Jill Kolongowski, Brooke Champagne, Nicole Graev Lipson, Amy Monticello, and Beth Ann Fennelly, “Anger Had Snatched Her Pencil While She Dreamt”: Rage as a Craft Tool" (Assay 12.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.2

Jill Kolongowski, Brooke Champagne, Nicole Graev Lipson, Amy Monticello, and Beth Ann Fennelly

“Anger Had Snatched Her Pencil While She Dreamt”:
Rage as a Craft Tool

“Every woman I know has been storing anger for years in her body,
and it’s starting to feel like bees are going to pour out of all of our mouths at the same time.”
- Erin Keane, 2018

Introduction: Keep Calm and Do Not Carry On

For most of my life, I (Jill Kolongowski) prided myself on not being an angry person. My parents rarely yelled, I rarely yelled, I’ve never been in a physical fight, even with my sister. I thought this made me a good person. And then, in my thirties, I became a mother. My anxiety about this new, perfect being I had to keep alive and whole and happy (especially for a baby born in May 2020, as the world shut down for the pandemic and the prevailing sentiment at the time was that COVID could be deadly for infants) transformed into rage. I couldn’t tell you what, exactly, I was angry about. Not at my perfect, beloved daughter, not at my husband. Even five years and another child later I’m not sure I can describe it. It felt like my body was too full; I suddenly contained more than I could bear, and I could never be as good as I wanted to be, as my daughter needed me to be. Every time she cried it felt like a failure, that I was fucking it up, fucking her up, and that made me furious. My rage felt enormous, shapeless, spilling out of me. The rage had nowhere to go, so I turned it inward. I threw things, went out to the car to scream, began hitting myself in the face

Because I wanted to understand my new rage more, I started reading book after book about women’s rage. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her, Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage, the anthology Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger, edited by Lilly Dancyger, and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch. Of course, then I wanted to write my own rage.

There was plenty of writing about anger itself, about the things that made women angry (and rightfully so), but less about rage as a craft tool itself. As I started to gather writers for a NonfictioNow panel, we discovered that many of us had been told by editors to edit our rage out of our final drafts. Beth Ann Fennelly notes that when she did express anger on the page, it was dismissed as childish, sentimental, defanged. Rage was fine for early drafts, for brainstorming, but was often much less acceptable for final drafts. No rants, angry sentence fragments, not too many or too harsh curse words, just shape up, calm down. Evidence of rage was a craft failing, lazy, too emotional, obscuring some better, more noble idea. In a review of Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down, Dani Shapiro wrote that the book was “dripping with rage.” This was not a compliment. In a review of Dubin’s Mom Rage, Merve Emre scoffed, “She sensed that her reactions were excessive, but she made no real effort to understand. Understanding was not the point of her essay. The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed—spectacularly, obscenely—into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.” The message: grow up. This rage is wrong, unbecoming. It’s worth pointing out that critiques like these are rarely given to male writers.

You already know the reasons why this is—the misogyny and racism of it all. Black women have been subject to the racist stereotype of the Angry Black Woman for hundreds of years as a way to discredit them and justify so much violence and repression. But I wondered why we still dismiss anger on the page as a lesser form of expression in nonfiction in particular. Why, when readers or editors spot the clipped or the loose, wild sentences of rage, the curse words, the monsters in the characters, they decide this is not just uninteresting and reprehensible as a subject, but weak craft as well. We allow it for fictional characters, but once the anger is true, it’s rejected. For men, Soraya Chemaly writes, when they become angry in an argument or debate, people are more likely to abandon their own positions and defer to his. But when a woman acts the same way, she’s likely to elicit the opposite response (xvii). Additionally, Chemaly writes that, when women are justifiably angry and expect a reasonable response, we are walking, talking refutations of this status quo (xxi). In expressing anger and demanding to be heard, we reveal the deeper belief that we can engage with and shape the world around us—a right that, until now, has almost always been reserved for men.

Thus, anger can be perceived as threatening. Women’s anger is perceived as unserious, disparaged, pathologized as a kind of “illness,” and punished. This is also true for men and nonbinary folks who fall outside the patriarchal norms—this deviation from the masculine norms is considered, by definition, feminine, and thus also punished by extension. Rage is severed from “good womanhood” itself, anathema to our very being. Anger rejects all the norms expected of women, and reading it on the page forces the reader to confront that rejection as more than a loss of emotional control. On the page, rage is the opposite of rage in real life. On the page, rage is threatening precisely because it’s a deliberate, calculated violation.

