Manic Depressive Pixie Dream Ghoul, by Mage Lockhart

Poetry, prose, prose poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Manic Depressive Pixie Dream Ghoul (MDPDG) is a collection of essays and poems ripped straight from the pages of a teenager’s high school diary circa 2014. It fizzes and foams around the drain of the dark, hazy, and recently nostalgia-drenched Tumblr era. The author takes a peek into the past to uncover their younger self at the moment they were just beginning to understand the world – its beauties and its horrors. From depression to binge-drinking and boyfriends, Mage Lockhart’s vivid and visceral musings cover it all.

The works in this collection are – among many things – a treatise on grasping relationships and the struggle to embrace love, a confrontation and co-optation of traditionally feminine ideals, and an exaltation and repudiation of the fairy tales we tell and sell to teenage girls.

Perhaps more than anything else, these works constitute a thunderous shriek deep within the murky and cavernous annals of female rage. The words within illustrate a girl at odds with the world – as well as their own pain, self-destruction, and isolation.

These writings were produced prior to the author’s bipolar diagnosis, and before they came out as queer and non-binary. As such, they capture the frustration and confusion of the era before and during self-discovery, while facing a world sculpted to willfully misunderstand the other.

And, ultimately, this chapbook will answer the question: what if the manic pixie dream girl was more Jennifer’s Body than 500 Days of Summer?

Mage Lockhart is a writer and feminist living in the Pacific Northwest. Their poetry has been heard across the West Coast including with The Los Angeles Poet Society and The Oakland Poetry Slam. Their writing is sometimes gleeful, sometimes macabre and manifests itself in many mediums.