Welcome to WEIRD SISTER

My mom and my Aunt Laura on Halloween (they’re BFFs; not actual sisters.)

A bunch of us have been talking for a long time about wanting to start a blog—one that fuses and fuels our interests in and obsessions with feminism and literature and pop culture, and the places where all of those things intertwine. When we finally landed on the name WEIRD SISTER—partly in reference to the Macbeth witches, but also to the weird sisterhoods of our various and intersecting feminist communities—it felt just right. It captured the importance of feminist solidarity with a nod toward the literary, and an acknowledgment of the glittery, complicated and strange forms of poetry and culture that we find most compelling.

Shakespeare’s “Weird Sisters” are witches, of course, and the name points to a specifically female-coded brand of black magic. It reminds us of the 90s goth girls and hippie chicks that we were or could have been. Of placing spells and chanting The Craft-style and reading tarot cards and devouring astrology books and staring into our mood rings and choosing to trust in something beyond logic, something dark and bright and otherworldly as central and important and of great value.

The name nods to the “weird sisters” of pop culture that inspired and encouraged us to become artists and activists and weirdos and dreamers. Denise Huxtable in her always-awesome creative outfits, and Darlene from Roseanne making comic books with her weird boyfriend, The Baby-sitters Club’s Claudia Kishi an illogical beam of spangled, ecstatic beauty to her buttoned-up sister Jeanine, and Karen, the hippie-chick sister on The Wonder Years whose family didn’t get her, but oh how we wanted to be just like her and let our little baby freak flags fly.

And weird sisterdom feels personal to us, too, Becca one of four sisters and me one of three. Growing up, being the “arty” or “sensitive” sister felt sort of deviant or damning, but as a grown-up it only feels glorious to be rogue feminist poets, and to create our own additional sisterhoods with other like-minded women.

We hope to help connect feminist writers and artists, and to offer a place online that feels kinda like a consciousness-raising group, kinda like a book club, kinda like a slumber party. We hope that people will join in on our conversations, which we expect to often be messy and complicated, and that WEIRD SISTER will be a space for engaging in dialogues, sharing ideas, and letting them hang out together and multiply. We hope also to be a kind of weird sister to the feminist and literary blogs that we love and that inspire us, adding a particular mix of playful, incisive and creative commentary into the vast and varied cauldron that is the blogosphere.