Women Writing The Erotic | Emmanuelle de Maupassant

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Adrea Kore, Emmanuelle De Maupassant, Erotic Authors, Inspiration, On Writing, women writing sex

My dear friend and talented writing colleague, Emmanuelle de Maupassant, embarked upon a massive project earlier this year – a qualitative and quantitative survey of 130 authors writing and publishing within the erotic fiction genre.

Her data became the basis for a fascinating, in-depth series of articles detailing erotic fiction’s many facets, and providing insight into the collective minds behind the genre. The article series spotlights a broad range of topics: from authorial intents and motivations to public perceptions and the function of pseudonyms; literary inspirations, censorship, issues of craft and the current state of publishing and marketing erotica.

Some articles also looked at the genre from a gendered perspective; what it is to write as a man or woman within erotic fiction, and mapped possible differences of perspective and experience. You can read about the male perspective here.

Image Courtesy of Emmanuelle de Maupassant

I feel honoured to have been part of this survey, along with a number of my writing friends, colleagues, and personal inspirations within the genre. The collection of articles provide an insightful “panoramic view”. Where is the genre right now, in 2016, several years into its boom, and five years on from the publication of Fifty Shades of Grey? Regardless of one’s opinion of this book, it has certainly bought more visibility to the genre, and agruably, more publishing opportunities. Where does erotica appear to be heading?

 

In the incisive words of Remittance Girl:

“As we look to what comes next, our only true desire can be to write freely and honestly, to write what refuses to lie quietly, to write what thrills us, emotionally, intellectually and viscerally.”

I see writing erotica as a woman to be a political act, as well as a creative one, and was particularly inspired and intrigued by Emmanuelle’s three-part series on “Women Writing the Erotic”. With Emmanuelle’s kind permission, I’m re-blogging Part One here, as it delves into so many pertinent aspects, and represents an intelligent, thoughtful “round-table” of ideas and observations from many of my favourite female authors. I only wish we could all have sat down to dinner together, and had this conversation!

Links to Part Two and Three are at the bottom of the original article, and further down you’ll fnd links to all the other fascinating articles that are part of this series.

It’s over to Emmanuelle now … Read on!

In this series (within the 130 authors survey), I’ll be sharing women’s views on exploring sexuality through fiction. Which themes tug to be unravelled and explored? What motivates us, challenges u…

Source: Women Writing The Erotic | Emmanuelle de Maupassant

Chords of Desire (Erotic Fiction Excerpt)

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Adrea Kore, Cello, Creative Process, Desire, erotic dreams, erotic fiction, Female Sexuality, Fiction Excerpt, Inspiration, short story, women writing sex, Writing Process

Lights up.

There are two bodies, up here on stage.

One is of cool flesh, lavender-scented. Sleek, dark hair, parted perfectly in the centre, is pulled back into a chignon, revealing the white arc of throat, the shadow formed by the sweep of her jawline as she bends her head in concentration. Black silk accentuates the pale sheen of her skin, her dress cut wide against the shoulders to reveal her collarbones, and the stretch of her swan-like throat. Slender hips cradle a spine which draws itself, erect as a candle-flame, towards the ceiling. She has arms of alabaster, impossibly long, arms of a conjuress.  Her eyes are closed, her nostrils open. She breathes music into her, as if it were all she needed to exist. All senses are focused on this other body, gripped between her thighs; this body of violent swells and curves so different to her own.

I am smooth and gleaming, the light from the chandelier creating honeyed ripples on the surface of my flesh, flesh of maple.  I am shaped to hold secrets. I am hollow, yet fecund.  Bodies such as mine are made for the fervent embrace.  Flesh such as mine will not erode easily, even from the rituals of the most devout of lovers. 

My senses are so exquisitely honed that a flutter of fingers at my throat forges fire in my womb. I feel the strength of the thighs which clasp my hips, the tender determination of her hands upon my spine.

I cannot but yield up my music.

Is this how I was born into consciousness, the bow keening across my strings, animating them with music? My cords, through which I sing and speak, and feel. She calls me Seraphine, her burning one, her angel. No matter where we are in the world, I feel as if I am always here; caught in light, cradled in her arms, pivoting on a single point of pain like a ballerina, poised between grace and chaos.

