Best American Erotica

My Date with Fleshlight: Joe Maynard Remembers

For our 15th anniversary, The Best American Erotica 2008, I asked all the BAE authors, "What inspired you to write your story in the first place?"

Writer Joe Maynard  wrote me a letter with the best behind-the-scenes story of all. It's all about how he came to test-drive a "male masturbation toy" called the Fleshlight, when he was given a demo model on assignment by a mercurial magazine editor — with rather impossible expectations...

Joe Maynard, on “Fleshlight”

Dear Susie,

Funny you should ask about the circumstances in which “My Date with Fleshlight” was written.

It begins simply, as these things often do. A Bostonian woman who’d previously published my work, moved to New York and was working for an erotica magazine here.

We‘d gone out to a movie together, and had a couple of those aesthetic discussions over cappuccino that you have with other aesthetes in your field. I was happy this new artistic ally that had moved to the city.

One day she called me to say she had a product, the Fleshlight, and asked me to write a product review. At this point in our relationship, the Editrix and I were friends. Sure, she’d published a couple of my stories in Boston. But that was Boston. This New York assignment was closer to home: the assignment that would turn our relationship professional.

The story I wrote was pretty much exactly what happened while testing this product. As you said to me, “you don’t hear a lot about men doing this!”  and that jibes with the fact that it wasn’t something I would normally do. I was happy with my girlfriend, “her cute little ass cupped inside a pair of velour bikini panties,” as the story goes.

It’s simple to find sex, but finding someone you love— that’s magic. The point of sex is ecstacy. Being in love is the drug, sex is the needle. So  I found the whole situation of fucking a cold piece of plastic absurd— even if it was “space-age” plastic.

My editrix only wanted two paragraphs, but being the conscientious artiste that I was, I wanted them to be the best paragraphs ever written. I was taking a writing class at the time, and James Salter had given us a talk on the idea of getting a notion of some sort, and stringing beads onto that notion—using the notion as a string that holds a pearl necklace together— never articulating everything inside each pearl, yet “being the string,” and penetrating, then absorbing, whatever the interior of each bead had to offer.

You know, suck the pearl dry and move on.

So, geek-like, I struggled with my squeamishness regarding inter-elemental sex, my fears that I’d write a piece of boring crap, and  I meditated on the wise words from the great author, stringing my friggin’ beads.

One day it just all came out. Probably not exactly what Mr. Salter had in mind, but potent, pearl-sucking pages.

I faxed it in, and the next day, I called Editrix for her editorial imput. I thought she’d tell me she laughed her ass off, that the joke was a home-run, that my intricate subtleties articulated a flavor never-before tasted. It would be as sure as a baby pearl sings its beauty-song to the mother clam, and the fruits of our first “professional” encounter would produce the first-ever two-paragraph sex product review to win a Pulitzer prize.

Perhaps it was too close to deadline time. Maybe it was because I didn’t simply say how great this fine product was: “You’ll never enjoy fucking a  plastic sponge as much as you will the Fleshlight.”

But instead I was honest. I let people know what it really felt like. Her response, lackluster, was something like, “What’s this?  I just wanted a couple paragraphs.”

“Fine,” I said, “This is just the way I work. It’s my process.”

Silence.

I suggested I could change it for her and then later rework it for Juggs, or Nerve.

“What?” she shouted. “You’re giving it to someone else? This was an experience I gave you! Our experience! Not Nerve’s!” She said I was ungrateful and totally unprofessional to even consider publishing it anywhere else.

She hung up. Bitch! I put the phone down and looked around at four co-workers stared back at me.

“What the fuck was that?” my boss asked.

“I think she dumped me.”

“Who, your girlfriend?”

“No, my editor.”

Later, I sent her the requisite two ‘graphs, but I’m not certain she ever used them. It was overshadowed by our break-up.

I tried to remember the good times. Her initial call— “I think I have something for you to test drive.”  Her “Did the Fleshlight arrive yet?” the day it came. Her “How was it?” the morning after I fucked the sponge.

I roamed the streets despondent. Every porno shop seemed to be “our” porno shop. Every blow-up doll was  our relationship: a lot of hot air that in one prickly moment explodes in your face!

With due love and respect for sex industry,

Joe Maynard

Photo of Joe from LaMama Poetry Archives

One of Joe's poems composed on dollar bills: Ducky Doolittle's LiveJournal
 

Susie's Last Tour for Best American Erotica

I am going on tour this winter, for the last, no-kidding, very last, edition of The Best American Erotica, 2008.

Why is this the very last BAE? You can read all the details here.

But for the moment, here are my farewell party plans!

