An Inspiring New Book to Read (and Perform!) (Seventeen Magazine)

http://www.seventeen.com/fun-stuff/17-buzz/emotional-creature-monologues

Life is an emotional roller coaster — happy, mad, sad, intense, quiet — but that’s because we’re emotional creatures! Tomorrow, famous playwright Eve Ensler releases I am an Emotional Creature, a new book of monologues to capture ‘the secret lives of girls around the world.’ But this isn’t just a new must-read book — it’s the start of a whole new movement!

Along with the book, Ensler launched the V-Girls Network on v-girls.org, where you can blog, create a book club, and join voices with other readers on the forums. Just as seventeen.com's Get Advice! community gives you a place to ask questions about anything online, V Girls gives you an outlet to share photos, videos, and writing that speaks to your dreams and thoughts on the world.

Tomorrow, you can get a copy of I am an Emotional Creature and begin reading the monologues, or performing them aloud with your friends. In the meantime, read on for three questions with the author and our favorite excerpt!

Excerpt from ‘Manifesta to Young Women and Girls’:
Cherish your solitude
Take trains by yourself to places
you have never been
Sleep out alone under the stars
Learn how to drive a stick shift
Go so far away that you stop being afraid of
not coming back
Say no when you don’t want to do something
Say yes if your instincts are strong
even if everyone around you disagrees
Decide whether you want to be liked or admired
Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out
what you’re doing here

Q: You wrote The Vagina Monologues, which are performed at college campuses across the country, to raise awareness of women’s issues and fundraise for anti-violence programs. Are there similar plans for I Am an Emotional Creature to be performed in high schools?

A: It won’t happen right away — first there will be a commercial production, we hope, of Emotional Creature, but after the commercial production, I will do the same thing I did with The Vagina Monologues and let it go out. It won’t happen for a few years...but then it will hopefully become something that can be done at high schools all over the world.

What’s really exciting is that a curriculum was developed over the last year that will accompany the book. With each monologue, there’s a way of exploring and dissecting and creating dialogue.

Q: Who would be some of your dream young women to perform these monologues?

A: I don’t know that I know them yet. I want to discover them. This season, Miranda Cosgrove and we hope Keke Palmer are going to do readings of it in LA. What I’m really moved by is that in New York, Rosario Dawson is directing a benefit reading on February 5, and I’m just knocked out by the girls who came in off the street, who auditioned, who read, who wanted to be a part of it. They’re incredible. I hope we discover the next new fabulous generation of teenage girls.

Q: One thing we always ask around Seventeen is, 'When I was 17, I was...'

A: When I was 17, I was sadder than I should have been.