one.
But while I love live music, couldn’t bring myself to going to Katy Perry with her, and given we’d bonded over the Clash and Blondie was surprised when she came back from the show, for once stumbling forwords. “Katie’s… great”…
I started thinking about other things we shared to reference other role models. It always bugged me with Dr Who (shared obsession), she has “sidekick” Clara.
Why wasn’t Clara a Doctor, too?
Katie Perry was the first person I heard her referring to like a hero.
Not on my watch. I asked her if she has heard of any of my heroes, the ones I just mentioned, like Tomoe Gozen.
Ella: “No?! tell me more”.
Me: “Tomoe was a farm girl that took the place of her sickly brother in the draft but instead of dying off in the first skirmish was first in and just a few years later a General….”.
Ella: “No way- not possible. Never heard of her”.
I went on for another hour telling her about Tomoe that night. The next night about Anne Bonny. Then Josephine Baker. Question to self: “They’re great but why do I, and not Ella, or others know more about them?” Part of it was probably no one wanted to read a dry academic history, the other, these needed to be written as real stories.
