Girlhood on print, zine's first issue is here

This Body of Words Is A Girl - Apollosagirl V.1

Hello my loves,

it’s been a while since I’ve written on this substack, but Apollosagirl is alive and well, in fact, she is in print now!! I have officially released its first zine publication, and because Amazon put it up earlier than expected, it has been kept relatively private as I wanted this newsletter to be the first to be find out.

This Body Of Words Is A Girl- Apollosagirl V.1 , is a collection of journals, photos, and mental landscape from female adolescence.  

It’s small and short in content; filled with journal entries throughout the years, along with essays, photographs, and an exploration of the feminine through the lens of virginity, autonomy, madness, sexuality, love, home, and beauty. 

The idea for this zine came around the time of my twentieth birthday this summer, as my heavily romanticized era of teenage girlhood came to a close, leaving behind a mess of all the different ideas of womanhood i’d been fed throughout the years, trying to find out in which of them lived my truth. The whole process of writing, editing, designing, and publishing was a deep shedding and revisit of girlhood in all its dark and gentle forms.

Every detail was deeply intentional. I filled these pages with hidden eggs, double meanings, references, and symbolism that I cannot wait to get into, but will hold off on now for sake of spoilers (and curiosity on what you pick up on). Transferring this to print was a mission on its own, that is still ongoing. However, I do want to talk about how the cover came about because quite frankly, I’m obsessed with it.

 The photo on the front was a digital picture of me taken by my best friends, on a night spent at their shared studio apartment on the lower east side late past midnight, where I played them the only three chords I knew on the guitar at the time. The ones to a song that has stayed my favorite for years, written by a hippie man decades ago who has now become a great friend and inspiration to me. An ode to him. I am the only one in the photo, and yet that picture is a culmination of the people who have left the greatest marks on my life. The guitar is referenced as it has stayed close with me through the years, not on my arms, but in the arms of my greatest loves. The ones who played as I wrote and sang, carrying my words and their hearts on wood. I have a guitar of my own now, not much to play, but to carry them too. An ode to them; the support alongside my journey of articulation and collaboration.

I cannot write in silence, and throughout the making of this entire zine there was music playing. There are albums that played chronologically back to back to set the tone in space, for narrative to flow through. There is a place that sound takes me from which I extract what is most pure, and in its absence, there is an eternal song that plays in the distance around me. I hear it often, in between silences and meditation, and in the synesthetic visions that come in writing and art direction have allowed me to continue to unravel it as a secret, engulfed in a symphony that encompasses a world of my own. It guides me. I tried to capture that essence and feeling in my writing, sprinkling both musical and esoteric references onto a story of girlhood that is of my blood and bones.

In the closet, I am sitting in the middle of my friends’ shared clothing rack, at the meeting point of male and female wardrobe. A reminder that in this exploration of girlhood, gender is alas just clothes for us to play with and embody, and not a life sentence to roles. A lesson I learned from the trans women and nonconforming afab friendships around me, who gave me the context and vocabulary to even conceptualize an idea of womanhood that could be my own. A deep thank you to them. The closet as the intimate space of undressing and putting together, the home of unprocessed pieces to pull together for departure. If I want to be seen for who I am fully I won’t achieve it by coming out of the close, instead I much prefer to bring you in, where together we can look at it all together.

The underwear in the back cover is edited from a photo on Pinterest I couldn’t trace back to anywhere but fell in love with. I think there is nothing more instrinctly “girl” than underwear; the cloth of flowers, careless dancing, petals, and all the arcane.

All writing on there is new and unpublished, except for an edited version of “I Made You Soup”, an essay on love I wrote on this Substack at the beginning of this year. For that reason, it has been temporarily removed, as I have not decided how I’d like to keep it and want to have it exclusive to the zine for now (but I do have a private link to the original I’m always happy to share upon request).

anywaysssss I could talk forever and ever about this but I’ll leave our next conversation to be had on print. I’ll be giving a few copies out in the city, but apart from that, the zine is only available on Amazon at the moment so I’ll leave the link below :)

Thank you!! I’ve missed you!!

https://www.amazon.com/This-Body-Words-Girl-Apollosagirl/dp/B0DKCF34WB/ref=sr_1_1?crid=YA3YMAZ7DLRG&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.u9G-V-g2VEYpKPcL8nWmOGgY95cF3cgB1Qe_l_IMaPbQALuEDt5XDvJ3uBczQ35rqmAh4YZTfmlbrLPlP2UpAUdjuzdgfG_PAS7aZb_n1yMVX2kCL2tZ4AH-YnX7Svi2bGcg7l8o__OVUtppxrXZAJOsoJl7E5-QXsldxzpic1vVj7PTLhCof6uHK1Na2wmH4SQCW2TonikEhU6Af8dRpCGhGQvkf_Dwx8Aw1MHSwB0.fEQGJUQxyTOdjvjBoRaY6e_uDDxrcmZIqJQUXtK2nsQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=This+body+of+words+is+a+girl&qid=1729706992&s=digital-text&sprefix=this+body+of+words+is+a+girl%2Cdigital-text%2C124&sr=1-1-catcorr