Tag Archives: writing about sex

take up space in the public arena for the erotic body

I miss my early morning company — there are no owls here to accompany me into this early morning writing time.  I had strange dreams, and they’ve faded now. My body is still in need of help, but it’s better.

This weekend I started thinking again about offering a sacred sexuality class, a group for women (to begin with) where we can write about the pleasures of the flesh and how exactly holy they feel to us — how much it matters that we are in our desire, that we feel our longing body, that we discover how to allow pleasure to bring us all the way open to another person, and, more importantly, to ourselves.

Right now, it’s hard to think about how to justify such a group, just as it’s been difficult to do a lot of promo for the fundraiser for Sex Still Spoken Here, the Erotic Reading Circle anthology — there are wars and violence all over the world. Israel has invaded Gaza, and hundreds of people are dying. The rebels in the Ukraine are shooting planes out of the sky. The people of Syria are dying in thee hundreds. People are sending their infants and children across international borders, alone, in order that they might be safe and free. The people of Sudan find themselves in the middle of a civil war. Every paper I open is filled with stories about sexual violence and atrocity. How can this be a time to speak about erotic pleasure and investigation, about sexual delight and recovery? Isn’t that the last thing on our minds: our own joy?

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Grow your words this summer — upcoming writing opportunities with Writing Ourselves Whole

ripening tomatoes, June 2013What words are ripening in you these days? Want to harvest those phrasings and images onto the page? Come and join us at one of our many writing groups and workshops. Here’s what’s the summer schedule looks like around these parts!

Write Whole-Survivors Write. Open to all survivors of trauma
8 Monday evenings beginning July 8, 2013.
Fee: $350 (ask about scholarship/payment plan, if needed)
Meets in private workshop space in Oakland, near Lake Merritt
Gather with other trauma survivors and write in response to exercises chosen to elicit deep-heart writing around such subjects as body image, family/community, sexuality, dreams, love, faith, and more.

Reclaiming Our Erotic Story: Open to all lgbtq women survivors of sexual trauma
8 Tuesday evenings beginning July 9, 2013.
Fee: $350 (ask about scholarship/payment plan, if needed)
Meets in private workshop space in Oakland, near Lake Merritt
Find community around the complexity of desire, and transform your relationship with your creative self through explicit erotic writing.

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writing the delicious body stories (why write about sex?)

(Today’s post comes from the book project writing I’m doing, and was inspired by an article I shared on our Facebook page yesterday. Consider this your prompt: how would your “why I write” or “why I write ___” manifesto read?)

First things first — when we write the stories of our bodies, we are writing sensory detail, we are developing character (on the page and off), we create dialogue, we write about place and time — that is to say, we are using all the tools of our craft. This is not merely an exercise in navel-gazing (as though sometimes navel-gazing isn’t exactly and only the right thing to be doing): this is developing our skill as writers.

Also: this writing makes us fearless. When we have written into the most frightening places in our hearts, into the places in our body that moan and sob without words, what can we not do?

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talking about writing about sex (a weekend with Dreamspinner!)

IMG_5130Good and gorgeous sunny morning to you. This morning, I’m feeling wildly grateful for the warmth we’ve been enjoying here around the Bay, for the smell of basil and jasmine, for the puppy’s panting next to me. I visited the midwest this weekend, and was reminded that, in the parts of the country where I used to live, spring is only just now arriving – the tree branches are still bare and it’s not even close to time to pack away the winter jacket yet because there’s still the possibility of a serious snow storm. My body can remember that cold, the deep expectation, the near-hopeless-but-still-maybe sort of anticipation, desperate the first wash of red buds on the maple tree. I don’t get that kind of exuberant reaction to spring anymore, since it never quite seems to get to winter here in California (at least not for this Nebraska-Maine girl), and I miss it – though I’m not sure if I miss it enough to move away from the sort of place where you can be in your garden all year round.

This past weekend I went to Chicago and got to write with a larger-than-usual group of experienced and published authors about the challenges and joys of writing about sex! I’m so grateful to Elizabeth North of Dreamspinner Press, who invited me to the Dreamspinner Press Author Weekend to lead a workshop with her writers. Elizabeth created Dreamspinner just six years ago, and now the Press offers a full and fabulously-varied line of MM romance (and a newly-formed off-shoot, Harmony Ink, offers LGBTQ Young Adult fiction). I got to spend a couple of days with the fun and nurtured community of writers that Dreamspinner attracts. These are fantastic and (many of them) prolific writers who turn in good books and, in return, are provided with consistently excellent marketing and sales – what a concept! Continue reading