Hi friends. We made it through another week. I’m about to log off for the next few days to celebrate my fortieth birthday with my kids, who have been insisting it’s time for me to get a tattoo (?!), but before I go, some news…
Friday good news:
Care for Writers: End-of-summer Camp is coming up! We start on August 4. We’ll have special guests, including my friend and pod co-host Tracy Clark-Flory, author of the memoir Want Me and the forthcoming memoir My Mother’s Daughter. We’ll have at least one other surprise guest author TBA soon. Every session will include short inspired readings, great writing prompts suitable for fiction and nonfiction authors, and time to write. Sessions will close with author chats with me, our guests, and you.
- dropped this week. This one is totally free and it’s about the childish hero’s journey at the heart of tech bro futurism. I hope you’ll check it out.
This week I’m also on Co-Regulation, a podcast by my friend, mentor, and savior
, talking about sobriety, writing, and feminist writing in the age of anti-feminism.
A writing prompt for your weekend
Below you’ll find a writing prompt for you to use this weekend and beyond. Feel free to drop anything you write in the comments below. Paid subscribers to the newsletter get full access to prompts like these, and to our Reading Group, past author salons, and more.
Our guest author
This week’s prompt comes to us from
, the NYTimes bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You and the novel Last Day, a 2019 NYT Notable book of the year. Domenica is also the co-editor of the anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart and Humor.She's published short fiction and essays in the Iowa Review, the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, The Cut, People, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized a handful of times, most notably in Wanting. She publishes personal essays with zero regularity and lots of love for free on her Substack.
Her latest novel, All the Mothers, is on sale now everywhere books are sold. To find out if she doing a reading or event in your area, check out her website or follow her on Instagram at @domenicaruta .
Envy Is an Arrow by
I recently read an interview with an academic who, after years of teaching and researching medieval literature, figured out she wanted to be a writer because she was always so jealous and resentful of writers. I loved the honesty of that – the true ugliness of desire and shame, of fear and longing. It made me feel a tenderness for her and for myself and all the things that spark this shame we all share, but rarely admit.
In my newest novel, All the Mothers, I wrote a scene at a baby shower in which the protagonist, pregnant by accident and choosing single motherhood rather than partnership with a man she doesn’t love, is confronted by a married friend who is struggling to get pregnant. The friend, by her own accounts, “did everything right” – she coupled up successfully (capitalist-patriarchy’s only gold medal for women) and felt she deserved to be rewarded with a baby before her single friend was.
On the surface, this friend is behaving monstrously by having a tantrum and pulling focus on what should be the protagonist’s special day. But having been on both sides of the jealousy coin so many times at many junctures in my life, I tried to write in to the friend’s deep pain beneath. It makes the scene more interesting, the world more complex.
So let’s explore that in our writing, whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.