As a result, many of us (though not all!) adopted what Soraya Chemaly calls “bodies of deference.” She writes that, “Women live their lives trying to create bodies of deference. And anger is not compatible with deference. Objectification denies us subjectivity, and anger is all about subjectivity. You can’t express anger without asserting I and your own perspective” (47, emphasis original). Women then self-surveil for rage, and self-censor to edit it out of both our professional and personal lives. I am, of course, speaking generally—some women are able to push back, though the personal and professional punishment for it still exists. For some of my copanelists (Brooke Champagne, Beth Ann Fennelly, Nicole Graev Lipson, and Amy Monticello), this “body of deference” used to manifest in our craft. Sometimes, the self-censoring looked like an intense focus on audience and/or how we were perceived on the page. We feared being perceived as a victim, or being perceived as too self-centered or too sentimental. We shied away from “uglier” sides of our own characters. Some see anger as an ugly emotion generally, but for men, anger is often associated with power, and often the only emotion they are allowed to truly express. To me, there’s a cultural rubber-stamping of anger for men, even if it’s not always venerated.

On the sentence level, these fears made us focus intensely on word choice, or avoid overuse of “I” or “me.” Of course, defining what “too much” means is impossible. This also sometimes manifested as self-deprecating humor. We laughed at ourselves before the reader could. We wanted our work to be seen and taken seriously. As a result, we erased parts of ourselves, parts of our stories, and by extension, part of the truth.

What follows are mini craft essays where we show our work: how we each rejected false ideals of “polished,” subdued prose for women, how we harnessed and portrayed rage on the page in order to break silences and tell the fullest, truest story.

Sentenced: Rage at its Smallest—Jill Kolongowski

I wrote about the birth of my own rage and the reading I did to try to understand it, but nothing made me want to be angrier on the page than having a miscarriage. My baby had a low heart rate that didn’t improve after a few weeks, so for a little while I walked around carrying a baby that I knew was dying. What I felt most in this horrible, in-between time, this vigil, was not sadness or hopelessness, but fury. The floating postpartum rage I’d felt after my surviving daughter’s birth had sharpened, clarified. Miscarriage is incredibly common, and most of the time caused by genetic anomalies (nothing I did), but where else could I place my anger and blame?

Like with many other kinds of grief, I felt a kind of survivor’s guilt; I felt a rage at the unfairness, and I felt rage that this tiny death happened at all, to anyone, to so many. While many people tried to reassure me, the subtext of so much literature about miscarriage is that, because it’s so common (one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage!), it’s just a part of life, sad, yes, and quiet down now. You already had a kid, lucky, so it’s time to move on. My rage was that those voices told women to accept the pain, and then get over it.

So when I wrote, I wanted to make the reader hurt. I didn’t write my story to cultivate empathy or understanding in a reader, but make them truly feel the pain with me. I didn’t care about being perceived as sentimental. Sentiment was the entire point. The uniquely awful experience of carrying a dying baby felt like being an unwilling ghost. People spoke in platitudes, talked around me, talked about themselves, looked at me with pity, wanted me to move on. Because so much of the cultural conversation about miscarriage minimizes the experience, I wanted to show exactly how bad it felt and thus use my rage to open conversations about better miscarriage support.

I considered using long, looping, run-on sentences, like a rant, but instead I used short, clipped sentences. I used anaphora, repeated sounds and words at the beginning of sentences. I wanted to pre-empt the dismissal of women's rage as excess, and instead used my sentences like a chisel (to borrow Beth Ann’s perfect metaphor she’ll use later), or a hammer, insistent, precise in its strike. I wanted my sentences to appear stereotypically masculine. I also deliberately broke the unspoken writing rules to vary your sentence structure and to not use the pronoun “I” too much. Because this was rage at feeling invisible, I intentionally used “I” at the beginning of as many sentences as I could.

I text everyone who knows I’m pregnant. I am very direct. I want them to feel what I feel. I tell them I am carrying a baby who is alive for now. I tell them I am carrying a baby who is probably going to die. I tell them I’m carrying a baby who is dying. Cruel fact seems the only thing I can take. I want it brutal…
We take the trip we were already planning, to a cottage I’ve been going to since childhood. I think it will be a good distraction. I am sort of right. I take my dying baby on vacation: I take my dying baby on an airplane. I take my dying baby to see my family. I take my dying baby on a boat ride. I take my dying baby swimming with their sister. I feed my dying baby ice cream. It’s sweet. It’s fun. I cannot bear it.”
— from “Tart,” The Sun, March 2025

I wanted to assert myself, and I wanted my anger to feel like a declarative statement, the sentiment a fact, something that forced a reader to look. My rage felt like a new room I’d discovered in my brain, a new color in the world, and I was glad to get to know it. Most importantly, it was the tool I needed to tell my story with the full spectrum of humanity, as true as I could.

