Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit & Real Life

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.
--Alice Munro


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.

Selected Works

Documentary Film
Tomboys! Feisty Girls & Spirited Women
Lively & inspiring video documentary, focusing on tomboys of all ages. Especially useful for girls and young people.
Poetry
In the Wake of Home
Poems of love and loss, lyric, analytic, mordant and comic.
Teaching essays
The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing
A collection of essays on teaching all forms and aspects of nature wriiting.
Fiction & Memoir
Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit & Real Life
An anthology of tomboy writing ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.