"The fiction writer...carries a burden of sorts. You are lugging something around that seems to be part of your being, or, as we would say now, is 'hard wired' into you, so much so that you have become its container, but the only way to express it--almost literally, to bring it out--is to write it. ...It's almost involuntary. Something needs to get out: Not expressed but extruded. As the composer Camille Saint-Saëns remarked, 'I write music the way an apple tree produces apples.'"
-Charles Baxter from Letters to a Fiction Writer

My mother would comfort, "It's just your overactive imagination."

But I conjured up more than monsters hiding in my closets. Creatures breathed next to my door, and footsteps mounted the stairs.

"Come home," I'd whisper into the phone, interrupting her bridge game.

I'd create the situations and then plot my way out of them. When I was a teen, I imagined love in the blue eyes of the most popular boy in school. I imagined romance with my fix-up date for my junior prom.

From the age of twelve, I filled journal after journal with dialogue, lengthy scenes, descriptions of long kisses--veritable teen romances, in fact. Reading those journals now, I can measure my growing maturity with the change in my handwriting.

Today, that imagination chides me on--pulling me into diverse worlds like fantasy, historical fiction, and magic realism.

And the stories are everywhere-- flowing from the robes of desert Moroccan women, in the angry mother's voice on my street corner, in my dreams.

I write furiously to imagine them to life.

Phyllis Carol Agins

Welcome

Following my imagination wherever it leads...

Proud to be included in Lilith Magazine's new fiction anthology, published by Brandeis University

EMPOWERING JEWISH FEMALE VOICES

A groundbreaking short story collection from the editors of acclaimed feminist publication, Lilith Magazine

ABOUT THE BOOK

Frankly Feminist
Short Stories by Jewish Women from Lilith Magazine

Edited by Susan Weidman Schneider and Yona Zeldis McDonough

Frankly Feminist (October 6, 2022; Brandeis University Press), the first-ever anthology from Lilithmagazine, is a unique amalgam of fine writing and activism that comes right out of Jewish women's lives today: transgressive loves, deepening connections, political turmoil, abortion, fear of loss, struggles with fertility, with body and soul, with finding community, with decoding family life.

These fictions offer variegated cultures, contexts and points of view: Persian Jews; a Biblical matriarch; an
Ethiopian mother in modern Israel; suburban American teens; Eastern European academics; a sexual questioner; a Jew by choice; a new immigrant escaping her Lower East Side sweatshop; a Black Jewish marcher for justice; a toddler's mother hiding out in Vichy France; and more.

Some of these 44 authors are bestsellers; others are emerging talents with ages ranging from their 20s to their 80s. The characters they create reveal themselves by choices of pastimes and partners; by their causes and their passions, by what they say and what they signal. And the voices in Frankly Feminist have plenty to say about how we live now. They are neither meek nor decorous. They speak with anger and humor, tenderness and rue, self-recrimination and howls of victory.

ABOUT LILITH MAGAZINE
Independent, Jewish & Frankly Feminist
Since 1976, Lilith's mission is to be the feminist change-agent in and for the Jewish community: amplifying Jewish feminist voices, creating an inclusive and positive Judaism, spurring gender consciousness in the Jewish world and empowering women, girls and trans and nonbinary people of every background to envision and enact change in their own lives and the larger community. For more information, visit lilith.org.

For more information, visit:
Website: lilith.org
Instagram: @lilithmagazine Twitter: @LilithMagazine Facebook: www.facebook.com/LilithMagazine
Frankly Feminist will be released by Brandeis University Press on October 6, 2022, and is available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold.

Phyllis Carol Agins

Welcome

Selected Works

Fiction under Phyllis Carol Agins

Nonfiction, under Phyllis Agins Grode

For Children, under Phyllis Agins Grode