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

folks who come through either the first incarnation of the Erotic Reading Circle or this one, who have moved on to greater heights. I mean Amy, you’re absolutely one of those folks! You wanted to find a place to share your work and then you’ve been published in Best Lesbian Erotica and you have a novel published (award- winning!), and then you have another one coming.
    AB : Yes, that true, and I think the confidence I gained from the Circle, and especially around giving voice to what seemed like taboo things to me, that opened up just a whole world of possibility—yeah, I don’t know that I would have done any of those things without the Circle actually, for real. For reals.
    CQ : And I’m thinking of my comrades at Perverts Put Out and remembering how many of those regular readers had their moment or two, at least, at the Circle. The person that stands out for me the most as an Erotic Reading Circle alum is Simon Sheppard who has become such an important gay erotic writer, sex essay writer, curator of Perverts Put Out lo these many years. And when Good Vibrations was at 23rd and Valencia, he lived right around the corner and so always, always came to the Circle. And there were a number of gay men in those days who were part of the Circle who sort of drifted away. But one who used to come who we see at almost every Perverts Put Out now is the great Horehound Stillpoint, whose long-form prose poetry is amazing.
    AB : The two of you are both quite accomplished, widely published writers—how does the Erotic Reading Circle, as you’re a part of it today, affect your writing? Does it support you in any particular way now?
    JC : I have often brought new writing in to the Circle and it’s usually work that I had generated at a workshop that I’m bringing out into a room of new ears; it’s helpful for me [to share the work with] folks who are coming from different experience, different points of view, who are not necessarily like me, who are going to be receiving it from a different point of view. That’s really helpful for me as a writer.
    CQ : And I don’t read very often at the Circle any more partly because there are enough people who attend that I don’t want to take somebody else’s spot. And partly because I’m not doing a whole lot of new writing, especially new creative erotic writing myself right now, although the past couple of years, the work that I’ve done that has meant the most to me has either been with Kirk Reed’s Biggest Quake Project, which had a little bit of the Erotic Reading Circle to it in a way. I mean not necessarily mindfully, but he had a group of people who worked together and shared pieces—the greater project was to write AIDS memoir, but we sort of used that group in the way that we use the Erotic Reading Circle sometimes. Also, the piece that I contributed to this anthology is a piece of recent writing that came from a memoir writing workshop that I was sort of co-scheduling along with the Erotic Reading Circle. That’s where this piece was generated, and I polished it at the Erotic Reading Circle. It meant a lot to me to have the space to do that. You know, some of us have gangs of writing buddies, at least sometimes. And I don’t really have that because I don’t have enough regular writing time and space. My world is so full of other responsibilities. So when I do have that, it’s so important to me—I think that I can say my community for writing is the Circle.
    Family and erotic writing
    AB : So has your Mom read your erotic work?
    JC : I don’t know! I have a feeling that my Mom has, my sister might have, and my father [doesn’t]. And I am totally fine with all of their boundaries around my writing.
    CQ : My mom died before I got very far out into the world as an erotic writer and so I’m pretty sure that she never did read my stuff. I’m not positive that she never did, though. She could have been a zine subscriber from the adult care center, you never know. You