Triumph, Like a Girl
Letters & Poems
An Anthology for Hope
Celebrating 150 Years of the Girls’ Schools Association
2024 marks the 150 year anniversary of the Girls’ Schools Association.
In celebration we are producing a commemorative anthology, edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf.
We are now inviting our members, our girls, and our GSA alumnae to contribute to this landmark publication by writing a letter to be considered for inclusion by Karen.
Submissions close on 2nd April, 2024
A personal letter from Karen McCarthy Woolf:
“The letter is a wonderful thing and correspondence can tell us so much about history, about how people lived their lives, of their passions, their relationships, and their secrets. There are many famous correspondences, from that between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell to the letters Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger exchanged for 50 years. Or those that Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara wrote to his mother. Before we had text, or email, we had the letter. We had pen pals. There is something so exciting about sending a letter in the post, to a friend, an aunt, a love, and receiving that reply. Letters are places where we confide in others, and spaces where we find new ways to understand ourselves. Letters are always to someone, and about something. Once we send them, we forget all the news and little snippets of gossip that fill the pages –– only recalling what was said when we receive a reply. That’s the difference between letters and emails: once we post them, they are out there in the world! We don’t have a trail of what we said. Letters are a way to share with our friends, they are intimate. Letters take time: unlike digital correspondence they are not immediate. There’s something magical in letting go.
We will delve into the GSA archive for letters of the past and ask you to help us create an archive for the future. If aliens came down from space, what would these letters tell us about our society and how girls and women have fought for education, and how it has help them excel, triumph even, in school and in life?”
We are sure that you will all have much to say in your own letter but you may wish to use these prompts from Karen to inspire your own writing:
- What do you know now that you need to pass on?
- Who were/are your heroes as schoolgirls/school pupils (for the allies who walk alongside us), and why?
- What might you do differently?