She makes love to me each night on stage, each performance a fresh seduction.  Together, we weave sound and silence into incantations which bewitch and benumb those who listen.

Those who come to sit in the dark and watch are nearly always men, no matter if we play in the theatres of Paris, New York or Cairo.  It is when the lights are directed away from them, when lulled into the roles of mere observers, that the truth of their lives is revealed in their faces, all yearnings and disillusions.  Men with hungering eyes and lonely mouths.  Men with laden wallets and leaden hearts.  There, in the embrace of the illuminating dark, they become my performance.

I am of wood, yet something of me is woman.

 

I love my mistress. But she has a heart made of wood. She does not respond to the caresses of love. It is only music that makes her soft, Bach that brings fire to her cheeks, Schumann that coaxes a languorous curve from her lips. Only for Brahms does her body quiver, her sex yielding to the vibrations of the notes through my body, becoming moist with desire. But for what? Strangely, it is I who long for the touch of a man, I who am fashioned from the finest of maple wood.

Perhaps, one night, whilst playing me in a frenzy of passion, she transferred her heart to me.

There are stories woven into the sinews of my strings. My mistress slices her bow along them like a scalpel.

But there are stories and there are secrets. The secrets I keep deep in the hollow of my body. These she shall not have.

I love my mistress. But equally, I love desire itself, the sensual energy that dances between two beings.  And if I cannot be completely fulfilled myself, then to invoke desire in others is what I will do.

 

* 

‘A dream, like trying to remember, breaks open words for other, hidden meanings.’

Rosmarie Waldrop

This is a curated excerpt of a story that was seeded in my psyche sixteen years ago, when I had an incredibly erotic dream. I was a cello, being played to an audience of only men, in tuxedoes. I could feel the music pouring out of me as if they were physical sensations, my whole body was full of this incredible cello music, and I woke up in the middle of some intense krias (a Tantric word, describing the movement or release of orgasmic energy through the body). I had woken up my boyfriend with my sounds and writhing, and I could still hear the music in my head, as I described the dream to him. The telling of the dream had an erotic effect on him too, and we umm … didn’t sleep for quite a while.

Over the next few days, I wrote about three pages of what the dream had evoked for me. It was the beginning of my first erotica story, and the words felt as if they were pouring out like streams of melody – but I couldn’t tie together the passages. Flash forward sixteen years, with several attempts in-between. I finally finshed it recently. Interestingly, I used almost all of the original material, but found my way into the “narrative gaps” to write a more fully-formed story.

Around the writing of a story, are often other stories.

Plots are something I used to struggle with, as a younger writer. That, I believe, is what hindered me from shaping the “scenes”, moments and characters I so strongly envisaged into stories. So, I am developing my “narrative muscle” with each story I work on – and complete.

To develop a strong sense of resilience and healthy writer-ego, I believe the completion of one’s creative ideas is crucial. Half-finished ideas have a terrible tendency to haunt you.

The defintion of a chord is:

Three or more notes that combine harmoniously.

And Chords of Desire is actually told from the perspectives of three characters: three characters that sound their own unique note on the exploration of desire, three characters bound together by its power. This excerpt is just after a short prelude that begins the story, and is from the cello Seraphine’s perspective. That initial dream, the surreal fact that I was the cello, and could think and feel, always meant she was going to be a sentient character. She could be said to embody feminne desire. Inevitably, this story weaves elements of magical realism into its narrative.

I’m still searching for a home for this story – if any editor or publisher reading it feels it might resonate with their publication, or indeed if any writer knows a place that its style would be at home in, please do feel free to comment or write me here. The full version is around 4000 words. Paid publication leads only, please.

As always, this writer very much appreciates reades who take a moment to let to me know their thoughts on how the story has connected with them.

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Striking Chords of Metaphor in Fiction-Writing (II)

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Creative Process, Figurative language, Inspiration, Metaphor, On Writing, Take Pen in Hand, Writing Process

In an interview in 1981, author William Gass spoke of his “hunch” that “the core of creativity is located in metaphor”. Gass went on to suggest that “a novel is a large metaphor for the world.”

