Friday writing prompt
Your weekend assignment
Hi friends, we made it. Some reminders and news:
Annual paid subscriptions to the newsletter are 25% off right now.
I did an author salon with Soraya Chemaly this week and it’s available to all paid subscribers.
As another thank you to every paid subscriber who makes this community possible, below I’m also sharing a writing prompt for anyone struggling to write this week. Feel free to post a line or paragraph of what you write and/or just share a bit about what comes up for you in response to the prompt.
These weekly(ish) prompts are accessible to all paid subscribers as a little treat for what they/you make possible. If you’ve taken a class with me before, you know the drill: take what feels generative for you, toss out the rest. 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 and don’t know how to begin. There is no right or wrong way to do this.
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.
On ungovernability
In her book of essays, Break Every Rule, Carole Maso writes, “If the creation of literary texts affords a kind of license, is a kind of freedom, dizzying, giddy— then why do we more often than not fall back on the old orthodoxy, the old ways of seeing and perceiving and recording that perception?”
Later, in the same essay, she asks, “If we joyfully violate the language contract, might that not make us braver, stronger, more capable of breaking other oppressive contracts? Might our pleasure, our delight, our audacity become irresistible finally?”
Maso calls for writing that is “an active refusal of the dominant code” and places such refusal in the tradition of subverting “the old ways of thinking about gender and race and sexuality.”
This week, in our Writing Group retreat, we’ve been talking a lot about refusal, ungovernability, and undisciplinarity (look at me making up words, refusing to be disciplined!)— specifically about what that might look like in our individual writing practices and styles, but also in our everyday lives.
Below, I’m sharing a compressed version of two prompts we worked with this week, both for those in the Writing Group who couldn’t make our cowriting events, and for all paid subscribers because I think they’re important for anyone writing and thinking during this time.