The story of Sex Still Spoken Here … and how you can help!

Cover of Sex Still Spoken HereWe’re a third of the way toward our goal, and we need your donations and your help getting the word out about the Erotic Reading Circle anthology –before you investigate our excellent (and dirty) referral contest that’s running right now, let me tell you the story of the latest incarnation of the Erotic Reading Circle and how this book came to be:

In 2006, I approached Carol Queen and asked whether she would be interested in reinstating the Erotic Reading Circle. I’d learned about the ERC during my first three months in San Francisco, when I was running my first erotic writing group for sexual trauma survivors. At Community Thrift (one of my my favorite bookstores in San Francisco), I came across a book entitled Sex Spoken Here, which anthologized some of the amazing work that had been shared at the Erotic Reading Circle during its run at Good Vibrations. In their introduction, the co-editors, Carol Queen and Jack Davis, described the power, beauty, and community that the Erotic Reading Circle had nurtured during its run into the mid-90s. Here I was, a newbie to San Francisco in 2003, researching the healing/transformative potential of erotic expression for survivors of sexual violence. “Wait,” I thought. “Why doesn’t a space like the Erotic Reading Circle still exist?”

A few years later, I had had the good luck to be introduced to Carol, began facilitating an erotic writing group at the Center for Sex and Culture, and even though I was still starstruck whenever I spoke to her (an experience that continues to this day!), I asked whether she would be interested in rebooting the Erotic Reading Circle under the Center’s auspices — and she said yes! We’ve been meeting monthly (every fourth Wednesday, 7:30-9:30pm, at the CSC) ever since — that’s coming on 8 years now — co-facilitating a space in which erotic writers can bring their work and have it received with respect, enthusiasm, and generous feedback.

A couple of years ago, we (along with our co-editor, the tremendous Amy Butcher) put out a call to our ERC regulars, asking for submissions for an anthology — we wanted to share with the larger community the strong, hot, layered, complicated, powerful writing that shows up at the Reading Circle every month. The book that resulted from this call — Sex Still Spoken Here — includes stories, poems, and essays from 27 ERC authors. It also includes excerpts from a conversation among the editors (in which we discuss the power of creative erotic space, the importance of erotic writing to the larger literary community, and the ways in which the ERC has supported new and established writers in the SF Bay area for all of these years) and a brief how-to guide, for folks who’d like to bring a Reading Circle into their own communities.

Self publishing costs money. So does paying authors. The editor have volunteered hundreds of hours on behalf of this project. The Center for Sex and Culture is a long-established non-profit doing extraordinary work in our community, and needs your support in order to get cultural products like Sex Still Spoken Here into the hands of folks who need to know that erotic expression comes in a whole lot more than 50 shades. Please support this project — every single dollar helps. Through our indiegogo campaign, you can pre-order the book (in print or e-format), or avail yourself any of our other tantalizing perks. You can also pass the word — if you have ever participated in the ERC or one of Writing Ourselves Whole’s erotic writing groups, I would ask you to please forward this message. Every step helps further the ERC’s mission to create more awareness and respect for the vast breadth of erotic creative expression, and to hold open a consistent space for those writers who are willing to risk writing the erotic.

We’ve raised just over one-third of the $5000 we need to publish and distribute this book, and we are so grateful to all of those who have already donated! Please help bring Sex Still Spoken Here into the world. Thank you, much love, and keep writing!

igg.me/at/sssh-anthology

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