Why We're On the Verge
And why writing matters in times like these
You may have noticed that the name of this newsletter has changed. I started this thing on a whim after I was unceremoniously laid off from my media job and was trying to figure out if I could do what I’d actually wanted to do all along — teaching, working 1:1 with editing and coaching clients, and running retreats. (So far so good… now booking new clients for November!)
Three years in (!) I’m finally thinking about how to be more cohesive with my offerings, and what seems to work best for my writers. My most popular and beloved writing class is called Writing for Women on the Verge, and like an encouraging/permissive Brooklyn mother, I’m letting her grow and expand as she wants to, from generative class to intermediate workshop to (coming soon!) a self-paced course and (coming a little less soon but still soon!) retreats. This newsletter is really part of the same project, so I’m renaming it “Writing on the Verge” for tidiness’ sake, but its theme hasn’t changed — it’s still about getting your writing unstuck. And “Writing on the Verge of Getting Unstuck” seemed a little long.
This language — this “on the verge”ness — has clearly resonated with people. But what does it actually mean to be “on the verge”? This is something I can’t say I’ve ever fully defined in offering these offerings. And yet the people who flock to them always know intuitively exactly what I mean.
Now, obviously you don’t have to be a woman to feel like you miiiiight be losing it. (Or to read this newsletter.) But I do think women — especially in our particular moment — are especially primed to feel like ambulatory Cathy cartoons, all frizzly hair and wild eyes. I mean, reproductive rights and gender-affirming care are slipping away, purity culture is back in, body positivity is back out, toxic masculinity seems to have bulked up on some sort of dystopian steroids, straight women in the dating pool are so not okay that there’s now something called “heterofatalism,” women who are married to men are apparently still having this same fucking conversation about the mental load and household equality, queer and trans women are bracing for rights to be stripped away, and for a million other reasons (as Anne Helen Peterson puts it so well in last week’s Culture Study), we’re exhausted. Everything is expensive. Many of us are afraid we’re going to lose our health care or whatever government assistance has made it possible to make ends meet. And like, have you seen who is in charge of things? And like, have you read the news? Ack!
So we may be excused for feeling a little… on the verge. On the verge of a nervous breakdown. On the verge of losing it entirely. On the verge of getting in the car and taking off, and driving all the way out of range.
This, incidentally, is an elemental storyline within the WOTV curriculum — the woman who just drives off one day — whether we’re reading (and then writing our own versions of)
’s fantastic short story “Burn Rubber” or Paula Bomer’s super verge-y novel Nine Months, or Sheila Ballantyne’s classic “mad housewife” book Norma Jean the Termite Queen, or ’s recent addition to the genre, All Fours, or what have you. And hold the phone, I literally just remembered I wrote one of these too — my first novel How Far is the Ocean From Here is about a pregnant surrogate mother hopping in her car and taking off for the desert.This is one of the many talismanic tentpoles of the WOTV genre, but I think it’s a useful one to look at. In each of the examples I just listed, women — mothers, mind you! — simply take off one day. They are responsible family members, necessary cogs in the machine of society, who feel overwhelmed and underappreciated, and who snap. They pack up their cars — sometimes calmly, sometimes frantically — and drive away. They don’t do the things they are supposed to do, choosing the freedom of the open road instead. There is no more boredom, only excitement. No one can get a hold of them. They are alone, and they are free.
It’s terribly American, isn’t it? Or is it nostalgic? Or maybe what I mean is, it’s a fantasy. It’s the cowboy on the plain, or the rebels on the road, or the glamorous outlaws telling the everyday world to fuck off. A fantasy that hasn’t typically been enacted by women, unless you count Thelma and Louise.
Here’s the joy in a “jump in the car and just drive” story: We don’t actually want to abandon our families and homes and jobs and to-do lists. Of course we don’t. But sometimes, a little bit, maybe, we do. Or we want, anyway, to imagine a fictional self that would. “What would my husband even do,” one writer I know mused, “I mean once he noticed I was gone? Would he suddenly acknowledge and appreciate everything I do when I’m there?”
What if. It’s a deep joy of writing, I think, is getting to linger in the “what if.”
There’s a beautiful and horrible freedom in living out on the page that thing you would never actually do. When the mother in “Burn Rubber” starts driving in circles around her suburb, we might cheer — hell yeah, she’s sick of being so dependable! When she purchases adult diapers so that she doesn’t have to stop — we might reconsider. Ohhh right, we knew this all along, that this is unwell behavior, and that it would hurt our loved ones and lives and selves, which is why we grit our teeth and pull into the Target parking lot to meticulously buy all the school supplies on the list, despite the call of the open highway.
This is why, in my course materials, I suggest, “Instead of running away from home... try this class first?” Because in writing we can sometimes enact or at least entertain ideas that are taboo, or strange, or unsettling, but that flit into our minds anyway. We can play “what if” while still appearing to be respectable citizens. It’s a kind of play. It makes me think of how, when my son was a toddler with SO much energy, I realized why sports exist — so that’s where they put all the energy! Maybe our brains are like fractious toddlers, and writing is a giant rumpus room.
If you’re feeling stuck with your writing, whether you’re mid-project or trying to start something new, try playing “what if" with yourself. That thing you think about, but would never actually do? What’s behind that, anyway?
And if you’d like to verge in good company, grab one of the last spots in my generative Thursday afternoon class, or apply for the intermediate Writing for Women on the Verge workshop! They both start in September, and will, let’s hope, cure what ails you.
Great new name!!
Love the name change!