Young women everywhere are being called to rejoice in what it means to be a girl.

Acclaimed playwright and bestselling author Eve Ensler was motivated to write her newest book, I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, by the girls she has seen and met during her travels over the last 10 years, where she has witnessed "all of the things girls are up against."

Ensler is the well-known writer of The Vagina Monologues, which deals with the taboo subject of women's sexuality. In I Am an Emotional Creature, she explores the hardships facing teen girls today.

Girls are "our greatest natural resource" and are seen as "being too alive, too intense, too emotional and too dramatic," Ensler explained in a recent interview with Generation Next. "I wanted to write something so girls don't feel like they are too much of anything and that they could be more."

The book is a collection of fictional monologues inspired by the lives of girls from around the globe and is an extraordinary celebration of everything girls are and what they have the potential to be.

"I hope the book provokes a girl revolution and inspires girls to take back their authenticity, their joy, their anger, their creativity and their emotions, and wakes the rest of us up," Ensler said.

A group of 29 local teenage girls will perform monologues from I Am An Emotional Creature on Feb. 20 at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

Ashley Lopez, 18, a student at Los Alamos High School, has enjoyed rehearsing her monologue titled "The Joke About My Nose" — a story of a young girl who loves herself and her big nose and struggles when her parents force her to get plastic surgery against her will. She is then confronted by the fact that she is now one of the "pretty girls" that she always made fun of.

"She's still herself," Lopez assures her interviewer. "She's still the funny girl, but she's making fun of pretty girls and how they follow these rules that are ridiculous."

Lopez is currently reading the whole book and said it has inspired her.

"Eve wrote this book to make a difference," Lopez said. "She writes, 'I'm older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be OK with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don't want you to have to wait that long.'

"She wrote this because she didn't want us to have to wait that long to figure it out."

The young women of the monologues are confronted with the difficulties of everything from anorexia and pregnancy, to suffering as a Bulgarian sex slave, as well as the tortures of working at a Barbie factory in China.

The title and phrase "I Am an Emotional Creature" is a central piece of the book's main message. "Girls are often taught to feel bad about being emotional," said Ensler, "We need to start saying, 'Yes, I am emotional and it's fantastic.' "

I Am an Emotional Creature is the driving force behind the new V-Day Web site, www.vday.org, through which girls can become a part of the V-Day movement — 'V' for victory, vagina and appropriately for February, Valentine's Day — and help end violence against women and girls. Teen girls are encouraged to join the V-Day community, become an activist and spread the news.

Through the movement, girls are asked to be their "authentic selves" and to be expressive by doing things like creating art and writing.

Girls are also being asked to "listen to the inner voice inside you and begin to discover what you're doing for you and what's to please everyone else," said Ensler, who understands girls' struggles between remaining true to themselves and choosing to please others.

The movement promotes girls developing deeper relationships with others without resorting to trying to always please the other person.

"Girls are trained to feel like they have to please everybody," Ensler said, "girls need to question, to dare, to create — anything but please."

The Feb. 20 performance will benefit the Santa Fe Mountain Center and V-Day. Santa Fe is one of only four cities, including New York and Los Angeles, in which I Am an Emotional Creature is being performed.

"It's really great and powerful," Lopez said. "It's just amazing how unique we are as women. We have this power to be ourselves and to stand up for ourselves."

The reading is intended for teens and their parents alike, because, "Everybody has an inner girl," Ensler said. "Everyone is taught not to be girls, not to express their passion, compassion, vulnerability or intuition," something Ensler has set out to change.

Cecile Lipworth, one of the managing directors of V-Day, said the monologues should be important to local teens.

"In Santa Fe especially where teens are so unnoticed in this town, I think it would give them such a great sense of empowerment and enthusiasm toward building a teen presence," Lipworth said. "Also, I think it's really important that teens see this work because it's quite revolutionary and quite different."

"In these times, there are just so many things going on and happening to women that aren't known and I believe that the monologues of I Am an Emotional Creature are just expressing that," Lopez said. "These monologues, and getting them out to the public, will show everyone — even men — that we're here to make a change. We can make a difference, and we want to. We want to make the world see the power that we have."

Tori Velarde is a junior at Santa Fe High. You can reach her at tori@velardenm.com.