Christian McEwen

From the Introduction:

There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc -- that was the lost hope of girls.

I was eight when I met my first tomboy. Her name was Susan Meldrum. She had dirty-blonde hair and bold white knees which stood out sharply under her regulation tunic. I remember the sound of her heels on the wooden floor and the scuffed toes of her heavy lace-up shoes. I remember too the way she flung herself across a room, swerving and skidding and crashing into things, with utter disregard for her own safety. How I marvelled at her! She was only six, but she seemed to be afraid of nothing.

I was a different sort of child myself, more anxious, more self-critical. I could climb a tree all right, but I found it hard to get down again. I hated netball and hockey, and was never any good at judo. Still, I knew myself to be a tomboy, with my longing for dungarees and close-cropped hair, and my determination never to get married. The word "tomboy" itself seemed magical to me: fiery, disobedient, gloriously untidy. "Girl," by compariosn, was flat and uninspiring.

Half a lifetime later, nudging forty, I put together a series of tomboy writing workshops in New York City, and began to gather material for this anthology. It was a wonderful project. I only had to mention it to provoke a flare-up of excited talk and storytelling. I sent out a call for submissions, and for weeks my mailbox was jammed with tomboy stories and reminiscences, drawings of hidden tree-houses and secret dens, of bows-and-arrows, catapults, and knives. Almost every woman I approached had a tomboy story she wanted to tell.