Announcement: A Woman Unbecoming

Crone Girls Press is pleased to announce our next full-length anthology project, A Woman Unbecoming. A charity project, all proceeds will benefit organizations that have been working to regain/ensure access to reproductive healthcare rights.

This anthology features CM Harris’s short story, “A Woman Unbecoming,” which also became the title and inspiration for this anthology of horror that celebrates female rage, power, and agency. If you’ve read her story (originally published in Coppice & Brake, 2020), you’ll know what’s coming in this volume. And if you haven’t, then hang on, because our authors are pulling no punches.

We’re excited to share our contributors’ names and stories over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for our cover reveal and artist interview on July 28. In the meantime, our co-editors, Carol Gyzander and Rachel A. Brune share some of their thoughts about the project and how it came to be. Read on!

Carol Gyzander, Editor

I was in my junior year of high school when the original Roe ruling was issued, supporting a fundamental right to privacy and protecting a pregnant woman’s right to have an abortion. We were the young women following on the heels of Gloria Steinem and the initial women’s rights movement, and we moved into some new freedoms and roles because of Roe v. Wade. As one can imagine, the recent Supreme Court decision overruling Roe has stirred up a lot of emotion and memories.

The fact is, however, that even though we had fifty years of abortion rights, for the last five decades the intersections between financial, social, racial, and gender oppression have raised barriers to access abortion and reproductive care and services.

And it just got so much worse.

I feel betrayed, undercut, and discounted—and this is the time to act on these feelings. Profits from our anthology will be donated to support reproductive healthcare rights and support candidates in the upcoming midterm elections who will support and fight for reproductive healthcare access measures.

Carol Gyzander is an editor and Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of horror, suspense, dark fiction, and sci-fi. HWA, MWA, SinC.

Rachel A. Brune, Editor

I was born into a world where (most) women who looked like me were able to get credits cards, bank accounts, and own property in their own name, where reproductive health rights were guaranteed, where sure, the ERA hadn’t been passed, but was it really necessary? Look at all the progress we had made … perhaps it was obsolete now? I was the world’s most complacent feminist. In fact, when I was younger, I wouldn’t even have wanted to apply that label to myself. Why would I need to?

Yeah, I was a dumbass when I was younger, and that complacency came home to roost. But as I got older, I read more widely, met more people, had more life experience. I learned more about my own history, and that of people–women–who didn’t look like me. I learned more about my own body, and how it works, and I learned that there were more things on earth than dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy. And I went from a complacent feminist to a raging one.

When I began Crone Girls Press, I was specifically inspired to include stories that embraced the wide range of authors and perspectives that the horror genre offers. We’ve published some amazing tales that have crawled into my mind, nestled down, hibernated, and then exploded outwards, leaving my conceptions in little bloody gunks all over the previously calm assumptions of my worldview. And I LOVE it. This anthology is an opportunity to share stories that celebrate rage of all flavors — anti-patriarchal, primal, queer, feminist — and to do so in a way that contributes directly to organizations that have been working all along to support access to reproductive healthcare rights.

Rachel A. Brune is a horror and speculative fiction writer, as well as the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Crone Girls Press. She enjoys her fiction like she likes her coffee–as dark and strong as you can make it!

A Woman Unbecoming

The baying of the hounds under a full moon signals the death of an era–and the birth of a new one under the Old Gods.

Most funerals are celebrations for the living–unless the guests decide to tempt fate and the guest of honor.

A bicycle ride becomes a contest of egos, but the pursuers aren’t the only ones hungry for the race to end.

Welcome to an anthology celebrating women’s rage, power, and agency. Crone Girls Press presents A Woman Unbecoming, a charity project to benefit reproductive healthcare rights.

Stay tuned for more news and offers for this anthology and other Crone Girls Press publications! Sign up for our newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram.