Friday writing prompt
On redefinition
Oh my god, we made it.
News
Only one week left to register for Care for Writers: The Workshop! There are just a handful of spots left across both cohorts, so grab a spot while you can. Both groups are already filled with amazing writers at a variety of levels. This class will be a nourishing, much-needed chance to find your people, think holistically about your writing life with lots of support, and reset your intentions and practice in spite of (and in protest of!) the ongoing chaos. Get paid subscriber discounts here.
Writing Group, our next virtual retreat will be the first week of May. I’m working to get exact dates and times to you next week.
Our inaugural Reading Group will meet next Tuesday 4/22 in the evening 5-6pm PT/8-9 ET on Zoom to discuss Silvia Federici’s essay “Why Sexuality is Work.” We’ll dig into what this essay brought up for us personally, and how we can use the ideas in the essay to define how we are meeting this moment. I’ll email out the link on Tuesday before the event. This discussion will not be recorded, for privacy. Really looking forward to this conversation.
This week’s writing prompt
As a little treat for every paid subscriber who makes this community possible, I share writing prompts roughly every other Friday. 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.
If you want access to this and other writing prompts, and our Reading Group, upcoming author salons, and more, upgrade your subscription.
Reminder to keep our writing prompts within our community. They have been acquired over years of teaching, and I use them in my classes. I offer them as a thank you to paid subscribers for the ongoing support.
Language matters
I’ve been teaching writing since the end of the aughts. I’ve taught every genre of writing, including many years of freshman-level college composition, and one of the things we talk about in every class, at every level, is just how much language shapes our sense of reality. It doesn’t take much to observe this today— violence is being openly waged through the redefinition of language we use to talk about gender, abortion, family, citizenship, and life.
This week, I wrote about the term “libido” and how it shapes our understanding of our own bodies. But as a writing teacher, I also spent many years challenging young people who proclaimed they “hated writing” to simply tell me about words or phrases or trends they found annoying or amazing, watching as they realized that actually, writing about the cultural concepts we live under every day is pretty fun, even radical.