Witchy Links & Things

Sexual "mental health disorders," copulating with the devil, and when normalization isn't a good thing

Yesterday I taught a class on exploring motherhood and sexuality in writing. I was determined to focus the class on pleasure and juice and joy, given all the pain in the world. It was a fantastic class, with an engaged and wise group, and we had the best, most bawdy, most titillating Zoom chat I’ve had in a class maybe ever. Writers wrote deep into their bodies. We all felt things shift and open.

We discussed the many prohibitions women face in writing about sex and motherhood, and we wrote against all that, into the maternal body, into representations of sex that don’t require women to be mothers, into the hedonistic sensual pleasures of food and care, looking at work by Melissa Broder, Melissa Febos, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson,

Angela Garbes

and others.

Later, I took my kids to the pumpkin patch and they jumped around on inflatable bounce houses in the sun until they were hot and sweaty, whining and wishing they had worn less clothes. We left and bought pumpkins somewhere cheaper, then came home, cut the orange tops off their carefully chosen gourds, scooped out intestines. They carved a crow and a face, respectively, with little knives. I tried not to fret about my children ending up in the emergency room. I made a bundt cake from a boxed mix. When I unmolded it later, it fell apart.

late capitalism

I’ve been reading Britney Spears’s memoir—more to come on it later this week—and in it, she talks about taking naps with her children as the closest she’s ever felt to god. It’s one of the more tender moments in the book, and it reminded me of something else we talked about in this weekend’s workshop: the erotics of care— the very good feelings that come with raising children. On the other side of writing Touched Out—of doing the work of scooping out my own insides—it’s been easier for me to settle into these pleasures. This tenderness, this creativity, feels more consensual, but also like a necessary antidote to [gesturing] everything else.

I’ve had a couple requests to run more sessions of my recent classes, and to share the class readings/prompts with subscribers. I’m trying to wind down teaching for the fall, but I promise to run these workshops again soon, and I will be adding more features to the new craft wing of this newsletter, so look out for more information. Until then, you can have me as your literary mom for the month of November— sign up here! Spots are limited. And some exciting book news/events coming soon.

Here, too, are some timely recs & links about hysteria and witches—starting with this excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English’s 1973 Feminist Press pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, with which we began yesterday’s class, and which illustrates how the persecution of witches was rooted in fears of female sexuality (see especially crimes like sex with the devil and giving abortions!):