Friday writing prompt
Your weekend assignment
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This week, I spoke with the great
for her podcast about shame and at and I unpacked all the feels about the Wicked press tour
As a thank you to all paid subscribers, below I’m sharing a writing prompt for those struggling to write this week. I hope you’ll 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 the politics of rage
I’ve always been a little uneasy around the politics of anger, which is funny, given the name of this newsletter. For many years, I’ve been interested in feelings and their relationship to politics and art. But much of what I’ve written about in this space explores madness in its other sense: that is, the way we pathologize and hystericize.
Sometimes, when people refer to my book, Touched Out, as a book about feminine anger, I bristle at that, too. I explore many emotions and affective states in the book!
Part of my discomfort is that just as a politics of male grievance has brought us to this moment, feminist grievance and outrage culture only gets us so far, even in the best of hands. And solidarity built exclusively on resentment can be tenuous.
That said, there’s an emerging canon of writing on feminist rage, much of it understandably having a renaissance at the moment, and I cannot get enough of it. All of these books and films are of course also about much more than simply anger—they speak to feelings rules, feralness, gaslighting, the distrust and disbelief of women, domestic abuse and sexual violence, and the many paradoxes of womanhood. Anger is a vehicle for so much.
In my own writing practice, anger is a guide that helps me understand what I don’t understand. It leads me toward the questions I want to ask about the world and about myself. And it sits closely to sadness and shame, but also a subject we will talk about at length next week at our retreat: refusal.