Some upcoming writing class news: Are you drafting your memoir, collection of essays, or novel? This summer, I’m offering a book development workshop, to help writers revise their messy manuscripts. Fill out this form to share your preferences for the class and to claim a spot on the wait list— you’ll be emailed with a link to register before the class opens to the public.
As a thank you to paid subscribers, I’m sharing a writing prompt for anyone 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 occasional prompts are accessible to paid subscribers as a little treat for what they/you make possible.
On the politics of anger
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 mark reasonable human emotions, and responses to oppression, as pathology or hysteria.
Sometimes, when people refer to my book, Touched Out, as a book about feminine rage, I bristle. I explore many emotions and affective states in the book, beyond anger! 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, and solidarity built exclusively on resentment can be tenuous.
Lately, however, I have softened to anger, even to the dysregulation of rage. Both my own, and others’. There is so much to be angry about, and while joy and pleasure and hope are no doubt states we also have to keep nurturing in defiance, I can fault no one for unbridled anger at injustice these days, especially women and queer people, who are everyday experiencing assaults on their own humanity, both in public and in private spaces.
There’s an emerging canon of writing on feminist rage, much of it understandably having a renaissance at the moment. What I love about these books and films, however, is that they are themselves always about much more than simply one feeling—they speak to feelings rules, feralness, gaslighting, the distrust and disbelief of women, domestic abuse and sexual violence, the many paradoxes of womanhood, how men hamper women’s solidarity, and more. Anger is just a vehicle.
In my own writing practice, anger can be a guide that helps me understand what I don’t understand. It leads me toward questions I want to ask about the world and about myself.