Friday writing prompt
On eroticism
Hi friends. We made it.
Some news:
I’m teaching a one-day class on revising braided essays for Write or Die, one of my favorite literary organizations, on Friday April 4. Register here.
On Monday,
, author of the forthcoming novel Animal Instinct, will join us for a live author salon at 10am PT/ 1pm ET. Animal Instinct is about a woman who is recently divorced and undergoing an erotic reawakening, so we will have lots to discuss! The event is for paid subscribers. Zoom info for this virtual event will be sent out Monday morning, and it will be recorded. Come chat with us on Monday.Amy is also a writing teacher and co-founder of Writing Co-Lab. She has a class coming up on journaling and a class for women on the verge. She also recently wrote about blowing up her life and about the GOP targeting no-fault divorce for my alma mater Ms. Magazine with a generous shoutout to this column.
For The Cut,
(who writes the tender, smart, and funny newsletter ) wrote about taking a sabbatical from marital sex and rediscovering her own desire in the process, also generously tagging my work. Sarah was a student of mine long ago and has since become a good friend— and just… what a dream to write a book and not only have it bring extremely brilliant people into your life, but to witness the writing actually move them. Sarah writes:
Without the pressure to attempt sex, I let myself put down the self-help books and pick up others, like Amanda Montei’s Touched Out. I realized that the years between those pining poems and meeting my husband were filled less with satisfaction and more subservience. There, I found memories not of wanting but of wanting to be wanted, of banal misogyny — giving blowjobs to guys who did not know my name; lying prone while boys drew pleasure from me like a syringe, muffling my own with a mixture of confusion and self-loathing. For years, I had been continuing to meld these instincts with the good and loving ones I had toward my husband, and I could no longer tell them apart. My husband, though not without his own physical vulnerabilities — it was years into our relationship before I saw him swim without wearing a T-shirt — didn’t carry these things with him. He showed up to the bedroom with a condom in his pocket; I dragged in a whole dang suitcase.
What was inside? The ghost of every sexual encounter I’d had, 99.9 percent of which had resulted in a boy or man orgasming and, until I was in my late 20s, zero resulting in mine. But it was also the headlines; about Diddy; about the good guys of my childhood who turned out to be very bad; about a girl who was raped, then forced to have the baby that was the result of that rape. It was looking at my daughter’s face, wondering what men would do to her. Even when I practiced the “erotic self-care” that Esther Perel had assigned me, when my husband told me I looked great in my new sweater or reached out for me across the gear shift of the car, all of this came rushing in.
This week’s writing prompt
As a little treat for every paid subscriber who makes this community possible, I share writing prompts most Fridays. These prompts are just to get you going, whether you feel stuck on a current project, want to explore writing in new directions, or just want to write something this weekend for yourself but don’t know how to begin. There is no right or wrong way to do this. This week’s prompt is inspired by some of the writing linked above.
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Please keep these prompts within our community. They have been acquired over many years of teaching, and I use them in my classes. I offer them as a thank you to paid subscribers for the ongoing support.
