Ellen Birkett Morris Explores the Quiet Power of Womanhood in “Lost Girls”

In this episode 193, we visit with Ellen Birkett Morris, author of “Lost Girls,” a short story collection which explores the experiences of women and girls as they confront the challenges and expectations of womanhood.

Jenny Offill, author of “Weather,” “Department of Speculation,” and “Last Things,” called this book a “dazzling collection of stories that showcases Morris’ impressive ability to hide devastating truths within seemingly small moments.”

A review of “Lost Girls” in the Southern Review of Books said: “Through vivid snapshots of female struggle, Morris demonstrates the power of women acknowledging one another — and themselves — in a world where they are continually diminished. The women and girls in these stories hold the antidote to their own erasure, and in turn give it to us: Only we can prevent each other from becoming lost girls.”

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About the Author:

ELLEN BIRKETT MORRIS is an award-winning writer, teacher and editor based in Louisville, Kentucky. Morris is the author of LOST GIRLS, short stories, and SURRENDER, a poetry chapbook. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah,Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. Her commentaries have been heard on public radio stations across the United States.

Endorsements

“The stories in Ellen Birkett Morris’s collection, Lost Girls, are memorable for the way they see the lasting truths that reside within the familiar. These stories are full of imaginative leaps that capture the wildness that lies beneath our seemingly ordinary lives. Morris is a writer of extraordinary talent. With elegance and precision, she can turn a story into something luminous and unforgettable.”

 — Lee Martin, author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Bright Forever

“Ellen Birkett Morris is a skillful literary pointillist. In Lost Girls, her debut collection, each spare sentence is as considered as a poem; step back a little way, and you behold a world.”

—  David Payne, author of Barefoot to Avalon

“This collection of stunning and original stories kept me turning the pages, eager to meet the daughter who eats the sins of others, the 30-year-old virgin who rents a breast pump, the bereft mother drumming away her grief. Ellen Birkett Morris’s Lost Girls draws us so close that before long, we are inhaling the same air, making the same unexpected discoveries, and deeply longing for each of these girls and women to find their private rainbows.”

—  Masha Hamilton, author of 31Hours and The Camel Bookmobile

“A view into these private moments of wonder and desperation and desire and grief. Small windows into this interconnected community of girls and women and the tragedies and triumphs of their lives. We so often don’t get to experience the minutiae that make up a person’s life, the slow days and the shows they watched on television, the small things that come together and make a person who they are. Lost Girls shows us that we can revel in those moments, tender and fraught as they may be.”
—  Trade review, New Southern Fugitives

Additional Works

SurrenderThe poems in Surrender explore the coming of middle age and the surrender to circumstances of loss and challenges, as well as the joys of finding new ways to love the world.

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