“A Cunt Walks into a Carnival”—Brooke Champagne

In my work, I reclaimed another tool that’s often relegated to brainstorming and early drafts, always edited out for publication: the curse word. Specifically, “cunt.” Chemaly notes that, when men and women use the same curse words, it’s considered more offensive from women. In the following paragraphs, I refuse the self-censorship. My cuntiness is the point—without it, the whole story couldn’t be told.

As an American mother with a memory and a pulse, I (Brooke) give you this day my daily rage at both the smallest infractions and the shattering, world-on-fire morass I’ve decided to breed amongst. And the only way—I mean the only way—I survive any of it is through humor and its common lubricant: profanity. The world we live in is profane, and yes, it too is sacred. Rather than conducting public rites of religious practice (i.e. attending church), I perform the sacred in private, and the profane in public.

In writing, I hope to convert my puny sorrows into epic traumas because this is one of the chambers in the beating heart of comedy, as I understand it: tumescent rage directed toward negligible transgressions. Sweating the small stuff may not be great for the psyche, but when I reconstruct my disproportionate rages into scenes, I laugh at the unintentional clown I become under the weight of my angers. In composing the clown, I learn to love her. One unfortunate side effect of my generalized rage is smug, scoldy sanctimoniousness, qualities I scorn in others but would prefer not to see in myself. My greatest fear is to become that type of self-righteous writer, and person. Instead, I hope to build my narrators as balls of combined victimhood and villainy who will irreverently curse herself and others for failing, but try to do better the next time, and many times over. My chanting of certain irreligious words during fits of rage sometimes even takes the intonation of prayer. There’s something sacred within my profanity, come to think of it.

Here’s the cuntiest, puniest story of unrequited rage that I have: When I was eight months pregnant, balancing precariously on the edge of sanity, my three-year-old daughter ascended the springy stairs of a two-story bouncy castle with the intention of sliding back down to earth. But when she reached the top, oh, hell-to-the-no. She would not slide down. At least, not alone. Her arms reached toward me; her meltdown was imminent.

My eyes scaled the semi-herculean task before me. I wasn’t just rotund, I was the Louisiana Superdome; however, I knew I wasn’t incapable of the climb. I still jogged regularly, though at a snail’s pace, and lifted the weight of my growing girl. But I didn’t want to cut the long line of rugrats in front of me, plus I wasn’t sure whether adults were allowed aboard. (Despite what you’ll learn below, I’m a compunctious rule follower). So, I sought help from a candy-faced volunteer at this local Tuscaloosa carnival I’d made the mistake of driving past. I asked the young lady if she’d mind climbing up the castle to retrieve my near-tears daughter.

Her nametag read VOLUNTEER, as if this were her proper name. She stared back at me with dead fish eyes.

Or, if she liked, I didn’t mind crawling up there myself to rescue my daughter. I didn’t admit it, but this was my preferred scenario: to storm the bouncy castle with my beachball torso, to perform the role of waddling epic hero.

VOLUNTEER, likely not yet a high schooler, shifted nervously. She looked me up and down. “Um?” she asked. “I think I need to go ask someone? I’m not sure if the bouncy castle has a weight limit?” She disappeared into the crowd, and I never saw her again. Though in the following minutes, hours, and let’s face it, even weeks after the birth of my son, she was never far from my mind.

I couldn’t stop thinking of this teenager as a single word: cunt. Learning to self-soothe is the definitive buzzword for newborns, one of which would soon burst from my vagina, while adults graduate to self-care for long-term maintenance of our collective spirits. Nothing says self-care for me more than saying “cunt” like an incantation when I am wounded. Because it’s not what I’m supposed to think or say, because despite being a rule-follower it reminds me I can at least utter a word that is mercilessly vicious. And so I thought to myself that VOLUNTEER was a cunt (to be fair, had VOLUNTEER been a boy, it wouldn’t have mattered. The word applies gender-neutrally toward its object, though of course when the speaker of “cunt” is a woman it’s that much more verboten, which is why it works so well!). VOLUNTEER was a cunt because she didn’t help me, cunt because she didn’t do her (admittedly voluntary) job, cunt because she phrased statements as questions, and most significantly cunt because she wondered aloud just what damage my mother-earth-enormity of a body could do. Well, my vocal cords don’t weigh an ounce, sweetie, but they can call you cunt…was my immediate internal response. I didn’t even get to react with a single side-eye before she vanished from my life forever. My daughter did, predictably, come down on her own. We assuaged her fear and my rage with a shared double-scoop chocolate chip waffle cone.

