The Sunflower Girl Collective: 5 Years Later Pt. 1 — Words from the Girls
On August 4th, 2023 the digital space I designed to amplify the voices of marginalized, disabled, queer, femme and nonbinary individuals in Northern Virginia and Washington DC will turn 5 years old.
Hello there & welcome back or welcome to the Sunflower Collective.
My name is Mernine Ameris. I’m the founder of The Sunflower Girl Collective. We started on August 4th, 2018 in a New Jersey backyard while I was on break from college at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. We originally started out as a collection of poems from my upcoming poetry chapbook, Gift From Virgo, the one I was writing to promise myself I could before I was 20. You can learn more about me at mernineameris.me.
You can learn more about The Sunflower Girl Collective & TSFGMag at thesunflowergirlcollective. com. Follow us on instagram and Twitter and like us on Facebook and all that at @sunflowergirlcollective.
I can’t believe it has been 5 years since we started. In 2024, we can’t wait to begin a different journey.
Medium is one of the first places where I spread the wings of the online space. Months like June and July used to carry a beachtime sense of seasonal depression, of smoggy days and a lack of air conditioning. Writing seemed like the ice cream at the end of a long day, an Italian ice amount of satisfaction that carried me throughout the last two years of the decade, like it always had. The summer I started The Sunflower Girl Collective, I was given a possible borderline personality disorder diagnosis, which has since been disputed by many therapists (the plot thickens).
In 2018: Writing about going to my first concert where white people sang the N word back at me, extreme weight loss, seeing a musical with my Haitian mother happened because of Medium. These were all the things I needed to process, the events of being able to hear my people but maybe not always see my people.
In 2019: We started writing about intimacy. My article on Casual Sex was a precursor to the gender wars to come. It is the article that brings me back to Medium every time, and was once the most popular one you could see when you looked up my government name. My parents groaned about a job search. They understood that this article about casual sex or my article about not wanting to get married struck a different chord than any other gendered discourse out there. It was the first time I felt like my voice was distinct. I started to scroll and saw messages of support and love and guides and feedback. So much creativity. I started to share with my 100 or so followers. We became a social space.
In 2020: The world changed and we exploded. TSGC was a blog, an Instagram diary full of snippets from the cutting room floor. Once I published Gift from Virgo, I began to ask myself what was next. I had talented illustrator and graphic design friends who helped spread our message. We had thousands of followers tackling and confront a wide array of cultural topics weekly through sharing beautiful and brutally honest messages through art. We focused on turning off autopilot. What happened next? A podcast, more poems, popular culture shifted beneath our feet, another chapbook. I became a rated author on Goodreads. And spoiler alert — another chapbook is here: Venus in Scorpio by Mernine Ameris is coming.
In 2021: My heart broke. The sentence “ I am a 22 year old queer black woman, Gen Z-millenial cusp, who has never been in a relationship before” was no longer true. I was a 25 year old, firmly Gen Z, queer black woman who had loved and had lost. I did not lose hard, and have a false assumption that I did because of how much I cared and forgot how to calculate that it was a risk that I took. I was living the things that needed to be written about. I was Small Girl, Big Suitcase yet again. I was deeply angry and made Tiktoks to cope. I had to heal my inner middle schooler by becoming a teaching artist. My fingers took a pause, it was all I could do to keep from weeping on pages.
In 2022: I returned to the space with my astrology expert Jadda, the brilliant Carla, the amazingly talented Priya, and my 1 year old nephew Karter. I saw some of my favorite artists perform live already (Rexx Life Raj, Paramore, Flo Milli, Karen Huger, SZA, Beyonce, the list goes on.) I have seen some of my favorite films and TV shows. I’ve taken writing classes again. I have opened my notes app and let myself scream. I went to DC Zinefest, I joined an adult art club, I started a new job. The word collective had a heavier meaning and I brought that into 2023, with our 6-part Zine Series. But that’s another article for another time.
For now, I leave it all in the words of Southern femme author Kayla Rae Whitaker “I wrote because I desperately needed to see myself, and the women I knew and loved, and I wanted to see them exist in a realm outside my own head. I wrote it because I wanted to invent my own sense of hope, to dig myself out of the hole in which I felt I lived perpetually and to find others. I wrote it for the same reason many watch television and movies — because we want to see one another, to feel accompanied as we measure time from the darkness of our respective rooms, knowing that, in some way, we are all tied to one another.” #tsfgmag
