Read Millennial Writers
I’m a firm believer that to read a person’s writing is to understand them. Or, when taken with a larger whole, to understand that culture, that place, that zeitgeist. To get kitschy, reading allows us to peer into another’s soul and shows us that yeah, we’re really not that different. It allows us to connect, comprehend, and change our thinking.
So in an era when my generation – millennials, the people born between the early eighties and the early 2000s – is constantly being dismissed (we’re all just “special little snowflakes,” aren’t we?) and derided as lazy (really, Fox News? We’re too lazy to eat cereal now?), it seems to me that there is a fundamental misunderstanding about who we, millennials, are as people.
So I have a suggestion: read millennial writers.
Look, I’ve even made it easy for everyone by putting together an anthology of some of the brightest young writers out there today. It’s called Songs of My Selfie and is by millennials, about millennials, for millennials – and for parents and bosses and maybe, if we’re lucky, even for the people who write those nasty articles about us.
We, the writers of Songs of My Selfie, felt a need to show the world that twenty-somethings are not only smart enough and talented enough to create fiction that is mature, provocative, and downright interesting – we’re already writing it! More than that, we’re writing about actual, real-life issues our generation faces every day: crippling student loan debt, unpaid internships and the promise of “exposure,” the inability to afford the American Dream, and utter disillusionment with that dream.
After all the negative mainstream commentary, it’s time for millennials to showcase their identity themselves. So, we’re writing, we’re constantly creating, we’re making art, and we’re ready to share it with the world – even if we have to build the avenues to do that ourselves.
We don’t need corporate media or Baby Boomers to define us. We need them to listen to us, to watch us, to see us for who we really are. We need them to read us. Now, with Songs of My Selfie: An Anthology of Millennial Stories, there’s a much-needed snapshot of the reality my generation is experiencing. #ReadMillennialWriters
Constance Renfrow is a New York-based writer and editor. She is the lead editor for Three Rooms Press and a freelance editor and writing coach at constancerenfrow.com. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in such places as Cabildo Quarterly, Denim Skin, Petrichor Machine, and she hosts a monthly open mic series at the Merchant’s House Museum. A lover of nineteenth-century literature, she’s currently completing a three-volume governess novel, her first full-length work. Lastly, she compiled the anthology of millennial fiction, Songs of My Selfie (Three Rooms Press, April 2016), now available for preorder! Follow her on Twitter @MissConstance21 and/or @SongsOfMySelfie.