If You Read This I'll Kill You: Breaking Into Our Teen Diaries
call for submissions
If you’re anything like we were, as a teenager you kept a diary filled with hopes, dreams, bad poetry and, well, self-obsessed ramblings about your life’s profound urgencies. Do these old journals fill you with shame and embarrassment when you read them now? Do you chuckle at your coming-of-age obsessions, your angst, your propensity to melodrama? Have you even dared to look back at those padlocked outpourings of your teen heart? Or, are you impressed with your insight, your newly-found wisdom?
We invite you to capitalize on that glorious shame, humor, and pride by
submitting old diary or journal entries for publication in the anthology
If You Read This I’ll Kill You: Breaking into Our Teen Diaries.
This book will let us finally peek, from the perspective of our
hopefully more balanced adulthood, at the daring and vulnerable
emotional geniuses we were back in the day. Entries will include
short comments from each writer that set the entry in context.
Check out a sample from one of the darkest, most secret pages of Jen’s
adolescent ramblings, in which, temporarily born-again at age 14, she
was planning her own funeral:
- Sing “Sunrise, Sunset,” because it makes me cry and really captures the big picture—cheesy, but dramatic, like me.
- Sing “Amazing Grace” because my father has saved me
- Have lots of daisies cause they’re plain and simply and earthly.
- Tell funny stories about me.
- If people want to give money for some strange
reason, tell them to give it to the Red Cross because this country’s
national disasters can only be cured by this country…
Jen is wincing in pain at having to read this! It only gets worse (better?)!
Or perhaps you have priceless notes or letters passed to you by friends
in junior high? We’re thinking of punctuating the books with
lovely gems like this sample from Nancy’s archives…
Nancy,
I know how you feel about me now. How come you always bullshit me? Nancy you are a fucking Bitch. I’ve tried so hard to be nice. I even changed for you. I can’t believe you told Paige about me and Rich…. I can’t handle you. Sorry, but you’re the Bitch this time and I’m not…. Why are you doing this to me? Nancy, I know I’ve been a bitch but times have changed and so have I.
Your friend, Missy
Send these in, too! You wrote ‘em, you received ‘em, we want to see ‘em!
We’re sure you can do better! So dig out those old journal entries, swallow your pride, and submit them to us for inclusion in the Diary of Teenage Angst anthology, along with a paragraph of commentary. Anything funny, embarrassing, poignant, or substantive will be considered. Don’t shrink from the righteous sarcasm of your 15-year old self! Don’t flinch at the hysteria, the ignorant convictions, the pathetic anguish, the brilliant insight! All of it will make for a delicious glimpse at the interior worlds we, thankfully, survived.
We want to get this project going right away, so please email us your submissions by October 1, 2004, to jen@thewritedoctors.com or nancy@thewritedoctors.com, or mail us photocopies with a self addressed stamped envelope at The Write Doctors, 2449 Vine St., Denver, CO 80205. Submissions may be made anonymously, and entries may be published anonymously if you like. Please include a paragraph of commentary that sets your submission in context.
