At the heart of When Women Were Dragons is the author’s inquiry into how to hand

At the heart of When Women Were Dragons is the author’s inquiry into how to handle those aspects of ourselves that society asks us to suppress. In the novel, the women who dragon are women whose selfhood is simply too large to be contained within the confines of social norms. These are women who have a deep need to unmask — to feel all of their feelings, to experience freedom, to seek adventure, to be their whole selves.
Take a moment to think about how that concepts like masking and unmasking resonate with you. Are there aspects of yourself that you largely keep under wraps in the interest of aligning with social norms? Are there times when you struggle to determine whether to present your full, unfiltered self, versus your more tamed, reigned-in, socially acceptable self, for example? Are there times when you suppress your urge to speak? Are there times when you have to code-switch? Are there times when you pretend to be less intelligent than you are in order to maintain peace? Are there times when you try to hide your accent so as not to call attention to yourself? Are there times when you edit colloquialisms out of your speech so that others can’t guess where you’re from? Are there situations in which you carefully arrange your face so as to conceal your true feelings? Are there times when you have irrepressible urges to sing or dance or fidget or stim or sit in unusual positions, yet you keep quiet? If this concept isn’t applicable to you personally, can you think of how similar pressures might impact people close to you?
Once you have your social dilemma at least vaguely defined, start to think about how that tension between masking and authenticity might be represented in a non-human form. Kelly Barnhill writes women as dragons, but what sort of entity speaks to you? Do you have characters that want to turn into air? Into phoenixes? Racecars? Trees? Wolves?
Write a prose poem or short story using the theme described above: transformation as a way of owning those parts of the self that society deems unacceptable. Your project may evolve to look very, very different from Barnhill’s narrative.
You may, for example, write a world in which the transformed characters have been somewhat accepted into mainstream society, though with some trepidation. One such story could be about a wolf character who attends a regular university with other students, who wants to join the cheer squad. And perhaps the cheerleaders have accepted the wolf onto the squad, yet their acceptance largely feels performative, because they still have some trepidation of the wolf. And so the story would proceed from the wolf’s point of view, in which his/her/their insecurities and pride in their wolfness are all tangled up. And perhaps the wolf develops a romantic interest in one of the cheerleaders, who likes the wolf as well, yet wrestles with a fear of being physically close to the wolf. Both characters have to wrestle their demons.
Draw inspiration from the world around you. I was in a coffee shop the other day, for instance, and the barista was talking about the shop’s plan to host a marketing event known as “Barbie Day.” I asked whether she would be costuming as Barbie along with the other baristas (one was coming as Weird Barbie), and if so, which one. She said that she would be “only vaguely Barbie,” and that phrase stuck in my mind. Applied to this assignment, what if your characters turned into Barbies? What if one character was only vaguely Barbie and thus presented some trouble? What does it mean to be vaguely Barbie? What might that situation look like if one used it as a starting point for thinking through this assignment?
There is no page limit or word count for this assignment. You can use first, second, or third-person writing.
Also include a one-page explanation of/ reflection on your project at the end of the piece. You can reflect on what you’ve discovered, or you can explain your artistic process, identifying the main ideas that hold your work together and the reasons behind your choices. You submit a copy of this assignment on Canvas.