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Ellen Birkett Morris
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Lost Girls: Short Stories Paperback – June 24, 2020

by Ellen Birkett Morris (Author)

“A dazzling collection of stories that showcases Morris' impressive ability to hide devastating truths within seemingly small moments.” —Jenny Offill

Lost Girls explores the experiences of women and girls as they grieve, find love, face uncertainty, take a stand, find their future, and say goodbye to the past. A young woman creates a ritual to celebrate the life of a kidnapped girl, an unmarried woman wanders into a breast feeder’s support group and stays, a grieving mother finds solace in an unlikely place, a young girl discovers more than she bargained for when she spies on her neighbors. Though they may seem lost, each finds their center as they confront the challenges and expectations of womanhood.

PRAISE for LOST GIRLS

“The stories in Ellen Birkett Morris’s collection, Lost Girls, are memorable for the way they see the lasting truths that reside within the familiar. These stories are full of imaginative leaps that capture the wildness that lies beneath our seemingly ordinary lives. Morris is a writer of extraordinary talent. With elegance and precision, she can turn a story into something luminous and unforgettable.” —Lee Martin, author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Bright Forever

"Ellen Birkett Morris is a skillful literary pointillist. In Lost Girls, her debut collection, each spare sentence is as considered as a poem; step back a little way, and you behold a world." —David Payne, author of Barefoot to Avalon

“This collection of stunning and original stories kept me turning the pages, eager to meet the daughter who eats the sins of others, the 30-year-old virgin who rents a breast pump, the bereft mother drumming away her grief. Ellen Birkett Morris’s Lost Girls draws us so close that before long, we are inhaling the same air, making the same unexpected discoveries, and deeply longing for each of these girls and women to find their private rainbows.” —Masha Hamilton, author of 31 Hours and The Camel Bookmobile

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  1. Print length
    140 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    June 24, 2020
  4. Dimensions
    5 x 0.36 x 8 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1952816017
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1952816017
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Eachstory showcases Morris' abundant compassion and brilliance of vision even whileproviding a piercing, unflinching depiction of life. These are ingeniousstories suffused with wit, prodigious intelligence, and sometimes even magicalovertones."
--Kelly Fordon, Authorlink


"The female characters in Lost Girls both startle and uplift us, but most importantly they demand to be seen. Set in and around the fictional southern mining town of Slocum, each of the seventeen stories in this collection features complex women and girls in pivotal moments of loss, self-discovery, and rebellion. With the same ease found in her Bevel Summers Award-winning short story, "May Apples," Morris weaves in difficult topics effortlessly. In this collection, she does the important work of showing women as complicated, resourceful, erotic, unlikable, and bold in the face of societal pressures and outright violence against them."--Southern Review of Books

"There is something about reading the short stories in the collection Lost Girls by Ellen Birkett Morris that makes me think of a magic trick. Blink and you won't be able to figure out how she does it. But then, don't blink. Stare as hard as you can. Retrace favorite paragraphs and lines and still be mystified about her pointillistic ability to create the images and lines that take the breath out of your body and create the unforgettable lost girls — and women — who inhabit these spaces rarely immortalized as engagingly or sympathetically in contemporary literature."
--Yvette Benavides, Book Public, Texas Public Radio

"Morris has an ability to wring a lot of emotion out of a few scant details, giving the feeling of a much longer work. Many share settings and characters, which contributes to a sense of interconnectivity and added meaning... she demonstrates a shrewd understanding of what makes her characters tick. In the end, readers will leave the collection feeling as though they've lived pieces of several real lives. A varied set of tales from a skilled practitioner of the short form."
-- Kirkus Reviews

From the Author

An excerpt from "On Respect" Kentucky Monthly Magazine 
The title story of Morris' book, Lost Girls, was inspired by the 1983 disappearance of 12-year-old Ann Gotlib from a Louisville shopping mall. "That whole story—her kidnapping—led to the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children," Morris said. "In this story, I wanted to take a personal lens. How does one honor those who disappear? How do we lend them the dignity of saying, 'I remember you?' "
Each story in the collection focuses on a woman or girl in a fictional eastern Kentucky town. The stories are short; some are only three or four pages long, and the longest is 16 pages. But each examines relationships and interactions—what Morris calls the emotional landscape—with tenderness, clarity and insight.
"The success of Lost Girls has been that these stories really belong together thematically and emotionally," Morris said. "Together, they send a message about the lives of women and girls—how we strive to be heard, struggle with self-actualization, and how we can help each other on those paths; how we can be triumphant in our ability to honor each other and lift each other up."
A unifying theme of the work, she said, is the characters' desire to be seen, and to see others, authentically. She pointed specifically to the title story, in which the narrator leaves a gift each year for a "lost girl" on the spot where she disappeared. Every year, the gift changes to reflect the age the kidnapped girl would have been.
"She left tampons, she left a set of car keys when the girl would have turned 16, and, in this story, the girl is turning 21," Morris said. "The last line of the story is: 'Tonight, I'll leave this bottle of Jack Daniel's. By morning, it'll be gone.' So she's doing what she can to remember and to honor that girl. There are moments throughout the stories where people find ways to really see the other person, to honor their experience."
The theme of being seen is deeply personal to Morris, as well as to her characters.
"As a kid who was really, really shy, as a woman, as a woman from the South—there are these ways in which I can feel unseen," she said. "That's just a really basic element of respecting people—trying to see them as they are. It struck me that my own experience with feeling unseen because I was quiet or because I didn't speak up or because I was never told it was OK to speak up is really universal for a lot of women."

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ TouchPoint Press
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 24, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 140 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1952816017
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1952816017
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.36 x 8 inches
  • Best Sellers Rank: #4,394,909 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

About the author

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Ellen Birkett Morris

Ellen Birkett Morris

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Ellen Birkett Morris’s novel Beware the Tall Grass is the winner of the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence, judged by Lan Samantha Chang, and published by CSU Press in March 2024. She is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award and finalist for the Clara Johnson, IAN and Best Book awards. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council.

Morris is also the author of Abide and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among other journals and in eight anthologies. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poem “Abide” was featured on NPR’s A Way with Words. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader magazine, and on National Public Radio.

Morris holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University-Charlotte. She attended the Kentucky Women Writers Conference on fellowship and teaches creative writing at The Virginia Piper Center at ASU in Tempe, Arizona and The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky. Morris has spoken and taught at the 2018 Antioch Writers Workshop, 2019 Kentucky Women Writers Conference, 2022 Writer’s Block Festival and 2022 Louisville Book Festival.