Art, anger and writing about the last normal days

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Hi Friend,

Dear

Last week we explored the senses in our roll and write. I like to use these sense exercises as a kind of microscope to look at an aspect in a story. What were all the smells of this place? What did I hear or see? Our ‘guts’ prompt brought out some powerful stories of hunger and fear, and had me listing the many ways anxiety and vigilance showed up in a particular time in my life.

Here is the Ploughshares article I quoted, which I think is a great read.

I was going to take this week off but I can't the theme of THE LAST NORMAL DAY/ WEEK is just too good to resist. The week after I'll do one on the one year anniversary.

I offer these workshops for free but If they feed your creativity I hope you will pay it forward. The Paul Thomas Scholarship fund helps vulnerable kids pursue their education. http://raycam.org/paul-thomas-memorial-scholarship/

Join the conversation! You can join the private facebook group for Truthful Tuesdays at https://www.facebook.com/groups/truthfultuesdays

Some Sunday thoughts on anger and memoir

One of my rules when I was writing Red Star Tattoo was ‘not from anger.” By that I think I meant I never wanted the reader to feel like I was being petty or vindictive in the work. And while I still believe that the writing always has to make space for the reader to fill in their own emotions, lately the wording of that caution against anger hasn’t quite felt accurate.

The poet Jill Bialosky writes that the “the desire to seek truth through art is born out of the idea that a truth needs to be uncovered, and fueling that desire is a yearning for redemption. Perhaps anger is part of that yearning, and that muted over the course of the transcendence of experience into art, is what gives a work its sense of urgency.”

The more I connect with other writers around creative non-fiction the more I see the way rage drives our work: the rage against injustice and loss, the rage against stories and beliefs that hurt us or people we love, the rage to take back some sense of meaning and control.

As a child it was often hard for me to feel anger, but my rage for my younger self kept me writing, kept me advocating on her behalf.

What do you think? What is the role of anger in your writing life?

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Truthfully yours!
Sonja

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PS -- My book Red Star Tattoo My Life as a girl revolutionary (Penguin Random House) is available through Amazon and other online book sellers. For book club orders, consider purchasing directly from me! I'll even chat to you about it on Zoom! You can also enjoy it as an audio book through Audible.com.

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