I would like to visit, and give a great hug, to:

    *  everyone who ever read a story in BAE, anytime since 1993, and never forgot it

    *  every BAE author I published and adored

    *  everyone I ever sent a (hopefully polite) rejection letter to

    *  every editor, agent, and permissions manager who helped me connect with an author

The dates so far:

Thursday, January 24, 7:00 PM
Brookline Booksmith

Friday, January 25, 7:00 PM
Longfellow Books
Portland, ME (my first visit to Maine!)

Saturday, February 9, 7:30 PM
Book Shop Santa Cruz

Wednesday, February 13, 7:30 PM
Modern Times Bookstore

Monday, February 18, 7:30 PM
Powell's Bookstore

Tuesday, February 19, 7:00 PM
Bailey/Coy Books

Thursday, February 21, 7:00 PM
Diesel, A Bookstore
Malibu, CA

Friday, February 22, 7:00 PM
Skylight Books
Los Angeles, CA

If you would like me to come to your town for an appearance, please click here! This tour is in progress; I expect to add more dates.

That "click" will send a request to both myself and the book's publicist. Use the comment boxt o suggest WHERE I should plan an event (bookstore, theater, your living room, etc.) and whether you have any clever funding ideas for the travel expenses.

Although this appearance-request system is not a fairy-godmother device, it will help me figure out where I need to go— where the welcome wagon is! Having friendship, homecooked meals, and support on a book tour is the difference between life and death, believe me.

If you want to keep up with my tour updates, sign up on my page at BookTour.com— they'll let you know you by email/RSS/whatever as to when I'm coming to your town.

(If you're an author who hasn't signed up with BookTour, I recommend it. It's such a relief to have a user-friendly place where you can organize all your reader events. Your fans can request an email or any kind of alert they like, every time you show up in public to make a fool genius of yourself!)

 

A Quick One with Dorothy Allison

What other occupations do you hold, or have you held, besides being a writer?

Teacher, waitress, maid, short order cook, salad girl, typist, transcriber, babysitter, dog walker & groomer, data entry clerk, computer specialist, gardener, performance artist, corset maker, seamstress, phone sex failure, mom, credit union manager, bookstore clerk, manager, phone representative, Social Security clerk (GS-6), dominatrix, sold fish by the side of the road, meat packer, audio announcer, actress, fruit picker... I could go on for pages and pages. Writing does not seem to earn a reliable living.

Are you now, or have you been a sex worker?

Yes, not a very good one.

Have you ever held Political Office?

Only in alternative organizations.

How old are you?

Fifty-seven, too old to care.

What is your astrological sign?

Aries, with intimations of Aquarius.

Are you a parent? A grandparent?

Parent and aunt.

Do your children and/or parents know about your erotic writing? Have they read it?

Parents knew and Mama read some. My boy just learned to read, not up to dykes and dicks yet.

Have you written and published Children's Stories, or Young Adult fiction?

Written some, published none.

Have you written and published Mystery or Crime fiction?

Yes.

Have you written and published Poetry?

Yes.

Has your work ever been banned in a nation, or seized at Customs?

Yes.

Has your work ever been subpoenaed?

Yes.

When not writing, what are you likely to be doing?

Hanging out with my family and friends.

Do you have any noteworthy hobbies, regimes, pursuits, or collections?

Extensive collection of lesbian feminist literature.

Dorothy Allison is the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, Trash, and the forthcoming novel, She Who. “What She Did With Her Hands” appeared in Best American Erotica 2003.

Photo by Jill Posener.

Scooter Libby's Erotic Writing Tutor

All across the country, people are asking, "Why didn't Scooter Libby take some erotic writing advice before he wrote his dirty novel?"

I know, I know— the damage is done. Now when The New Yorker reviews his torrid oeuvre, they can be cruel:

While one critic deemed [Libby's] The Apprentice reminiscent of Rembrandt, certain passages can better be described as reminiscent of Penthouse Forum.

Ouch. That was so unnecessary. I'm listed, after all. When you're the Vice President's Chief of Staff, don't you owe it to yourself to have the very best counsel?

To start with, Scooter could use a good spanking with a hardcover edition of Strunk & White's Elements of Style. His most grievous challenge lies in composition and command of the English language.

We should've smelled a rat when Libby first wrote that note to Judy Miller that sounded like a Harlequin blurb:

Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come  back to work— and life.

I have to admit, that caught my attention. Those lines are near lavender with Bronté-itis. I thought, "Those two must be carrying on a platonic infatuation— if they were fucking, he wouldn't be this overt. Either that, or the man is in love with the sound of his own voice."

Well, if you can't get a decent book doctor the first time 'round, you can always learn from your mistakes. Let's do a "clinic" on where Scooter went wrong. I'm going to use my book, How to Write a Dirty Story, as our textbook.

Scooter writes:

He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his. He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger. . . . One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he knew not how best to touch her.