In my previous post on metaphor, I described strong metaphoric presence as casting “a fine web of meaning over the entire story. All its separate strands are also interconnected; the metaphors have their own perfect geometry and symmetry. The strands give both shimmer and strength to the story; they catch the individual perceptions and associations of individual readers within their sticky threads.”

Strong metaphor allows a story to transcend its own boundaries, which is what Gass is getting at when he suggests that a novel is a metaphor for the world. Strong metaphor allows a piece of art to exist in the mind and (I would argue) the very body of the reader in terms of the sensations and emotions elicited upon first contact with the metaphor(s). Metaphors are doorways of and to perception.

 

The babbling of King Lear in the storm, and the sharp, manic grief of Hamlet live in my body. So does the image of Persephone descending into the Underworld, Angela Carter’s dark fairy-tales, Jeanette Winterson’s searing, lyrical metaphors on love and loss, and the painful examination of mortality and meaninglessness in Beckett’s Endgame. I may no longer recall the exact plot, but I retain the themes, the images, the metaphors, for they are connected with feeling, with lived experience.

I’m mixing my play-texts and my literature here because at a formative part of my intellectual life, I read and studied both avidly. Researching these articles, I was drawn back to theatre theory. Theatre is a powerful medium for metaphor, combining both text and the visual mediums. Speaking on the relationship between spectator and performance, director and theorist Eugenio Barba observes:

“There are spectators for whom the theatre is essential precisely because it presents them not with solutions but with knots. The performance is the beginning of a longer experience. It is the scorpion’s bite which makes one dance.”

If we take the spectator here to equally stand for the reader, and the performance to represent the story, this observation echoes what I express about metaphors and images living on in my body and memory, long after I have engaged with the work.

As a former theatre director, I’m often struck by the similarities between the relationship a writer has with a story and a director has with the piece of theatre in creation. Both must have an overarching perspective on their work, and yet a precise attention to every detail. In other words, both macro and micro perspectives are required, sometimes simultaneously. Both must elicit meaning and atmosphere from the text. Both may feel they have ‘command’ of the characters, yet also find that the characters themselves have their own inner life and intentions; exemplified in the first instance by the common writerly assertion that characters ‘take over’ or write themselves in certain parts of the writing process, and in the second instance by necessary collaboration with actors who will bring their own insights to the characters. I share another of Barba’s insights here; this one on the technique required of the director (writer) in working to create the performance (story):

“For me, the director [writer] is rather the person who experiments with ways of breaking the obvious links between actions and their meanings, between actions and reactions, between cause and effect.”

This, of course, is only one way of looking at the aim of fiction-writing. But to me, it speaks to the curating of unique perspective and voice, and the conscious dismantling of clichés, which is the kind of writer I’m working at being. I may not always succeed – but to create work full of clichés would be like a little death to me, and I don’t mean the orgasmic kind.

What is a cliché? It’s often a tired, over-used metaphor. Long ago, linguistically speaking, a cliché was once an original metaphor, but they have been brandished so frequently that they have lost their impact. Encountering clichés disengages me from any text; the more frequent they are, the more likely I am to want to throw the book across the room. Perhaps that’s why I don’t own a Kindle. A careful writer will be vigilant for clichés in the drafting process. My editing clients soon know that I am ruthless about eliminating clichés in their work, and stretching them to find fresher imagery.

This leads me back to metaphor. In the first post of this series on metaphor, I suggested a starting place for drawing out and deepening metaphor in your work: your themes. If you want to know one place where your metaphors are to mine, begin with them.

Themes centre around nouns.

Desire. Loss. Love. Betrayal. Madness.

You could also call these the subjects of the work. The nature of those nouns (or subjects) can be expounded upon to create a theme, and the theme is then mined to create imagery, metaphors, and motifs, throughout your work. So another way of understanding a theme is that it expresses an opinion on the subject. If we go back to my initial list of nouns, I’d expand them to potential themes as below:

Following one’s desires has unexpected consequences.

Loss creates suffering, and suffering creates growth.

Love is essential to the human experience.

Betraying someone knowingly creates negative karma.

