Girl Parts: Catching Up With Local Creative Rachel Richardson

Rachel Richardson has a unique mind both for making things and making them happen. She was CEO of Art Corner Toledo, where she was responsible for coordinating many works of art that now decorate downtown, such as the “Toledo Loves Love” mural by artists Matt Taylor and Chad Kupp on Adams and 13th Streets, or the beautiful piece honoring artist Judy Dilloway on Adams and 11th, across from the downtown library, painted by Maura Amato. Before that, Rachel worked with Independent Advocates, a court advocacy group which helped domestic violence victims within the court system. Now, she’s focused on the world of publishing. The intersection of advocacy and creativity is at the center of her current project, Girl Parts Publishing & Productions.

Girl Parts is a publishing and production company whose focus is on making sure women’s voices are heard. Richardson stated that the idea to form the project came after working on her own memoir, “I Don’t Know Why She Swallowed the Fly.”

“Pretty much everything I’ve done has come from some need for independence, back to when I was doing advocate work,” she said in a Sept. 10 interview. “When I was doing murals, the most fun was when a building owner said, ‘you could do whatever you want.’ The approval process just really got on my nerves. I didn’t know how to get my work seen, and I thought, ‘I’m just gonna skip that part.’”

Richardson’s frustrations are not uncommon; the lengthy process often required to get a manuscript on an editor’s desk is an arduous one, and expensive to boot. She hopes that Girl Parts will help not only facilitate creativity and ideas for local female artists, but also enable them to have their work produced and published in a more accessible way.

Worms for Dinner
Recently, Richardson’s daughter, Naima, inspired a children’s book titled “Just Worms for Dinner!: A Call to Arms.” She said the idea came to her one day when, while out for a walk after a rainstorm, her four-year-old began rescuing worms from the sidewalk. “She got this very specific idea to collect worms for Donald Trump to eat when he goes to jail,” she said. “Several weeks later, she was still talking about it, and I thought, ‘I should write this down, she pretty much has a step-by-step plan.’” Yusuf Lateef, father to Naima and Rachel’s husband, is an accomplished visual artist, and he agreed to do the illustration for the book. Just like that, the first product of Girl Parts was born. Described as “an opportunity to introduce kids to political activism in an age-appropriate way,” the Kickstarter campaign for the book in summer 2020 was very successful.

While publishing is one side of Girl Parts, production is the other. The name of the project derives from a sketch show Richardson began writing in 2018 with the same name. “I had taken a sketch writing class, and just did what I could to put structure around this very amorphous thing that was just a lot of ideas and was going to get ready to start fundraising to produce a show, and suddenly no one was allowed to be in a theater,” she explained, as COVID-19 quarantine hit in March 2020. “So that all went to the back burner, but all along I’d been thinking about video,” she said. The conversion seems as though it will be a great success; Girl Parts Publishing & Productions is currently working on a piece of videographic art which comes from that original series of sketches, to be released in the near future.

Get involved
Girl Parts currently hosts a weekly Zoom meeting on Wednesday nights at 6pm; formerly, it was held in the downtown library. Richardson emphasized that many works of art have come from the meetings; it’s an opportunity to get together with other creative minds and discuss whatever it is you might be working on, whether that’s music, or a play, a poem, or some other art form.

“Even if it’s just renovating your house or learning about stable mental health, whatever you’re working on, you’re welcome to come,” she said. “We update each other on progress and goals, and people offer each other collaboration, feedback, and support.”

At the end of the interview, Rachel was careful to thank the people who have inspired her most. “I want to give a shout-out to Pat O’Connor and Pam Hollenbeck for constant inspiration throughout the process of conceptualization and production. There are a lot of people who’ve passed who I feel very close to, but those two, I can feel them encouraging me to do these creative things [ . . . ] I want to acknowledge that whenever I can.”