This passage violates one of my cardinal rules, outlined on p. 130 of HTWDS:

Love Scenes Are Not Operating Instructions

Erotic scenes are acts of passion. You don't want to reduce body parts to a running diagram of measurements and traffic signals:

"Licking my way three inches up her left knee, I felt her ejaculate splatter my right cheek."

This unerotic attention to the wrong details is what is known as "mechanical" sex writing, and you want to rid yourself of the neurosis at its first showing.

The Business of Erotic Writing

I recently got interviewed for a book trade magazine on the subject of the business of selling "erotica," and it aroused my... suspicions.

I knew that past couple years, all the major romance imprints have taken an X-rated turn, and their combined marketing muscle was creating a mini-boom in advertising and seemingly "spontaneous" media stories about erotica for women.

There's lots of talk about how the TV show "Sex in the City" created women's erotica from whole cloth (hand me the barf bag)— and plenty of discussion about the differences, or perhaps the collapse of difference, between romance and chick lit.

For this story in Publisher's Weekly, I did an interview with Bethanne Patrick, the book review editor for AOL.

The "Forbidden" PW Erotic Romance interview

Bethanne Patrick: Why is romance as a genre already cracked, if not downright broken into pieces?

SB: It may be cracked, but it's still in business. If Romance publishers didn't change with the times and their community, they wouldn't exist as a genre anymore.

You may say, for example, that the Western is pure— but it's dead as a contemporary book genre. Horror nearly went belly up; science fiction would have curled into a historical corner if it wasn't for the Internet crowd that created a resurrection.

Five Dimes by Anita Melissa Mashman

"You want me to do what?" I asked surprised, looking down at the silver coins on my naked stomach.

Patiently he explained again.

"Stand in the middle of the room, with your legs spread. Then put your hands together, over your head, palm to palm, with a dime beteen each pair of fingers and your thumbs."

Pulse beating fast, I thought, what interesting little game does he have in mind this time?"

from "Five Dimes," by the late Anita Melissa Mashman, in Best American Erotica 1993

Listen to the whole story, read by Saint Teresa Stone: Link.

After you peel yourself off the floor, I think you'll want to hear the rest!

Best American Erotica '93 was my first collection in the BAE series, and it's so good sometimes I wonder how I had the nerve to try another.

Audible now has the whole original audiobook for you to download: Link

Other authors include: Blake Aarens, Greg Boyd, Pat Califia, the late great Bob Flanagan and Ronald Sukenick, Lisa Palac, Carol Queen, Trish Thomas, and Carter Wilson, among others. (Trish almost got taken away by Katrina but we're still holding onto her!)

The actors, like Miss Stone, who recorded these erotic stories, are veterans of audiobook recording. But this is a BIG departure for them. They would love to hear what you think! You can send any fan or feedback letters to me and I will respectfully forward it to them.

Yes, that's Miss MoneyPenny, from James Bond's early incarnations.

A Devil's Argument Against Publishing

If you write an erotic story — or any story, for that matter — and never publish it, you will have done a very good thing. If it stays in a box for you to cherish, if it is passed between you and your lover, shared among friends, or circulated on a private e-mail list, ypar ou will have accomplished something quite wonderful.

By writing privately, you will have expressed yourself intimately, and communicated with exactly who you wanted to speak to in the first place. You will have the primal satisfaction of an artist: your imagination fulfilled. You’ll have confronted the challenge to be authentic, to dream aloud, to take yourself over the falls and climb back out, soaking wet and ready for the next round. Congratulations, you are a true writing hero!

By not publishing in the public world — with the mediation of publishers, distributors, and retailers — you will remain unsullied and unembittered by the publishing process, which is not unlike being dragged naked inside a barrel filled with nails.

No one will put a price on you, no series of twits will be the final arbiters of your value. Your writing will not be lost in the shuffle, or ignored, or insulted. It won’t find itself in the hands of the indifferent and indignant. You won’t be told you’re a superstar, but neither will you ever be called a has-been, a one-shot wonder, or a fraud. You will not be betrayed by strangers.

When I read stories by unpublished writers that deeply affect me, I am torn. My first impulse is, “They are so incredible, they must be read by the rest of the world. How can I get their work in print?” Yet the other side of me says, “They are so dignified in their publishing innocence, their uncompromised integrity. How can I seduce them to what I know is a miniature version of hell?”

My advice to unpublished writers is this: There is nothing like the thrill of reaching new readers with your work, the people who resonate with your creative ideas and want to share their own inspirations with you. There is nothing like hearing a total stranger say, “Your story changed my life.” Some of those strangers will become your dear new friends, future collaborators, lovers, and comrades.