Madness is merely an unsanctioned perspective on the world.

There may be major themes and minor themes in a literary work. A writer may express a theme through narrative action and scenes, and through the characters; their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Its function is to bind together various other essential elements of a narrative.

Below is an exercise designed to draw out more information about your theme and deepen your metaphors. I’ll be referring to my two most recent short stories Chords of Desire and The Forbidden Box to illustrate steps of the exercise.

TAKE PEN IN HAND

Have you got a current early draft or idea for a story? Pick out one of its themes that you’d like to explore further. Write it at the top of a blank page /screen. Next, do you have any objects / symbols in your story that are associated with that theme? Add that to the top of the page.

For example, in both of my stories, the impact of a secret is a theme. Coincidentally, both stories feature an important object (also a symbol) associated with secrets. In The Forbidden Box , an old box has secrets, as does the owner of the box. In Chords of Desire, the object associated with secrets is a cello. It’s a major theme in the former story, a minor theme in the latter.

This is a free-associative exercise. Simply allow yourself to write a series of sentences about your theme and /or your object. Think about them separately, but also play with linking them in the same sentence. “Rest” your mind on what you know about your story so far while doing this. In other words, allow your ideas about the theme to be filtered through your story-world. Take about ten minutes to do this.

If you don’t have a current draft, go back to your list of personal themes / symbols from the first post, and choose one or two of those.

(So, while you do that, I’m off to make a pot of tea … Back soon …)

I’m back. I’d love to peek over your virtual shoulder and see what’s on your page, but as I can’t, here’s a selection of my statements from my draft-work.

The Forbidden Box

Theme: Secrets                                       Object: The Box

Boxes are three-dimensional walls.

The lid of a box, when opened, is like a mouth, spilling forth secrets.

Boxes hold the tangible and the intangible: artefacts and memory.

A locked box is like a mystery, waiting to be solved.

Boxes are miniature rooms.

Boxes are for keeping things in, but also for keeping things out.

*

Chords of Desire

Theme: the impact of secrets            Object: Cello                                                            

 I am shaped to hold secrets; hollow yet fecund.

For them, I play an entirely more compelling movement, like a hidden code in a forbidden love letter.

But there are stories and there are secrets. The secrets I keep deep in the hollow of my body. These she shall not have.

*

Inevitably, you will generate some metaphors and some similes amongst your list. You may not use all of them in your stories; some you will re-draft and re-word. But I’ve found I generally use more than half in some way or another, and they can be a great way to generate more material when you stall. How might you use these?

•  As part of a character’s dialogue, or their inner thoughts.
• A repeated thematic motif throughout a work, particularly if a more poetic or lyrical style is what you are exploring.
• As part of the narrative itself – for example, if the story is written from third-person omniscient perspective.

Some statements may also become an idea or image which you will explore and illustrate throughout the narrative of your story, rather than you using those words literally. For example, The Forbidden Box is a re-imagining of the Pandora myth, and the image comparing the opening of the lid of a box to the opening of a mouth and the spilling of secrets is an image that helped me link the idea of family secrets, and of adults not revealing vital information to Pandora until she was ready, to Pandora’s burning curiosity to discover what’s inside the box, and what is revealed when she finally opens the box. The shut lid of the box is juxtaposed with the shut mouths of her grandfather and grandmother.

Below is a small excerpt where I used some of the statements in different ways. In this excerpt Pandora is about seven years of age ( I’ve also re-written one or two words so as not to reveal certain elements of the story – for those who I hope will get to read the full version at some point if it’s accepted for publication):

“The box, Grandma, the box!” was all she could say, when Grandma asked what was wrong. Grandma tried her best to reassure Pandora that whatever she had seen had been a trick of the light, and her imagination.

After dinner, lighting his pipe, Grandfather announced:

“Best not to go near that box.  It’s very old, and very valuable. It’s not a toy, not even for very intelligent young ladies like yourself. Do I make myself clear?”

For the first time in her life, she was only too happy to let something forbidden to her, stay forbidden. But for years she would have strange dreams about the box, where the figures in the carvings would come to life and speak to her, where voices would whisper open me … see what’s inside.

A shut box is just like a secret, waiting to be unlocked.

