Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence.

Only the violent acts of men "count" toward something besides evil in a patriarchy. It is the male story of violence that is sanctioned both socially and aesthetically. The male hero and acts of heroism require violence. Everyone is okey dokey with that. We are only beginning to see that constricting set of truths open up a little.

The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.

The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.

When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture's violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically tortures and punishes her guardian rapist, or picks up a gun and fights back in ways that make her not pretty, or aggressively rejects her role as the object of desire, or even when she waddles off into the woods to squat and have a baby without the safety and expertise of hospitals and doctors, these are the kinds of violences and stories we can learn from.

I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.

Worse, the bodies of women, minorities, children, disenfranchised bodies (prisoners, so-called nut cases, etc...) and their truths don't "count" as either present and important in society or worth Pulitzer prizes as characters in literature.