However, in order to reach those new friends, lovers, and comrades, you are going to have to go to The Market. The Market is not “your friend”; The Market does not have your self-interest at heart. It can be an intoxicating place — the money changing hands, the competitions, the auctions, the promotions and premiums — but it isn’t a place that puts art first, or people first. It puts money first, and that requires a measure of illusion and exploitation that must be endured in order to reach your desired audience.

Interviews Where I Might Have Said Too Much

An interview with Susie Bright, on The Best American Erotica series, from
The Boston Phoenix:

Q:  Are there ever writers who don’t want to be included in BAE?

SB:  At the very beginning.I remember asking John Nichols if I could reprint a story of his that I liked very much, and he said, "You want to reprint it in what? Best American what?" It was like I had just invited him to join me in my trash-trailer-park cheese-ball orgy or something. I sent him a copy and he said, "Okay, it’s not as bad as I thought, but people just don’t realize what you’re doing. It’s a very valiant effort, but no thank you." Then a couple of years later he sent me a note that said, "That was so dumb. I really wish I’d been in your book."

Nowadays, no. I almost wish somebody would get upset! It’s much more commercial. It’s like, "Well, how much are you paying?" Believe me, I’m all for writers getting paid, because I certainly include myself among them. It’s just interesting that there’s not a sense of putting yourself in danger or ruining yourself.

It used to be erotic writers were kind of presenting sexual lifestyles and behavior that maybe you hadn’t heard about before. It was like— "Wow, fisting? You’re kidding. Jell-O orgies? Never heard of them! Transgender — what’s that?" There was this sense of opening the curtain and showing things. Now, you’re not going to surprise people with sexual behavior, you really have to go deeper into the character and suprises of human nature....

The SFist

Q.  You've been writing, editing and critiquing erotica for years now.  Would you mind introducing our readers to some classics of the genre?

SB :  I think everyone has their own personal history of the books they first read that they realized were "hot." I remember a copy of The Godfather that was being passed around my seventh grade classroom with the "dirty parts" marked in turned-down pages. When I got older, I went back to look at what was so "dirty' and I just had to laugh-- it was Mario Puzo's version of The Farmer's Daughter, a bawdy story with no shortage of purple prose.

I also remember the first time I read erotic stories that I realized were being told with a degree of insight and depth that took them into another dimension. They were "hot," but they also were profound on other levels. I remember John Updike's  "Couples" and Charles Bukowski's "Notes of a Dirty Old Man." I remember taking "Story of O" on my first major backpacking trip into the Sierras for  a month of bushwacking. I remember how spooked I was that the two books I packed:  "O" and "Gravity's Rainbow," Both ended with unfinished sentences.

My introduction to "plain brown wrappers" came much later. I picked up a hitchhiker on Valencia St., which much have been the last of his kind in the 1980s, and he left a brown-bag covered paperback in the back seat when he left, titled: "Dueling Lesbians in Bondage." What a treasure...

Surviving Darwin, by Alicia Gifford

Every year I publish Best American Erotica, I always pick one story that I especially like to read aloud at book events. Usually, the first time I read it, it’s in bed with my lover, because I get so inspired I have to try it out on him.

My favorite “read-aloud” story in Best American Erotica 2005 is "Surviving Darwin” by Alicia Gifford.

I asked Alicia if I could offer you a reprint of the story here on my blog, and she kindly agreed. Other authors in BAE 2005 include Mary Gaitskill ("The Ugly Cock Dance") and Nelson George "(It’s Never Too Late in New York") as well as Steve Almond remembering the best Ecstasy party ever.

The Portable Girlfriend, by Doug Tierney

"HEY, WIREHEAD, wake up."

    Jack Bolander felt the vibrations through the floor as his roommate pounded on the bedroom door. The sunrise coming through his window turned the yellow painted-over wallpaper a sick orange color, the color inside his head when he wired in without any software in the 'Face.

Ron pounded the door harder. "You're going to be late for work again, asshole. If you get fired, I'm kicking you out in the street."   

"Yeah, yeah, I'm up." Bo had been lying awake for a while on his bare mattress, staring at the water-damaged ceiling, drawing pictures with the rusty brown splotches, and trying to forget his dreams. Unconsciously, he stroked the inside of his thigh, but he stopped when kicked the door again. "I'll be out in a minute."

"I'm leaving in two minutes, with or without you."

"I said I'm coming." He dressed without looking down at his body, without glancing down at the lacework of shrapnel scars that ran from his right leg, across his crotch, to his left hip. He stuffed the 'Face and wires into his rucksack along with a couple disks before he pulled on his boots and his field jacket. He didn't bother to tie the boots; he'd do that in the car.

Stepping out of his room felt like stepping into someone else's house. Ron had furniture and house plants and cats. Bo had a mattress on the floor, piles of clothes, and milk crates of software. Sometimes he slept in the closet when he couldn't stop dreaming about the war.