hellobeautifulcreatures

And if you were a nine-year-old girl at any point during the last 30 years, you are almost certainly familiar with American Girl. It very well may have been an essential part of your nine-year-old girldom. From the beginning, from the time it was a mere kernel of an idea scrawled on a postcard, American Girl was engineered for nine-year-old girls. It all began when Pleasant Rowland, who was working for an educational publishing company at the time, took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. Rowland had had a varied career; she'd been an elementary school teacher , a TV news reporter , a textbook writer. History and education were her passions, and while she was in Virginia, inspiration struck. She sent a postcard detailing her plan to her friend Valerie Tripp , a children's author. As she recalled at American Girl's 25th anniversary celebration , it went something like this: "I've been down in Williamsburg this week and had an idea. What do you think of it? A series of...

Elaine Margolin Contributor In addition to writing book reviews for Truthdig, Elaine is a book critic for The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle , Jerusalem Post, Denver Post, and several literary journals. She has been reviewing… “Sour Heart: Stories” A book by Jenny Zhang It’s easy to see why Lena Dunham chose to publish Jenny Zhang ’s compelling and wildly original debut book of loosely connected short stories at her new Lenny Books imprint at Random House. At first glance, Dunham and Zhang seem to be from different worlds, but there is much that binds them. Dunham grew up a rich kid, the daughter of artists, and attended private school in Manhattan. Zhang grew up the resilient daughter of impoverished and traumatized Chinese -American immigrants who came to America with high hopes that were quickly demolished. Yet the women seem similar in temperament: They are irreverent, defiant and drawn to the hipsters and outlaws who linger at the fringes of our society. Both see...

Deerbrook Farm is a love story, straight out of the True Romance series . It’s about a young girl named Betsy Skillin , born in New York City and raised in Europe, who met Tom O’Connell, an American soldier, on a train traveling from Frankfurt to Paris. She was 14, and he was 20. Their chance meeting led to several years of friendly correspondence. Somewhere along the way, Tom met another woman and married. Betsy married Nolan Welmaker . Tom developed a successful career in advertising sales, and Betsy became known in San Antonio as a successful mother, community volunteer and entrepreneur, opening Violet Talk Gifts in Alamo Heights. I ran into Tom at a business function after he was married and had a daughter,” Betsy says. “I wrote my phone number on the back of his business card and gave it to him.” She invited him to visit San Antonio and then went on with her life. “In 1980, my phone rang,” Betsy continues. “A deep voice said, ‘This is a voice from your past,’ and it turned out...

Photography by: Courtesy of Winter Water Factory Stefanie Lynen and Todd Warnock — shown here in their Brooklyn studio — credit social media for helping grow their business. Lynen focuses on design, while her husband handles day -to-day operations, sales, and marketing. Stefanie Lynen got bitten early by the entrepreneurial bug. As a girl in Germany, she started a "company" with her sister, selling bottles of melted snow gathered from their backyard. They called it " Winter Water Factory ." The business was short-lived (even their parents wouldn't buy the water), but her creative energy was just beginning to flow. Lynen soon learned that she loved to make beautiful things with her hands, from paper chains to knit hats — and she'd easily get carried away. "I could never make just one," she says. About a decade ago, a friend showed Lynen , who started as a freelancer and is now the design director for Martha Stewart Crafts , how to silk-screen,...

By KATE SPICER Published: 22:34 BST, 25 April 2012 | Updated: 10:54 BST, 26 April 2012 270 View comments Kate Spicer wonders if she should have become a teen mum instead of aborting her baby" class="blkBorder" /> Regrets: Kate Spicer wonders if she should have become a teen mum instead of aborting her baby Setting out from my home in sleepy Devon, I catch the bus into the nearest big town , where none of the chemists know my family, and buy two expensive pregnancy tests . It’s the summer holidays after I’ve left  school and perhaps my periods have  stopped because I’ve been anxious  about my A-level results. Or perhaps not. My suspicions that I am pregnant go beyond a missed period: I feel queasy in the mornings.  The pregnancy tests are positive. I run a deep bath, as hot as I can stand it, and drink neat gin until I am sick. It says something about my teenage ignorance that I have resorted to an  old wives’ abortion technique from the 19th century. The onl...