Review by Lara Lillibridge
DeMisty D. Bellinger’s short story collection, All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, just released by University of Nebraska Press, won the Barbara DiBernard Award, an annual prize for a book published by Zero Street and named for Dr. DiBernard who is professor emeritus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a pioneer in LGBTQIA+ studies. Bellinger also wrote the novel, New to Liberty and two collections of poetry, Peculiar Heritage and Rubbing Elbows. Bellinger teaches creative writing in central Massachusetts. She has a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, an MFA from Southampton College, and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. Her time in Wisconsin definitely shows in this collection, as many stories are set in the region.
The book title comes from the short story, “Awesome Everywhere.”
[after the narrator’s husband commits suicide]
“Her dad?” she started. I turned on my toes, like doing the twist. I said, “She’s not a good dancer. It’s not her only flaw, right? We all have many. But it hurts her in musical theater.”
“Your daughter’s awesome.”
“That’s true.” I said. “All daughters are awesome everywhere.”
Bellinger’s lyric prose shines in lines such as,
The hail was acupuncture. The hail was a bed of nails. The hail was pressure points pinning down each ache of parenthood. The rain washed away little hands, sticky with sweets and covered in dirt, constantly grabbing and clasping onto her hands, her knees, the hems of her dresses and shirts. The precipitation freed her breasts from gummy mouths sprouting ready incisors gnawing at her tender skin.
Her lyricism gives depth and richness to All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere. The collection includes stories about women who love women, both lesbian and bisexual; women in love with men; abusive mothers abusive and absent fathers/husbands. We are introduced to unidentified women who have no one to claim their ashes, shown girls in tears in fourth grade, women being belittled or neglected in relationships, and murderous women who are filled with purposeful rage.
Many of the stories are unresolved, leaving us a feeling of this end of this day, this chapter of their lives, but not the end of their stories. It feels as if Bellinger’s characters have gone on living in an unwritten world—those who got away from these pages alive, at least, which is not the case for all of them. The stories are haunting, and unexpected. Each ends in a way I did not predict, but that felt authentic.
What is most striking about All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere is the tenderness and care DeMisty shows for the women, girls, and daughters. Lines like, “Their hair was uncombed, fuzzy, they were all carelessly beautiful,” speak to how we want to be seen, but rarely feel that we are.
While not every story has a female protagonist, in my mind, the heart of the collection is inherently female centric. The title, which I’ll admit I didn’t understand when I started reading, speaks to a deeper meaning than just a positive affirmation:
She used the word awesome and I guess since then, I’ve been going around looking at things and people in awe. Everyone and everything have something in it worthy of wonder and fear, of glory. I closed my eyes and tried to breath in everything around me: the loamy dirt wet with melted snow and dead leaves, the crispness of the running water, the threat of a storm coming in from the northeast.
And this definition of awesome—worthy of wonder and fear—is exactly what DeMisty’s characters are. All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere adds to the cannon of literature on what it means to be female, but also on what it means to be truly seen by another.
All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere: Stories by DeMisty D. Bellinger
University of Nebraska Press, 2024, 188 pages, $21.95 [paper]
ISBN 9781496241306
Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning; Mama, Mama, Only Mama: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent; and Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home. Lara is a Creative Nonfiction Co-editor for HeartWood Literary Magazine and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from West Virginia Wesleyan College.