Let me be clear by saying this possibly-sweet young person had not behaved like a cunt, something I knew even in the heat of her unintentional sick burn. In fact, I felt like a cunt myself, since guilt is never far from my rage. VOLUNTEER was simply doing a job she didn’t understand. Similarly, living in my newly-huge body was a job I didn’t understand. But still, when the world’s standards feel stacked against me, when I’m hurt, thus angry, thus powerless to cease my suffering, “cunt” is my best medicine. Everyone has a go-to naughty word, even saccharine Southern gals who say “son-of-a-biscuit,” and whom I’d never judge (to their faces). But mine is “cunt,” and science says it and helps mitigate negative psychic and physical emotions, including pain (for more on this science, I’ve launched a whole linguistic inquiry into the word in my essay “The Case for ‘Cunt,’” which appears in my debut essay collection, Nola Face).

In the anecdote above, I’m conveying the righteous rage at the meant-to-be-anodyne but actually-annoying-as-fuck comments that (pregnant) women receive about their bodies every day. More profound rage undergirds the event: the time, place, and Deep South politics in which I live, the anxiety that I cannot handle the small responsibilities of one child’s life, so how the hell can I deal with two, the two horrific miscarriages preceding this pregnancy, and the list could go on and on. But instead, I focus my rage toward one comment, posed in the form of a question by the VOLUNTEER to show how certain members of the youth speak today, and to internally scream “cunt” in reaction to it: my hope is that this makes my narrator both virtuous and foolish. There’s a sweet spot of writing rage comedically where creating a character who is parts right and parts wrong in nearly any situation enhances the nuance and humor. Ultimately if Brooke-as-narrator behaves cuntily in her rage, she wears it as a badge much like VOLUNTEER wore: CUNT.

Rage as an Unburned Bridge—Nicole Graev Lipson

Like many of us, I see becoming a mother as a crucial turning point in my understanding of anger’s nuances and generative potential—a phenomenon I explore in my memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (Chronicle Books, 2025). In my writing, I work, even down to the sentence level, to refuse shame and risk likability in order to fully mine what my rage has to show me about the conditions of contemporary womanhood and motherhood. By using blunt, plain language when describing my anger, I normalize female rage and push back against the notion that it must be tucked away or softened with an apologetic smile.

As a girl, I was a rule-follower and people-pleaser, and—much like Beth Ann—I carved out a niche as the easy one in the family. I kept my head down, worked painstakingly hard in school, and craved nothing more than feeling my parents’ and teachers’ approval wash over me. In many ways, I was the textbook high-achieving, middle-class girl. I did ballet—that consummate emblem of female self-discipline—and practiced alone in my room on a clockwork schedule. I filled the pages of my journals with self-improvement regimens. During these years, I did not have a name for the chronic pinched tightness in my chest, or the waves of irritation that would flood my body daily without warning—but I believe now that these were sublimated fury, rattling the bars of its cage. Fury at what? At the world, for giving me this small, cramped corner in which to prove myself. And at myself, for accepting it.

In early adolescence, my buried anger expressed itself in what I can best describe as sullenness. Without words to put to my feelings—or an understanding of their source—I worked hard to contain them. Being around others—my parents and extended family especially—exacerbated my irritability, so I withdrew myself from their presence as much as possible. For nearly a year, when I was thirteen, I hardly talked to anyone but my friends. Adults were risky. In their presence, I often felt as if I were on the verge of cracking open, my angry, fiery insides spilling out.

I eventually started talking again, but it took years for me to stop turning my anger inward. During college and for some years beyond, the impulse to contain and hide my feelings found a new outlet in the form of an eating disorder. Restricting what I allowed into my body made me feel in control of all my unruly urges and needs—as if shrinking down my body could shrink down the feelings it housed.

It wasn’t until I became a mother that I finally experienced the full, explosive depth and breadth of my rage. The conditions of early motherhood—the sleep deprivation, the constant vigilance, the surrender of bodily autonomy, the lost sense of self, the seeping boredom, the tectonic shifts in my husband’s and my relationship that had tumbled us into traditional gender roles—ignited a fury in me too huge to keep under wraps. I found joy and purpose in many aspects of motherhood, but the impossible demands of being the primary caregiver of young children within a patriarchal nuclear family structure pushed me to my breaking point daily.

