Dear Readers,
I've been surrounded by funny women my whole life, so I'm always surprised to encounter the persistent myth that women have no sense of humor. (Granted, suffragettes and libbers weren't a terribly giggly bunch, but they were kind of busy, you know?) I've felt similarly stymied by the lack of publications showcasing women writers of wit. Therefore, in the spirit of genial revolution, I bring you Swivel.
Why the name "Swivel"? It's fun to say, for one thing, and fun to do, too. Swivel evokes hips, which for women are an emblem of sex appeal, self-deprecation, and offspring (all fodder for amusement). In this literary magazine, the word also refers to the woman writer's ability to take a mundane, stressful, or tragic situation and swivel around to see it from a different perspective—one that reveals its essential humor.
During a recent re-read of Aimee Bender's stellar fiction collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, I found a paragraph in the title story particularly relevant to Swivel:
I think of that girl I read about in the paper--the one with the flammable skirt. She'd bought a rayon chiffon skirt, purple with wavy lines all over it. She wore it to a party and was dancing, too close to the vanilla-smelling candles, and suddenly she lit up like a pine needle torch. When the boy dancing next to her felt the heat and smelled the plasticky smell, he screamed and rolled the burning girl up in the carpet. She got third-degree burns up and down her thighs. But what I keep wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was the candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
This is precisely what I wish for Swivel--that it offers similar moments of risk and possibility, of adrenalin and tragedy, of absurdity and indiscretion, of ill-advised skirts and super-powered hips. Perhaps especially in the case of writing humorously, it seems the thigh burns are worth it.
Lucille Ball once said, "I'm not funny, what I am is brave." So here's to all the brave women who've helped make Swivel a reality. I think they're pretty funny, too.
Happy Swiveling,
--Brangien Davis