*

The theme of family secrets, information being withheld is there in the dialogue, and the last line is a re-working of:

A locked box is like a mystery, waiting to be solved.

Note that you can also use this exercise just with a significant object or symbol in your story. I’ve used it to generate the bulk of the material for a memoir short story I wrote about my mother’s life, family secrets, mother-daughter relationships, grief, and her journey with cancer. The two symbols I explored using this exercise were my mother’s hands and an unusual topaz ring.

The theme of the impact of a secret brings intrigue, complexity and depth into the narrative and the characters. It was there in the seed of both stories, yet it could have remained dormant or half-asleep. I consciously put my creative attention on that theme (among others) and worked to draw it out further.

Free-association writing reveals to your conscious mind what your subconscious already knows; it enables you to know what you know. It can help some writers get past internal blocks. What you come up with may surprise you and help you gain more insight into what this particular story wants to express about your themes through your metaphors.

By playing upon your theme(s), you will immediately develop, deepen, and multiply the play of metaphor in the work.In a stunningly written book on the theme of callings, author Gregg Levoy relates this about powerful story-telling:

“A tradition in both Middle Eastern and Hebraic mysticism holds that any passage of sacred text, any teaching, any story, must be examined from at least three points of view: literal, metaphorical, and universal (mystical or wordless). None excludes the others. Meaning thus becomes a thing of layers. Those with a poetic basis of mind understand this. Where science goes for the unified theory, poetry voluptuates in nuances. Where logic studies the wind, poetry regards how the boughs are bent.”

Meaning becomes a thing of layers: metaphors assists you in creating these layers.

(If you find this exercise helpful, I’d love to hear from you.)

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Striking Chords of Metaphor in Fiction-Writing (I)

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Creative Process, Desire, erotic fiction, Figurative language, Inspiration, Metaphor in Fiction, On Writing, Take Pen in Hand

I am fishing. Trying to lure an idea, hook it, pull it to the surface. I want to cut it open and see what’s inside. I want to show what I know about this slippery, incandescent, underwater creature.

In writing this, I use the very thing I want to write about as my way of writing about it.

Metaphor.

Defined as “a figure of speech in which one thing is identified with another”, the word metaphor originates from the Greek word metapherein – meaning “to transfer“.

So how do I write about this creature, this chimera, that has kept me connected to the miracle of words and stories ever since I could first absorb a story whole, and breathe out wonderment? Ever since I first felt the power of story to transfer my senses, my very being, to another time and place? How do I write about this element of language that to me is like alchemy? (That’s a simile, by the way; when one thing is likened to another.) String a sequence of discrete words together and suddenly it’s possible to create meaning, magic, metaphor. Alchemy. Yet only certain sequences of words will speak and sing to us in this way. Some remain firmly in the realm of the mundane and in plenty of instances, that’s all that’s required; to get a character out of a room and into a forest, to indicate where the gun is kept, or how the dress is unzipped.

But I want to talk about the other use for sentences – when they transcend their form and boundaries, and become more than what they appear at first glance. Although i feel I know more than a little about how to weave metaphor into writing, I know less about how to extract it out of the writing process, to hold it up to the light and discuss it in a way that may reveal something to you – the writer-as-reader. This may be my first attempt. I’m sure it won’t be my last.

Why write with metaphors? Paradoxically, describing one thing as another may be the best way to acquaint your idea with your reader. Metaphors can create a sense of the universal in the particular. Your reader may never have gone sky-diving, but when you describe it as being suspended, weightless, swimming through clouds, they’ve probably floated in some kind of body of water before, and experienced that sense of weightlessness.

Metaphors may shine a light onto the obscure; open doors and windows onto an experience deemed impossible to write about. Finding the right metaphor(s) may help you find the right audience.

Look at Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and his intriguingly complex metaphor of the power and impact of scent; scent as the purest expression of life-force, scent as obsession. Suskind immersed us in Jean-Baptiste Grenouille’s perspective right from the opening; describing eighteenth-century Paris via its melange of smells. Why did this work so well? Firstly, because it was an original departure from the predominant tendency for writers to describe setting in visual terms, and secondly because nearly every being on earth has experienced the affective and arousing power of scent in some instance in their lives.

