Feb 01, 2022
After the Green Ribbon
The story of the girl with the green ribbon was once a generic tale of horror. Now, it is about about gender.
A. E. Osworth is part-time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates the art of digital storytelling. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit) was long listed for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. They have an eight-year freelancing career and you can find their work on Autostraddle, Guernica, Quartz, Electric Lit, Paper Darts, Mashable, and drDoctor, among others.
The story of the girl with the green ribbon was once a generic tale of horror. Now, it is about about gender.
Storytelling is like the TARDIS in ‘Doctor Who’—the narrower and more specific we get on the outside, the bigger it gets on the inside.
Children appear in horror all the time because to parent one is naturally terrifying.
All the things I would have shielded my younger self from, they crop up in books, too. And they are not the monsters with the glowing eyes.
In the film ‘Beetlejuice’, death is exaggeration. To die is to become a different size, to be viewed as grotesque by an outside observer.
Revising toward praise gives a writer a direction to go, something to build to instead of something to run from.
I love to be a leaver. To be the one that steps out into the unknown, even as I am terrified.
A lot of my fears have been made real by the last year. And somehow, some way, I have returned to an insatiable appetite for things that scare me.
Everything I do is done behind a desk. And now, now? Now I can even use this Peloton. I don’t even need to run in the rain.
There is something attractive about being the subject and the artist all at once; of being entirely in control of how I am seen, who sees me.