I wish I could say I was able, like Jill, to protect my children from my anger in those early years of motherhood. But it took me a while to get to this point. I did not yet grasp that it wasn’t my children, my husband, or myself who was to blame for the crucible I found myself in, but the expectations of a culture that has never been designed to help mothers flourish. Failing to meet these expectations filled me with shame, and as I describe in Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, “Anyone who knows shame knows its destructive powers, how easily it edges into rage. And because there’s no acceptable space for mothers to direct this rage, it frequently gets directed at the very children we long desperately to do well by—because they are there, because they are small, because they cannot help, in their humanness, to provoke feelings in us of deficiency. Because we mistake them for the cause of our shame, when really, they’re the victims of its fallout.”

I recently came across a passage in Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born that powerfully conveys the trickle-down effect of control and domination in a patriarchal culture, and how it ultimately harms children: “The child dragged by the arm across the room to be washed, the child cajoled, bullied, and bribed into taking ‘one more bite’ of a detested food, is more than just a child which must be reared according to cultural traditions of ‘good mothering,’” Rich writes. “S/he is a piece of reality, of the world, which can be acted on, even modified, by a woman restricted from acting on anything else except inert materials like dust and food.”

Gaining critical distance from my anger didn’t erase it, but it did help me redirect it away from the people I love most in the world and toward the institutions and norms that make the lives of mothers in the United States so very hard. I began to appreciate what my anger had to tell me about the world and its injustices, and more and more, I found this anger to be a galvanizing fuel for my writing. What’s more, I discovered through experimentation that by drawing on the tools of nonfiction craft, I could transform my rage from a chaotic, destructive force into a more deliberate and constructive mode of communication. Through my choices around sentence style, diction, image, and more, I was able to harness my anger and finally make it do what I really wanted it to do, which was to illuminate how systems of inequality can seep into the most private and intimate corners of women’s lives.

One of the practices that helped me redirect my anger was facing head-on, in writing, the ways in which it had infiltrated my interactions with my children. Instead of brushing these hard moments between us under the carpet, I decided to hold them up to the light and conjure them in scene as truthfully and honestly as I could, using plain, direct, reportorial language. In my essay “A Place, or a State of Affairs,” for instance, I use frank, straightforward sentences to depict myself erupting at the end of an afternoon at home with my three young children, bombarded by their needs and demands without a break:

I brought over bowls of pretzels, and then asked the kids to clear their emptied bowls, and then asked so many times that the asks became yells and then the yells coalesced into a single guttural howl. Jacob began to cry, because he is exquisitely sensitive, and because truly, I shouldn’t howl at my children. I wanted to talk with them about this, to redeem myself, to debrief. But…it was closing in on dinner time—and there were still baths to do—so instead I grabbed green beans from the fridge and started furiously snapping off the ends, furious at myself, furious at my kids for making me furious at myself. My legs throbbed and the corners of my eyes burned with anger and shame, and suddenly, I felt so cramped, so hot, and I realized that I still hadn’t taken off my jacket.

In this passage, I used long, multi-claused sentences in order to conjure a feeling of accretion and growing tension. I wanted readers to feel, syntactically, the pile-up of demands and inward sensations that led to my cracking point. Am I proud of this moment in my kitchen? No. But it was important to me to depict it truthfully, in all its mess, in order to show how the pressures on mothers infiltrate family dynamics, jeopardizing our tenderest, most intimate relationships. I wanted to help other rageful mothers feel less alone—and selfishly, I longed to feel less alone as well.

Channeling my rage into my writing, I have felt it transform from a destructive force into a means of building bridges—between myself and my readers, between myself and my family, between the human I am and the human I want to be.

Rage Woman Steals Your Narrator—Amy Monticello

My rage was a symptom of premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and I wanted to harness that rage as not “just” a symptom but a takeover of the self. Creating a second self for PMDD, one willing to be unbecoming on the page, allowed me to play with the intemperance of rage.

My mother said she could hear PMDD in my voice. “It has an edge,” she told me, trying to describe my tell. “Why do you call me when you’re like this?” Because, as I write in my essay “A Woman’s Prime,” recently published in the North American Review, “she’s my mom. Because my father is dead and she is now the only person on this planet obligated to love me when I’m like this. Because I want her to fix me. Because I’d rather ruin her day instead of my daughter’s.”

