Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology Read Online Free Page A

always accept it. You’d think there’d be many, many more places for this kind of art—you know, everybody’s at least a little interested in sex, aren’t they? A lot of creative people have some sort of sexually related work that they’ve done. Whether they’re established and known creatives or whether they’re Henry Darger in Chicago in his room who didn’t get a museum until after he was dead. I mean, there’s a lot of juice in the sexual for a creative person and the idea that many people can’t ever find a place to take that creativity, that just makes me really sad. It’s one of the things about being free enough in San Francisco to have created more than one cultural space for sex-related art making. That’s one of the things that helps make San Francisco San Francisco. It’s because we have so many voices that we feel like it’s safe to come out and add our own, I think. And the Circle makes that happen in miniature.
    AB : Yeah, for sure. And it, you know, you use the metaphor of an art space and there is this beautiful [art show] up right now that unfortunately the reader can’t see but I think if you took any one of those pieces and put it in a show with all the “normal” pieces then it’s going to get held out as, “Oh, that’s the sex piece,” and so it doesn’t get looked at as a piece of art work in the same way. And so when you come to the Erotic Reading Circle and everybody’s reading erotic stuff, it’s not just like “Oh, my god, you wrote an erotic piece.” Instead, [the response is,] “Oh, huh, let’s look at your erotic piece in context of these other erotic pieces,” and now that’s a whole different conversation. It’s a level of witnessing that can’t happen elsewhere.
    JC : Right, folks will describe being at other, more traditional workshop settings, where other writers are so pulled out by the content—“Oh, my god, this is a piece of writing about sex!” or, more supportively, “It was really brave that you wrote that piece about sex!” That can be really powerful and generous feedback, yes, but sometimes we would like more than that. Like, what was it about the piece that was working? What did you think about these characters? Sometimes folks in a more traditional workshop setting can’t drop down beyond “These people are having sex!” In this space—I really like how you articulate that, Amy—in this space, ok, there’s lots of sex happening in all these pieces and so how are we engaging with them as legitimate works of art? How are we talking about this? How can we help this person with their craft? Being able to get a different quality of response feels really important.
    Many times people are bringing, you know, a piece of short fiction, a blog post, a poem, that is a fully contained piece and it’s erotic—that’s part of the point of the story, is that it’s a piece of erotic writing, right? And then other people are working on larger works of fiction and are using erotic interaction as a way to develop their characters, to kind of give us more information about their characters, which I love. It’s such a powerful way to explore more about a particular character. Who are they interested in? How do they have these conversations? There are folks who wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves erotic writers who would be welcome in this space. Maybe they don’t consider themselves genre writers, or erotic genre writers, but still would like to have some space to workshop or engage the erotic content in their writing—there is space for that as well. You don’t have to call yourself an erotic writer to be welcome in the Circle.
    What comes of participating in the Circle?
    JC : So, if we were going to think about some outcomes, what has been the result for folks of the Erotic Reading Circle? I mean, readers can get some more information about that from [the mini interviews that accompany] each of the stories but there certainly have been