In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), Legacy Russell uses the glitch — the error, the interruption, the little pop-up window that appears over a webpage — as a way of thinking about bodies, identities, and the systems that try to put them into boxes. For Russell, the glitch holds the promise of new possibilities: it disrupts the rules of the system, makes its limits visible, and opens the way for identities and modes of existence that escape established categories.

The glitch is a crack. It spills over. It shines. It saturates. It makes us cringe a little. That’s where our blank page comes in!

This edition of the writing workshop Writing with Mittens is both glitchy and spooky ʕ•͡-•ʔ, haunted by two e-ghosts: Doug Smorin, an office worker having a mental breakdown whose to-do list becomes increasingly chaotic as we read it in Calvin Kasulke’s novel Several People Are Typing; and the writers behind “Literally the Best Thing Ever” in Rookie Mag.

The first entity haunting this workshop is Doug Smorin. His to-do list starts out perfectly ordinary, then slowly begins to derail. Doug starts with reasonable things: move a call, write up some meeting notes, buy a new desk. Then “buy a new desk” comes back. And back again. And again. He starts to glitch. The to-do list turns into a stream of erratic thoughts.

The second comes from Rookie Mag and its column “Literally the Best Thing Ever.” In this sadly now-defunct online magazine, teenage writers would devote entire pieces to whatever they happened to be obsessed with that week. It might be a celebrity workout video, an amusement park, One Direction, Ms. Pac-Man, or any other subject important enough in their eyes to deserve their full attention. The smallest object of obsession was treated with the utmost seriousness.
That is more or less where this workshop is heading.

Participants — you! — are invited to choose something you are obsessed with. Anything can be your best thing ever : a wacky hobby, an Instagram account devoted to cats or dogs or aliens, a hate-watched TV show, an actress whose entire life story you could chart through breakups or an incredibly niche Wikipedia page. In other words: the thing your friends know better than to mention in front of you unless they have at least twenty minutes to spare.

Then we start writing.
We let the text repeat itself, interrupt itself. We let one detail bring up another, which unlocks a memory, which somehow leads to a filing system, and suddenly a flashback resurfaces from a Reddit post from 2017.
Lists are welcome.
Saying far too much is welcome.
Sudden shifts in tone are welcome.
Extremely specific information is very welcome. Thought can stay messy enough for the hesitations of fingers on a keyboard to remain visible.
During the workshop, everyone commits to telling the group about the object of their obsession and, in return, to listening to everyone else with the same attention.
The result might look like an essay, a monologue, fifteen repetitions of the same sentence, or a document that, for a moment, seems to have started thinking all by itself.