There’s a spiraling quality to PMDD rage that can descend into melodrama (my family’s nickname for me is Sarah Bernhardt, after the 19th-century stage actress, deployed as shorthand in my childhood as shorthand for Stop being ridiculous, Amy )—something my husband and I often laughed at when an episode had passed. Like the time I threatened to divorce him because, as I write, “he filled out a form incorrectly, which leads to telling him he never fills out forms correctly, which leads to saying he perpetually thinks he doesn’t have to follow instructions or read his email when I always follow instructions and read my email. This is so fucking offensive I almost can’t believe I married him.” Absurdism also appeals to me because PMDD is all too real. It tried to kill me, as it tries to kill 34% of women diagnosed. There’s something wildly illogical—indeed, enraging—about the ten years it took to find a doctor willing to try chemical menopause and hormone replacement therapy, which probably saved my life. Finding myself absurd is, I hope, a way of showcasing the absurdity of women’s healthcare. As a character, my PMDD stands in for all the irrational or altogether unavailable treatment women receive as they go through perimenopause in an increasingly terrifying world that depends on women’s labor.

Though at its worst my PMDD lasted twenty days a month and thus became my “typical” state of existence—one that could lend credence to conservative claims about women’s fitness for leadership and that the medical establishment treated with antidepressants, bypassing the root cause— I desperately clung to the belief that I was still someone else outside my diagnosis. To write about PMDD, I had to explain—and more importantly, illustrate—a bifurcated existence where I vacillated between versions of myself. To do this, I borrowed a strategy from Sonya Huber’s Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays From a Nervous System (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). I made a character out of PMDD who could speak (read: scream, spiral, rant, accuse, and tell you off) for herself.

In lyric essays that include lists, prose poetry, and epistles, Huber makes a character (and sometimes narrator) of her chronic pain. This character, Pain Woman, has little patience for the expectations foisted upon people with disabilities nor the restraint to suffer them silently. In the title essay, Huber writes, “Pain Woman gives no shits. Pain Woman has stuff to tell you, and she has one minute to do so before she’s too tired. Pain Woman knows things” (101). In these quick, to-the-point lines, Huber observes her second self—her shortened fuse, her sense of urgency, her exhaustion. But in “Dear Noted Feminist Scholar,” what begins as a polite, academic email to someone bothering the narrator to join a conference panel turns into a sharp, far less restricted rebuke. “Thank you for not taking no for an answer,” the narrator says at the turn of the essay, “and for making me articulate exactly what it means to live with a disease that is both painful and energy sapping” (117). The letter gains heat from here. Every subsequent “thank you” expands the circle of all-too-frequent experiences the narrator has had living with a disability. Her gritted-teeth courtesy ultimately positions herself not only in this email exchange but in a world where “social capital is created with bodily appearances” (118). By the end, Pain Woman’s anger has become the essay’s engine.

Unlike Huber in her non-pain state, Pain Woman holds firmer boundaries, speaks her needs more directly, and has more “messianic confidence” (101). But her clarity, and the humor that accompanies it, come from the bandwidth Huber’s pain imposes on her day-to-day life. So while Pain Woman is absolutely a badass, she—and Huber—are also suffering. Such tension is embodied by the book’s polyvocal nature, which Huber expounds on in her excellent craft guide Voice First (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Once I began to see PMDD as a second self, I began to write about it—and so many other things—differently. Instead of the earnest shame and self-deprecation I’ve used to make myself more likable, I adopted a posture of rebellion and fascination. I turned myself into a car wreck from which I couldn’t stop rubbernecking. Who was this hot mess running around my house, flipping off finance bros at fancy downtown bars, and kicking at the taillights of cars that didn’t fully stop at the crosswalk? Certainly she wasn’t the college professor who, like Huber, speaks academic jargon fluently in a hundred professional-sounding emails a day.

Here’s a short passage from “A Woman’s Prime” where PMDD is in the driver’s seat:

Look, it’s not all bad. PMDD makes an excellent scapegoat for a certain kind of hedonism otherwise denied to women my age. It’s like the way my mother treated me when I was sick as a kid, one of the only times she coddled me. The higher my fever, the more Blockbuster rentals, issues of Sassy, and ice cream I could have.
So if, in the 2+ weeks per month that I’m under PMDD’s influence, I want something I might not normally permit myself, I can always say PMDD wants it.
PMDD wants tacos from Chilacates for dinner.
PMDD needs two hours of quiet during which the only sound it hears is the lighting of a bowl of weed.
PMDD is thirsty for six mint juleps.
PMDD advises that braving the museum crowds on a Saturday may result in the need for bail money.
PMDD must binge watch trash true crime shows like Fatal Vows or Death in the Dorms for the next ten hours.

Until women receive the healthcare we require and deserve, I need all those fires I lit and fits I threw and phone calls I made to my ever-patient mother who couldn’t fix anything to be worth something more than a personal unburdening—I am rarely furious only on my own behalf. Transforming my experience into artful humor, reflection, and rage is also a call to arms for all women to demand the gaslighting about and reduction of perimenopause to be replaced with science, policy, and empathy.