Without this web of metaphor as a driving force in the main character’s psychological and physiological drives, which in turn heavily influenced the narrative action, this story may have been little more than a macabre and unfeeling account of a perverse, amoral serial killer toward which readers may have had little sympathy. Without this evocative use of metaphor, Perfume may not have found its audience.

Having just written two (rather long and significant) short stories that were both rich with metaphor in less than a month, the process left me reflecting on the role of metaphor in my writing; how I harness what might, in initial drafts, be an instinctual (and sometimes random) wielding of them, and develop their presence in subsequent drafts. I also try to harmonise the selection of metaphors I use. This is why the image of metaphors as chords occurred to me as I was searching for a title for this series. The concept was also on my mind, as one of my new stories is about music and was called Chords of Desire.

Chords are defined as three or more notes that combine harmoniously. The notes are melodic in themselves, yet re/sound more intricately when played – and heard – together. In writing, one can work with metaphors in this way, too. The selection of metaphors can create cumulatively harmonious meanings throughout your story. I’ll be discussing the crafting of metaphor, using my work on these stories, in more detail in the second post in this series.

Using metaphor feels instinctual to me. Yet I do encounter work almost entirely devoid of metaphor, or work where the use of metaphor is clumsy or inconsistent; where it appears contrived, or pasted over the top; dislocated from the heart of the story.This suggests to me that using metaphor in writing is innate to some, and not to others. It also suggests that it’s a skill, a way of seeing, that can be developed and deepened. Mark Tredinnick, author of The Little Red Writing Book says this of metaphor:

“But make sure nothing you do just decorates your writing. It should serve your subject matter (by getting at its nature and it soul); it should help your readers (by pleasing them in itself and by making the reading more than a merely literal experience); it should animate your sentences (by giving them colour and attitude and music).”

Fellow Author Brantwjin Serrah: On the Value of Poetry

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Adrea Kore, erotic language, erotic poetry, Inspiration, reviews, threshold, Writing Process

Fellow author Brantwjin Serrah is passionate about the value of deepening the understanding and appreciation of poetry: for itself, but also for how it informs prose-writing. Recently, she wrote an insightful article on this topic, featuring fragments of two of my poems, among others. In the article, she declares that:

 …learning to read poetry is equally as important to learning to write it.

Upon reading it, I felt it made such an intelligent argument for the value of poetry, that with her permission, I’m re-printing excerpts of it here. I’ve written poetry from a very early age, winning first prizes for poems when I was 11, then 12, as well as studying it intensively through drama and theatre training. Writing poetry is something I can’t seem to help, so I have felt it was important in the past to gain some study of the actual craft.

Personally,  I’m drawn to the form primarily because of these two elements: its many plays and permutations of rhythm, and its insistence on finding new, and evocative ways to express things felt and observed. You see, I’ve always loved dancing and disliked cliches.

After writing Talking Shop: Poetry as a Tool for Better Writing, Brantwjin also felt sufficiently interested in my erotic poem Threshold to feature an “unpacking” of the poem in her “Reading Diary”. This is the first time anyone has analysed one of my poems (that I’m aware of), so it was a slightly nerve-wracking experience, waiting to hear what she saw in my poem! However, reading the analysis was intriguing, and I’m relieved to see that much of what I wished to convey is apparent to the reader (this reader at least). I’m also delighted to hear that some elements are more open to interpretation than I had initially thought. (More than two players in the erotic encounter, really? Wonderful!) In this way, the poem can mean different things to different readers; they can insert themselves and their own narratives of desire into the poem. I believe this is one of the aims any well-crafted writing can hope to achieve.

So, please read on to hear more of Brantwjin’s keen observations on the craft of poetry, and the benefits of reading and writing it:

On Pleasures of the Text : Kore Reads

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Adrea Kore, Adrienne Rich, Anais Nin, Creative Process, erotic fiction, Inspiration, My Bookshelf, On Reading, On Writing, Susan Sontag, women writing sex

Reading is a voluptuous, yet defiant act …

Reading is a voluptuous, yet defiant act, particularly in our increasingly  time-poor society.  Pages of a book can erect a little wall between yourself and everyday demands, whispering “later” to here-and-now concerns, and “yes” to deep time with the self. It’s a reason for lolling on your favourite couch with a pot of tea and home-made chocolate cake, or finding a mini-oasis of park green under the dappled shade of a tree.

