What I like about Vanessa Veselka, besides her humor and social commentary, is that she’s not afraid to admit that she too struggles with writing about sex. The author of Zazen, which was nominated for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and won the 2012 PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for fiction, is honest about the difficulties […]
Read more "Girl on Girl: Vanessa Veselka"(Read part one here) Hadley woke up earlier than him Saturday morning and tried desperately not to wake him as she took his manuscript into the kitchen. She was at least three chapters behind schedule on her first pass of the manuscript. Marcus needed to review her changes by the end of the week. They […]
Read more "In Bed With Her Author (Part II)"She didn’t mean for it to happen again. The first time, Hadley was a young editorial assistant and he was an alcoholic with the aura of a Nobel Prize winner. She was intrigued by his smell of cigars and the twenty-year age difference. It fell apart when his wife returned from her summer abroad and […]
Read more "In Bed With Her Author (Part I)"Last week I attended an English department lecture about writer Anita Loos. Confession: I attended it foremost because free food was promised (#gradlife) and secondly because I saw the word “feminism” in the talk’s title. The lecture, “Putting his Pictures in the Papers (1916): Anita Loos, Douglas Fairbanks, and the Technologies of Indirect Feminist Rhetoric,” […]
Read more "Anita Loos & The New Indirect Feminism"This past weekend, during a swelteringly hot spring day, I hid inside a coffee shop with Lindsey Kugler (as writers are wont to do) to discuss her recently published book, HERE, sexual exploration through writing, and N’Sync fan fiction (yep, that’s right). Is sex writing scary? No. I have been doing sex writing for a […]
Read more "Girl on Girl: Lindsey Kugler"Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the most recent story collection God Bless America. He is also a regular contributor to The Rumpus, where you can read his essay “Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto.” I first came across his writing in Tin House’s essay collection on the […]
Read more "Dirty Talk with Steve Almond"Author Monica Drake‘s second novel, The Stud Book, comes out next week. In it, she writes about overpopulation and relationships. Before the release of her anticipated follow-up to Clown Girl, she sat down to answer a few questions about sex, writing, and humor. Is sex writing scary? Probably. Yes. All writing is scary, in a […]
Read more "Girl on Girl: Monica Drake"I first knew Lidia Yuknavitch (author of The Chronology of Water and, most recently, Dora: A Headcase) would be my sex writing soulmate when I heard her speak on the subject at last fall’s Wordstock Literary Festival, where she sat on a panel with other writers who discussed sex’s place in writing. She was the champion for straightforward sex–in writing and […]
Read more "Girl on Girl: Lidia Yuknavitch"Matthew Dickman, poet, author of the recent collection Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and very brave man, agreed to talk with me about sex…and writing. Before we began the interview, he read “Four Switches,” a four-part poem he wrote while living alone for a month in Marfa, Texas and not having any sex at all. Matthew was thinking […]
Read more "Dirty Talk with Matthew Dickman"Last month, I interviewed Kerry Cohen, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity. This was my first time interviewing someone after I had read her memoir, which is an experience where the intimacy you feel with someone from reading the personal details of their lives matches with the reality of talking to that person. […]
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