“No More Smiley Faces”—Beth Ann Fennelly

I grew up in a very conservative, very patriarchal, very Irish Catholic family, in a very conservative, very patriarchal, very Irish Catholic suburb thirty miles north of Chicago. I was born in 1971 but it seemed the 60s and 70s passed right over Lake Forest, IL. My father commuted to work in Chicago. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. My sister and I were trained to be ladylike, docile, polite, and chaste. Important oft-repeated maxims that guided my childhood included “Children should be seen but not heard,” and “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” and “Never speak unless spoken to first.”

My sister rebelled against these strictures but I absorbed them so deeply that it would take me decades to shed them, to speak out when speaking out was called for. Mostly, when I think back on early memories, they are almost always memories of me watching something happen, as a passive participant. I was never an active agent or a provocateur. In my memories of my childhood, I am rarely speaking. In my memories of my childhood, I don’t recognize the sound of my voice.

I attended an all-girl Catholic boarding school (though I didn’t board myself because it was in my home town). It was more like a finishing school than a laboratory to set our intellects afire. I escaped to books, as many weird children do. This concerned my mother, who used to tell me not to concentrate so hard when I read because frowning would “give me wrinkles.” Neither the women in my community nor the nuns who taught my classes provided models of women with agency. Righteous anger—the kind that can change the world—was reserved for men. When I did express anger, it was dismissed as childish, sentimentalized.

Once in third grade the head parish priest visited our class to announce that students who were interested in being altar boys should go to the church at lunch for an informational meeting. I went. And promptly got kicked out. Because of, you know, the whole vagina thing. That evening, I wrote a protest letter to the Archbishop. Only years later when I saw that letter in the family scrap book did I realize that my mother never sent the letter as she’d promised to. Even that small protest was silenced and repackaged as “cuteness.” My mom’s caption in the scrapbook read: “Our little women’s libber.” It’s possible I’m fabricating this next detail, but in my recollection, she also drew a smiley face.

Unsurprisingly, I began to chafe in my teenage years, but I had no idea how to focus my unrest. I had one strange powerful outlet—loud music. Angry music, edgy alternative and punk. Sometimes I’d pretend to head to a babysitting job but really drive to Chicago by myself to attend an all-ages show at the Metro, hear the Smashing Pumpkins or the Dead Milkmen or Poi Dog or Ministry, I liked to get so close to the speakers that I could feel the music booming in my breastbone, booming in my bootsoles, sometimes I (sober, the only sober person in the club) would climb up on the speakers and dance. I felt the rage inside my body—a feeling that was beyond words, because I’d only known words to masquerade or be turned against me– find its mate in the music’s rage. But I still didn’t know what to DO with the rage. Soon I’d be driving home, ears feeling hazy and stuffed with cotton, ready to pretend I’d been babysitting, ready to, come morning, don my plaid uniform skirt and genuflect.

It took me a long, long time to begin to hear my voice, much longer than it should have. I didn’t start hearing it until I went to college. First, all those books I’d been reading that were allegedly giving me wrinkles had born in me the desire to write. In college, I discovered that my secret journal full of scribbles needn’t stay secret. I took my first writing workshop and I had a great teacher (thank you, John Matthias) and my whisper began to take on volume. I became increasingly exposed to the great literature that would shape me.

The second thing that helped me better listen to myself is that I left Catholicism. In the absence of that all-encompassing singular narrative that I’d consumed since birth, there was a vacuum, and I filled it with questions. The questions and the poems fed each other. I began to make my first tentative strivings towards inserting an authentic voice into the narrative. Everything I wrote was self-conscious—in those years I was writing the equivalent of “Do-I-look-fat-in-these-pants?” poems. But I kept questioning and listening. The voice that was coming out of me wasn’t ladylike, docile, polite, and chaste. The voice had tonal range. The voice was a bit of a smartass. The voice could be funny or ugly or angry.

Later, years later, in 2014, I would return to that “cute” story of my foray into “women’s lib.” What would prompt me to revisit that material would be the release of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s files naming the priests involved in the sexual abuse scandal. I learned then that the very priest who’d forbade my request to become an altar boy had been abusing altar boys for decades.

