My Friends Reached Down Into a Well I’d Tumbled Down

One of the stories we’ve been attempting to tell with the work we publish at Triangle House is how to centralize art, as an individual and collective response to the ills that plague modern society.

Sometimes I end up feeling like I’m saying the same thing over and over again with different phrasings. I wrote in the editor letter in February:

Art is the language women have to discuss the trauma inflicted by the hands and words of men.

In the intervening months, I’ve met so many women who, through telling their stories of trauma, helped me find a language for my own. My friends reached down into a well I’d tumbled down, gave me a rope, and kept pulling even when I was dead weight. A response to the isolation of modern life is intentional community, and the writing community is well poised to activate when there’s a threat to either an individual or the rights of the marginalized.

This moment is a confluence between freedom of the press and the arts. A threat to a woman who built an avenue for other women to speak and protect each other is a threat to anyone who has ever spoken about trauma, and to every person who uses art as a way to process the ways other people have hurt them. The way the world responds to this will affect us for generations. It’s easy to feel like it’s in the hands of the powerful and the hands of the law, but individuals can do what the spreadsheet attempted to do in the first place: protect each other on the ground and build support networks outside of existing systems.

For the foreseeable future, our proceeds from Through Clenched Teeth will go to Moira Donegan’s legal defense fund. Women’s anger as a response to individual and structural violence  is not a footnote, it is the center of the narrative of freedom and progress. Please consider donating to the fund for Moira’s legal defenses, and we will continue to provide access for other ways to support this cause as they become available.