Girls Write Nashville Teaches Young Women About the Power in Their Voices

On a sticky Saturday morning in June, a group of young girls spills off an L-shaped couch onto a rug nestled between racks of gear in a basement recording studio. Their gazes are fixed on Tiana Williams, their fellow student in Girls Write Nashville. She’s confidently belting out “That Someone Is Me,” an upbeat punk-y pop tune about self-acceptance. Williams wrote the song with singer-songwriter Sarah Clanton, a mentor she met through the program. Everything is going great, until Williams loses her place and tells Girls Write co-director Georgia English, who’s been strumming the chords on her electric guitar, to stop. 

“I’m really glad this happened,” says English. “This is a teachable moment.” English, her fellow co-director Jen Starsinic and Melanie Bresnan (another Girls Write mentor, whose basement we’re in) spend the next few minutes giving advice learned over several years of playing live about how to power through forgetting a lyric. English begins again, and Williams stumbles over a different line. This time, she smiles, does a little dance, and then comes back for a strong finish. “Who even remembers that you messed up?” asks Starsinic, once the applause dies down. “All I remember is how awesome you recovered.”

This was a practice session for the concert marking the end of the second season of Girls Write. On Saturday, the 11 students (plus five more from a co-writing program Starsinic and English started called Writing Teams) will sing their songs at West End songwriter hangout The Local, backed by a band of choice Nashville players. Those include guitarist extraordinaire Ellen Angelico, Will Cafaro on bass and Megan Coleman on drums, plus English and Starsinic on keys, strings and other instruments.  

The show is a release party for a compilation recorded at Nashville’s famed studio The Sound Emporium. The album features each student singing a song she’s written with a mentor (Kyshona Armstrong and Anne McCue are among the outstanding artists on this season’s roster), with whom they’ve been meeting twice a month since January. The mentors and protégés also gathered as a group once each month at the Nashville Public Library’s Studio NPL space, for a writers’ round they called a guild meeting. In a phone call a few days before the practice session, Starsinic explains that the focus of these meetings is encouraging students to be confident in the value of what they have to say.

“A girl will play a song, and it’s really great,” says Starsinic. “And then all the other girls are like, ‘That’s so good! You’re gonna be famous! And I love that shirt that you’re wearing.’ And so we can take the opportunity to be like, ‘Those are all wonderful, kind things that you said. … However, in this phase, what we’re trying to do is talk about songwriting and art. What about her lyrics did you like? How did it make you feel? What did you think was effective? Was there a point in the song that was really meaningful to you? Did it touch you in some way?’ And then they’re like, ‘OK, yeah. That one lyric made me so sad.’ There’s other stuff going on in there, you’re just not used to being invited to talk about it.”

English and Starsinic, former classmates at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, established Girls Write at the end of 2016 with a THRIVE community arts grant from the Metro Arts Commission. They’ve applied for 501(c)(3) federal nonprofit status to be able to raise funds and expand the program. Ideas under consideration include running more than one group at a time, expanding beyond the range of girls ages 7 to 17 that they currently serve and setting up after-school sessions. Students audition to join Girls Write, and there’s no cost. Starsinic emphasizes that it’s designed as a coaching scenario for girls who show they have a passion for communicating through music, and that it’s important to eliminate as many barriers to participation as possible. So far, Girls Write has admitted most applicants.

If enthusiasm and drive are some of the most important qualities for a Girls Write student, rising high school sophomore Imani Miles has them to spare. She’s already self-produced and released a slew of sophisticated and distinctive R&B-pop tracks under the name I.A.M.Love, and she plans to finish a full-length by the time she graduates. She’s also taught music production to students in the poetry-centered program Southern Word and participated in both runs of Girls Write. Her contribution to this season’s compilation is called “Summertime.” She and the house band wrote a new arrangement that changes the song’s character dramatically without changing the lyrics.

“The one that I did with Girls Write is kind of a spinoff, darker version,” says Miles. “The first one is just about summertime. It’s really happy, it’s really poppy. It’s like, ‘Oh it’s just summertime, we’re gonna relax and we’re gonna have fun and that good stuff.’ Then the second version of that song is kind of like a dark, longing version. … ‘We’re gonna cherish summertime. We’re gonna live this together and kind of be together.’ ”

That’s the kind of creative breakthrough advanced students might look forward to. Starsinic remembers a different sort of breakthrough moment for another student that may even be more important. It came during Girls Write’s first season, as Starsinic waited with the student in the hall at The Sound Emporium. 

“She was looking at one of the Taylor Swift records on the wall that was recorded there,” Starsinic says, “and she’s like, ‘Someday I just want to be famous, because I just want someone to look at me and think, “I’m worth getting to come to a recording studio like this and make my music.” ’ I was just like, ‘Well, I think that’s what’s happening right now.’ ”