Earlier in this essay, Jill writes of the craft decision she made in “Tart,” her essay about her miscarriage—a decision to write short sentences and use the word “I” a lot. With these techniques, she made her rage visible to readers. In my piece, “Goner,” (Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton, 2017), I use similar techniques. I consciously craft unpretty, truncated, abrupt sentences, many of them only sentence fragments. And I name names. I wanted the propulsive accumulation of facts, for it was the absence of facts that allowed that poison to spread. Every time a priest was found guilty of abuse, the sin wasn’t named, there were no repercussions. The priest was simply nudged along to a new parish. Everything was expunged, erased. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” as it turns out, was good training for the culture that looked away, that allowed serial abuse to keep happening. When nothing is stated, nothing is linked, no one is the antagonist, there’s no plot. I wanted to plot that abuse and show how harm led to harm led to harm. I wanted the facts to build as my anger built, I wanted to use my rage like a chisel to sculpt that famous inverted checkmark of the Freytag triangle. Here’s a passage from “Goner”:

Now, a grown woman with children of my own, back in Illinois at my mother’s table, I read in The Trib that church files show that Father Mayer sexually abused altar boys. For decades. He’d been removed from St. Mary’s and sent to St. Edna’s, removed from St. Edna’s and sent to St. Stephen’s, removed from St. Stephen’s and sent to St. Dionysius’, removed from St. Dionysius’ and sent to St. Odilo’s. All those altered boys. Did the archdiocese, the Cardinal, know? Please. In the church files, there’s a contract Fr. Mayer signed, promising that at St. Odilo’s he wouldn’t be alone with boys under twenty-one. Because by then two of his previous altar boys had committed suicide.
After St. Odilo’s, he was sent to jail.
You can look all of this up, if you care to. Father Robert E. Mayer, pastor of St. Mary’s, Lake Forest, Illinois, from 1975 to 1981. Call this fiction: I dare you.

The sentences aren’t elegantly constructed, but full of fragments, like shrapnel. They aren’t ladylike and shapely, but blunt and aggressive. They address the reader in a way that seems less invitation and more confrontation. Face the facts with me or get gone.

And Father Mayer? He’s dead now. Died in jail. But that solves nothing, really. So I keep writing. I affix words to my rage now. No more smiley faces.

Conclusions

Reading these together, I (Jill) am struck by how many of us felt silenced as children, or felt our rage awakened when we had children. Kids are born unselfconscious—their rage is pure, the truest version of the word “unadulterated,” and rage is often punished or conditioned out of them. Because of this pure origin, rage can feel primal, can feel new, and can feel ancient. Rage is not just the purview of men and men’s writing; instead of rejecting it or diluting it in our work, we have invited it to sit at our table and be an important part of the conversation. We want to continue this conversation on the page with women from cultural contexts outside those here—we know there are many we didn’t begin to touch. We want the publishing industry to welcome more autobiographical rage from transwomen and nonbinary writers. We want the work poets have been doing with rage to inspire the same kind of innovation and experimentation with rage on the page in ways we haven’t even considered yet.

In the movie version of Nightbitch, the Mother character’s rage slowly transforms her into a literal dog as she parents her two-year-old son. After awhile, she likes it. When she eats a rare steak, like a dog, she does it with a level of gusto she never has, finding a new depth of flavor. When she goes outside, her new sense of smell makes the whole world new. We’ve found that writing rage is joyful, right, instinctual, unadulterated, and most of all, corrective to a status quo that has ignored and downplayed our rage for centuries.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Brooke Champagne is a native New Orleanian and the award-winning author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, named a Best Book of 2024 from Kirkus Reviews. Her book of cultural criticism and reportage, Drive-Thru Daiquiri, is forthcoming with LSU Press. Champagne serves as Book Reviews Editor for River Teeth, and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.

Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and four of prose. Her newest, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs, was just released by W. W. Norton. She lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS. Learn more at https://www.bethannfennelly.com/

Nicole Graev Lipson is the USA Today bestselling author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Lit Hub, LA Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for The Best American Essays, and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. Lipson received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and lives outside of Boston with her family.

Jill Kolongowski is the author of a collection of essays called Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me (Ulysses Press, 2017). Other essays are published in Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Insider, Brevity, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Her essays have won Sundog Lit’s First Annual Contest series and the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction at Lunch Ticket, and been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jill writes the flash essay Substack newsletter Tiny True Stories and cares for her two young children in Northern California.

Amy Monticello is the author of the chapbooks Close Quarters and How to Euthanize a Horse (winner of the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize in Nonfiction). Her work has been published in the North American Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, under the gum tree, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hotel Amerika, CALYX, The Rumpus, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She is also the co-author of The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing. Her awards include the 2013 S.I. Newhouse School Prize for nonfiction awarded by Stone Canoe and the 2025 Long Story/Essay Prize from the Iron Horse Literary Review.

Victoria Brown
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Megan Brown
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and Meditations:
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