Love Your Hate
I am teaching a glorious flash nonfiction class of all women writers right now and we are about halfway through the session. Last week, I found this delightful piece where the author embraces her hate:
https://splitlipthemag.com/poetry/00526/despy-boutris
It inspired me to give a different sort of prompt in my flash class, something I’ve never done before.
I told these brilliant women writers to write about hate. To jump in and swim around in their own rage, to see what happens when they are given permission to screech at the sky.
Yes, reader, I know there’s too much hate in the world right now. Yes, I know it’s destroying our country and we’re having to navigate this every day. I know we are enduring an administration built on the pettiest hate possible and I know it’s exhausting.
But women are raised to be nice, to smile, to be the bigger person, and so I wanted to see what would happen if we just wrote down our hate this one time. If we let it out.
Twenty minutes later, the writers started sharing. We gasped. We laughed. We clapped for each other. It was the highlight of my week and the sound of that session, the joy, the explosion of the release, has stayed with me for days.
I have been on the receiving end of hate, at times that I knew of and I’m sure at times when I didn’t know. When my son was five years old, he came home from visitation with his father and told me that his stepmother played a game with him where she stepped in front of an automatic door at a grocery store and said, “Open the gate, who do we hate? We hate Cindy!” I don’t mind being hated by someone like that but I do mind that my five year old had to endure her bullshit.
But I digress. Making art out of your hate, but obviously not in the presence of the small children of those who have earned your fury, is a whole different thing. I was delighted to see that hate was a prompt that could serve as a spark for people whose work I already love.
So if the hate is keeping you up at night, ruining your appetite, distracting you from the joy in your life, go make some art about it. Let it go, put it down on the page, and if you can, share it with some people who will cackle and applaud you for your honesty.
Thank you for reading.
That was one of the most cathartic things that has happened to me in maybe ever. There was a frozen moment when, after you read the sample piece Cindy, full of restraint-free rage and intelligence, then told us to let loose and go for it ourselves, that we looked at each other shyly as if to say, really?? We're allowed to do this? And then a delicious transition happened, when we all realized that hell yes we're allowed to do this, and omg do I have a lot to say. When we came back after the writing break we were breathless from the relief, and the feeling of freedom and power that exercise gave us. When we started sharing our pieces it was amazing...I am still buzzing from the thrill. I've been working on a re-write all week, I can't seem to stop, about a guy with a giant clam of a face, and an orange comb over... Thank you, jeez what a gift.
I love this so much! Yes, yes, yes!!!!!