I began this piece of writing with the intention of listing something like my ten most favourite works of erotica and stood, contemplating my bookshelf for inspiration. Yes, I have a real one, not a Virtual / Kindle one – to prove it there’s a photo further into the article.)

My bookshelf is an old-fashioned honeyed-wood thing of solidity that my father gave me one Christmas many years ago; five shelves high which means I have to stretch a little to reach the top shelf, and I like that feeling – of reaching for a treasured book. It makes me think of the feeling of yearning I get when I’m not reading; a yearning to sink in to the pages of a book and lose myself in story, and also the mental reach for the right word or image that one makes as a writer.

I keep my classics on the top shelf, just as a bartender will keep his top-notch spirits and liqueurs, gleaming and beckoning, on the uppermost shelf.  There, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment sits next to D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Bronte’s Jane Eyre leans, shivering a little, against Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. This shelf is bolstered by Shakespeare’s Collected Works at one end and a weighty volume of Oscar Wilde’s prolific and genre-spanning writing at the other.

 Language and ideas, once encountered, live inside you, and can effect changes, both subtle and catalytic.

Devouring and studying these classics in different ways during my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, studying literature at University and hurling myself headlong into several semesters of Shakespeare and Ancient Greek Theatre (text and performance) through my theatre degree gave me a deep appreciation for the almost-limitless fecundity of language. As importantly, it also cultivated an absence of fear of language. Wrestling with Grecian choric text, conquering the vocal delivery of iambic pentameters in Shakespeare’s work, finding contemporary sense in obscure medieval words, and unravelling complex metaphors to reveal depth, beauty and universal truths in works conceived of many centuries ago; these interactions with language absolved me of any hesitancy I had in seeking out any author’s ideas I felt curious about, and opened me to the power and potency of the written word. The ideas we consume contribute to our growth or our atrophy. Language and ideas, once encountered, live inside you, and can effect changes, both subtle and catalytic.

Words endure. And the feelings they conjure up in the body can endure too, leaving traces, imprints in the cells, the memory.

You can tell a lot about a person by looking at the books on their bookshelf.

Can you keep a secret? This top shelf is now no longer my favourite shelf. These kinds of texts have had their way with me; they’ve done their work.  These … relationships I’ve had with texts such as these now underscore my new handful of literary touchstones. I’d like to introduce to you my new favourites – ones that have specifically  coaxed me along a path of writing. Initially, some of these works allowed me to notice my love for sensual, voluptuous prose and searing imagery, simultaneously realising what I most felt drawn to reading was the feminine experience of the world, and also those stories of  growth, transformation or dislocation, felt through and mediated by the body.

These were the things that I began to write about: Love and longing. Loss. Translating the physical arts I most loved into words: my experiences of dancing and life-modelling. Then, more arduously, carving out narratives of sexual trauma. Death. Then, the sensual pleasures. Sex.

Light, dark, light, dark. Always this dance, and writing has helped me embrace the totality in the supposed contradictions.

These are a few of my favourite things …

I realised it’s not been only my reading of erotica that has fuelled my desire to write erotica. As importantly, it’s been my reading of the following: non-fiction feminist texts and essays, strong, powerfully imaginative contemporary women fiction writers, play-texts written by female playwrights, and women’s short stories, in addition to a few core works of erotica read at crucial moments in my life journey. Then, throw in a few texts by male authors, and that would more aptly represent  those voices that resonate and refract in my own writing. Sontag again captures my thoughts on the relationship between what one reads and how one writes:

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by writing.”

I have said before that reading Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus gave me the spark to write about desire, and almost a decade later re-discovering Jeanette Winterson’s sensual, searing prose gave me the permission. Something about Winterson’s work resonated with the language burning away inside me, threatening a slow smouldering consumption of my journal pages if I didn’t give my ideas some more space and light. And more eyes and ears. Susan Sontag writes in an essay called Writing as Reading that our writing too, is part of our reading; that ” to write is to practice, with particular attentiveness, the art of reading.”

