Create your liberated literary utopia

When your dream and creative passion is to write, how do you succeed without selling out or selling yourself short? Ariel Gore has spent her life trying to solve this puzzle, writing and organizing her way towards a creative utopian vision, where storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art. In The Wayward Writer, the follow-up to her national bestseller How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents, she shows you how to chart your own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on your readers, step into your unique powers, and build your own literary community where respect and honesty reign—and where you can be a writer and survive. Gore presents an alternative narrative structure to the patriarchal hero’s journey, with a focus on tapping into myths and hidden places. She urges us to not be precious about where or when we write, or to apologize for who and what we are, or to stop short of telling the truth about our lives. The result is an impossible to ignore rallying cry for writing dangerously to create a liberated literary utopia—and a helpful guide through the thorny landscape of publishing your work. 

“You know that feeling when you crack open a brand new book and just by reading the first paragraph you can tell you’re about to go on a transformative journey? The kind of book that grabs you by the hand and says, hold on, we’ve got important work to do? A story that, at the risk of sounding very cliche because the word “witches” is, after all, in the title — leaves you spellbound? We Were Witches by Ariel Gore is that book. Released in September by Feminist Press, it is everything you didn’t know you were allowed to want in a narrative.”

—Autostraddle

Now you can get signed copies of Ariel Gore’s new novel, We Were Witches, direct from arielgore.com.

$18 includes postage & your own spell book.

“Forget Freytag’s Pyramid (of Predictable Male Prose)—behold Gore’s Upside Down Triangle (of Fierce Feminist Narrative)! We Were Witches is its own genre, in its own canon.”

—”Kate Schatz, author of Rad American Women A-Z

Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches is one woman’s body refusing to become property, refusing to be overwritten by law or traditions, one woman’s body cutting open a hole in culture so that actual bodies might emerge. A triumphant body story. A singularly spectacular siren song.

—Lidia Yuknavitch

Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches is both magical and punk rock—the way it takes traditional values and traditional story structure to task, the way Gore’s protagonist, Ariel, uses witchy intelligence to resist a system totally against her.

—Michelle Cruz Gonzales

We Were Witches seizes the shame and hurt internalized by young women and turns it into magic art and poetry. Ariel Gore’s writing is a diamond pentacle carved into a living heart, transforming singular experience into universal knowledge.”

—Susie Bright

An incisive and engaging work of literary genius that never loses heart. Gore speaks with the brazen and tender voice of a neglected, hidden generation about hidden and vulnerable truths.

—Lasara Firefox Allen

We Were Witches is raw and truthful, painfully funny, inspiring of outrage, and alive with the wonder and magic of a feminist awakening. One single mom becoming woke, struggling, and triumphing on her own outsider terms, We Were Witches is a new feminist classic, penned by one of the culture’s strongest authors at her most experimental and personal.

—Michelle Tea

Ask for We Were Witches wherever you buy books. Here are links to Bookshop.org and Amazon.