Writing Women in Rage

Instructor: Rabia Saeed

 

What happens when a woman writes from fury? How does a woman’s rage erupt onto the page? Repression, rebellion, silence, scream—what forms can it take? How might your own writing tap into the well of furious feeling? 

 

This workshop will begin with a reading of an excerpt from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a novel born, some say, from grief, genius—and rage. From there, we will explore how women have transformed their anger into literature, private emotion into public language: from the gothic tumult of Jane Eyre and to the moral unravelings in Anna Karenina. We will trace a thread through Virginia Woolf’s to the raw emotional terrain of modern voices like Elena Ferrante’s. Alongside these, we’ll engage feminist theory from Audre Lorde and Sarah Ahmed to examine how anger works—not just as emotion, but as resistance, power, and vision.

 

Often, writers are divorced from the lineage of writers that come before them. This writing workshop serves as an introduction to the subject as well as how its subject has been crafted in the past. You’ll experiment with voice and narrative form as you begin short stories, novel excerpts, or hybrid pieces that speak from, through, or around rage. Come ready to read wildly, think deeply, and write with your heart full of fury.

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