Outlaw country.

Outlaw Country is a collection of poetry, prose poetry, flash fiction, short fiction, and short creative nonfiction that began as an exploration of the language our culture uses to talk about and describe women. My work was informed by the strong female writers who came before me. Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons began my interrogation of words and domestic spaces. Margaret Atwood's The Female Body built on Stein's work, adding narrative and irony through examining objects and rhetoric associated with women in a four-page collection of flash nonfiction and fiction. Flannery O'Connor's use of the grotesque and themes of domesticity, religion, sex, and gender are a major influence as well. Solmaz Sharif's collection Look coalesced my interests in examining rhetoric and the different contexts in which women exist. Other influences are Mary Ruefle, Sylvia Plath, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I used Stein's technique of repetition and Atwood's irony through flipping context or making small changes to words. I borrowed Sharif's definition through rhetorical use, and O'Connor's humor. Figuring out how to organize these different genres, narratives, and techniques into a discernable and pleasing order for the reader was my greatest challenge. Through the writing process, Outlaw Country became a much more personal expression of my intersectionality as a woman, an expression that interrogates language, culture, gender, sex, age, domesticity, and place. Because of that, the order gradually moves from rhetorical questions about femininity and femaleness into increasingly personal answers to those questions. Ultimately, Outlaw Country is a description of the rhetorical space women inhabit, never able to attain culturally acceptable femininity. Since we are all dynamic, multi-dimensional people, all of us at some time or place (or for all of time and space) have been made to feel we are outlaws to our gender