This portion of my shelf houses a seemingly arbitrary, but indelibly meaningful personal version of the Dewey decimal system. My obsession with creative process is revealed by my collection of books on the craft of writing and creative process. After all, “writing is finally, a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways” (Sontag).

Honourable mention goes to Ray Bradbury’s (one of my lifelong revered writers, so he had to get a mention in this article somehow)  Zen in the art of Writing and Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo. (Want to know how to go about writing difficult, personal experiences of trauma and loss so you can re-frame your experience and let words heal the wounds? This is the book)

Then there are my feminist theory texts such as Naomi Wolf’s Vagina.  There are more of those off-stage left, but I wanted a closer shot where you could also see some of the titles on the spine. There are two anthologies in which my own stories are published  (Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 13, A Story-telling of Ravens) nestled next to works that inspired me to start writing erotica. There’s an incredible feminist re-imagining of Medea’s story by German author Christa Wolf. Margaret Atwood’s chillingly feminist work of speculative fiction The Handmaid’s Tale.

Missing in action is Tobsha Learner’s witty and sensual Quiver,  also part of my chain of cause-and-effect of becoming an erotica writer.  I fear this one went the way of an ex, never to return, though her other anthology Tremble  is present. Also, I noticed with dismay I have no personally owned volumes of Angela Carter’s stories. That I shall have to remedy. There are more obscure erotic works such as Alina Reye’s Lucie’s Long Voyage and a comprehensive, gently academic and exhaustive collection of women’s writing called Erotica: An Anthology of Women’s Writing, edited by Margaret Reynolds. This one almost made it to my list, but it’s been more a reference book and an introduction to some of my favourite writer’s work, rather than one I’ve read cover to cover. This snapshot contains a good number of what I’d call my “Kore Reads”, but not quite all of them.

So here, in the order my subconscious tumbled them onto the page, is my bakers’ dozen (or my witches’ coven) of beloved  texts of erotic inspiration. Thirteen is a powerful number with a contentious and misunderstood history, so perhaps that’s appropriate for a tracing of the articulation of female desire. Over time, I’ll add descriptions or reviews.  If my writing resonates with you in any way as the reader, I hope you’ll feel intrigued to investigate a few of them. Or maybe some of these are your favourites.

• Delta of Venus – Anais Nin

• Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson

• Lighthouse Keeping – Jeanette Winterson

• The Last Magician – Janette Turner-Hospital

• Perfume –Patrick Suskind

• Medea – Christa Wolf

• On Lies, Secrets and Silences: Selected Prose 1966 – 1978 – Adrienne Rich

• Women who Run with the Wolves – Clarissa Pinkola Estes

• The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter

• Quiver – Tobsha Learner

• What I have Written – John A Scott

• Vinegar Tom – Caryl Churchill

• A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments – Roland Barthes
  

These are a few of my favourite things. These works and their themes, language, ideas, imagery now live inside me. These are the words that fire my own.

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading.  Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write – and rereading the beloved books of the past – constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction.  Consolation.  Torment.  And yes, inspiration.”

~ Susan Sontag

*If you’d like references or more information about any of the books I’ve mentioned, dear reader, leave a Comment below or send me a personal message HERE.

Talk to me. I’m listening…

Writing the Erotic – Where do We Begin?

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Adrea Kore, Creative Process, Inspiration, Natalie Goldberg, On Writing, sexuality, Take Pen in Hand

In Writing Down the Bones, a wonderful classic on the craft of writing, author Natalie Goldberg discusses eroticism in one essay. She explains, and I agree, that any big topic, such as eroticism, can leave us generalizing, making grandiose statements, or never even starting because we think we don’t know enough.

“Always begin with yourself, and let that carry you,” she suggests. “Begin with something small and concrete – your teacup in its saucer, the thin slice of apple …Writing, she says, “is an act of discovery”. You want to discover your relationship to the topic, not the dictionary definition.”

Natalie Goldberg – On Writing

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Inspiration, Natalie Goldberg, On Writing