Big Girls: Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction

Tender, unsparing stories about bodies, longing, and the haphazard, messy business of becoming.

Big Girls is a luminous collection of short stories that examine what it means to move through the world in a body that feels scrutinized, misunderstood, or out of place. With a voice that is both sharp and tender, Janet Thielke writes about girls and women navigating adolescence, family life, desire, and loss, capturing the quiet moments when self-awareness begins to harden into identity.

These tales follow characters who are observant, self-conscious, and deeply human. In the title story, a teenage girl and her emotionally volatile aunt grapple with body image and bullying from opposite sides of life experience. In "But It Moves," a science teacher in a conservative town defends evolution as she cares for her disabled son, while in "The Bullet Game," a hypothetical game of life and death spirals into conflict over loyalty, love, and emotional vulnerability. Thielke allows her characters to be contradictory: funny and wounded, defensive and generous, hopeful even when they are hurting. Bodies are central to these stories as living vessels carrying memory, shame, pleasure, and longing. Ordinary settings become emotionally charged, and seemingly small encounters leave lasting scars.

Throughout, Big Girls explores what it means to be watched, to grapple with the outgrown narratives of the past, and to imagine a future self who might finally feel at home. This is a collection that pays close attention to people often overlooked--and finds meaning in the act of noticing.