Call for Submissions - Wounded Feminine: Grieving with Goddess

 

Cover art by Claire Dorey

Girl God Books is accepting submissions for our upcoming Anthology of writing:  

Wounded Feminine: Grieving with Goddess

Personal essays or accounts (up to 2,000 words), academic papers, poetry, prayers, and art are welcome. We want to hear insights from felt experience to transformation on Grieving With Goddess and surviving love and loss in the age of toxic masculinity.

Inviting shared experience into the Goddess Space is cathartic for those who tell their stories and healing for recipients. Grief resonates within all of us somewhere. We all have a story to tell. There is hope to pass on.

We grieve the loss of what is important: loved ones, relationships, our youth, health, and our rights and freedoms because attachment is part of the human condition. Perhaps we grieve for the person we might have been, for our Wounded Feminine, if we weren’t victim to war, abuse, and violence.

“What cannot be said will be wept.” - Sappho.

 

Points to consider:

• Opening the yoni portal within the pages of a book. We need space to retreat, free from judgement and time as a monetised commodity, to go inward, sit with emotion and find our source of internal power.

• Grief as a detour into a labyrinth to meet the dark stuff on the ‘straight line’ of our life plan. It’s the cinematic subconscious processing difficult emotion in the shadows – Shock – Denial – Rage – whilst life goes on for others out there in the sunshine. Treading water in an unfamiliar new world with all that grief releases rising to the surface.

• What if I told you the Goddess holds space beneath her wings for those who seek it? – Raising vibration through the written and spoken word, dance, music, through touch and in sharing circles.

• The Grief Space as wild cocoon for magic and alchemy – a doorway to self expression, access to the dark shadow, a catalyst for change.

• Grieving the Wounded Feminine: Demonisation of Eve and Lilith represents the demonisation of all women and the silencing of Mary represents the silencing of all women.

• Perhaps we feel nothing. Then grief creeps up on us. Trauma is incurred. Trauma is released. All this confusion, making sense of things, it’s a vulnerable time. Wherever the vulnerable are there will be predators. Perhaps the Banshee howl was a very vocal show of female force warning circling predators, “beware the matriarch is watching.”

• As gate keepers women were on the front line of life and death, ensuring we survived birth and controlled our own bodies. The funerary Goddess assisted souls to the afterlife. This was where the power was and it was in women’s hands. This is why patriarchy set about erasing women’s power.

• Capitalist patriarchy shut the Grief Space down because it fears emotion in the same way Zeus feared Nyx and sailors feared the Siren. Emotion, public displays of emotion and the emotions of others became a source of shame. Patriarchy’s relentless denial of emotion stems from the fear of personal growth.

• In the hands of the unscrupulous the Grief Space became the Guilt Space, a place of dysfunction and propaganda, ritualised ostracism and humiliating misogyny with threats of hell and damnation. Vulnerable women have been shaved, burnt and buried alive or forced into a lifetime of mourning. They replaced transformation with solitude, bleakness and black robes, turning sadness into loneliness.

• To the detriment of the entire human race, unprocessed grief can escalate to the stuff of nightmares. As Carl Jung wrote, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life….” 

• When state and religion collude to cement masculine power and undermine and control women it makes sense to look to a spiritual age when the Goddess held power.

• Goddess honours emotion and cuts through the aloneness of grief showing us we are part of a huge cosmic cycle: birth, death, rebirth, with destruction making way for creation, all of which is governed by Mother Nature. She shows us how spirit lives on as vibration.

• How can we reclaim, reframe and contextualise the Grief Space so we can feel our feelings free of shame, tell our stories, speak our truth, let go and when we are ready, move on, knowing we are connected to a powerful and wise female lineage and support network?

”Life is an unfoldment and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.” - Hypatia.

  

Edited by Claire Dorey, Pat Daly, and Trista Hendren

Scheduled publication: TBA 2024

Submission Guidelines:

Please send your finished piece in a Word document. Calibri size 12 font is preferred.

Please do not use any fancy formatting or fonts as it creates a lot more work on our end. Make sure to spell-check before you submit.

Art should be sent in high resolution as a JPG.

You may submit more than one piece for consideration, but due to the volume of submissions, please only send your best work and keep it on topic.

Please also include a bio in the third person under 150 words. Please send your submissions to:

submissions@girlgod.org  

by August 1^st, 2023 with the book title in your subject line.

Please note that we cannot accommodate any late submissions or corrections.