An aging woman removes all the mirrors in her house. A girl, haunted by the disappearance of her neighbor, enacts a yearly ritual of remembrance. A grieving mother and an obnoxious teenager make an unlikely connection over a drum set.
“It’s this idea of being seen as your authentic self,” explained author Ellen Birkett Morris, whose short story collection, Lost Girls, was released in June 2020. “There are recurring stories of loss … and yet, ultimately, in the mix of all of that are moments where people honor other people’s unique experience.”
A Louisville native who resides in the Highlands, Morris has been published widely, with stories and poems in journals including The Antioch Review, Shenandoah, South Carolina Review and Upstreet. Lost Girls, Morris’ first short story collection, has earned attention in Kirkus Reviews, The Southern Review of Books, Story Circle, Texas Public Radio and other outlets.
Though loosely linked by a few recurring characters and a setting in a fictional eastern Kentucky town, the stories in Lost Girls are distinct and varied. What connects them is Morris’ means of approach—a tender attention to the interior lives of her characters and an unflinching will to find what lies just beneath the surface.
A Writer’s Journey
Writing has been part of Morris’ life for as long as she can remember. Her father, John Birkett, wrote two detective novels set in Louisville and Lexington: The Last Private Eye and The Queen’s Mare.
“I had a sense of exactly what that job looked like and entailed,” Morris said. “It didn’t look very fun to me as a kid. He’d sit at a typewriter, and in that respect, it looked boring.”
The bedtime stories he read each evening were far from boring, however, and Morris began creating her own stories at a young age.“I actually have the first thing I ever wrote,” she said. “It’s in crayon on lined paper and bound with ribbon.”
Morris has worked as a freelance writer for publications such as The Courier-Journal, Today’s Woman and Kentucky Monthly; was writer/editor for the newsletter of the George Patton Foundation at Fort Knox; and continues to work for a number of clients as a contributor, editor and media relations consultant. She had long wanted to write creatively but didn’t begin doing so until she was in her early 30s.
“I said, ‘If you don’t do this now, you’ll never do it,’ ” Morris said. “I was afraid to be bad—and I was. I wrote some really bad poetry and stories. But then I wrote some better stuff.”
Morris said events like the Antioch and Kenyon Review workshops provided valuable feedback and helped sharpen her skills. She also completed a Master of Fine Arts in fiction at Queen’s University in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“I’ve had some really good publications, but also—along the way—received a lot of rejections, as writers do,” Morris said. “You have to find a way to develop a philosophy around rejection. Does it mean you need to go in to revise? Or does it just mean you didn’t get the right editor at the right journal on the right day?”
Morris has taught seminars and given talks at conferences on the subject of getting published, and she has advice for others starting on their writing journey.
“The process of submitting is like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing if it sticks,” Morris said. “It’s also a bit like gambling … Be ready to put your work into the world and let it happen.”
Lost Girls
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.”
Morris writes for many reasons, but one of the most significant is self-understanding.
“While I write fiction, the stories I tell draw on emotions and feelings I’ve had that are deeply embedded in my experience and give me a way to work through those in a way that’s useful,” she said. “It’s a way to understand myself, to understand the world, and to share whatever sorts of insight or understanding I’ve gleaned from my experience.”
Learn more about Ellen Birkett Morris at ellenbirkettmorris.ink.
Get to Know Ellen
Kentucky Monthly: What’s your favorite Louisville restaurant?
Ellen Birkett Morris: Le Relais at Bowman Field. It has a 1940s feel to it, the food is really wonderful, and on a really nice night, you can sit on the patio and watch the small planes fly in and out. There are times in COVID when I grab a book, sit in my car, and watch planes going and coming to replicate that feeling.
KM: What’s something you’ve always kept on your desk?
EBM: A picture of my first dog, Tippi. She’s on the ground among some early spring-blooming crocuses, a little hybrid mutt with lush fur and a funny little face. I’ve had many lovely pets, but that one dog that’s your soul connection—she was it.
KM: Three books for a desert island?
EBM: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and Winnie the Pooh, which was the first book I was ever given.
KM: Advice for beginning writers?
EBM: Read a lot. Read widely. Read stuff that you wouldn’t expect you might be interested in just to see what other people are doing with words. And sit down and write. Be brave; it’s hard … Try to immerse yourself in the whole thing. Continue your education, and take the classes you can get ahold of and build your confidence. But above all, believe in yourself; believe it’s worth it to give it a try. Be fearless.”