Sex Writing Workshop

GR - Graduate

With the exception of pornography, our sexuality, our sex lives, our sexual fantasies, rituals, and practices are rarely represented or examined by writers. We might start by asking what is more fundamental and universal to humans than sex? In writing and images, a pivotal distinction arises between the pornographic, whose goal is arousal, and sex writing, whose goal is representational: to capture in words experiences that exist largely outside language, a transaction of bodies and consciousness, whose intensity rarely survives its lived moment. Sex writing, a modern enterprise, ventures to write sex: pure, clean, empirical almost. But to ignore the pornographic would be senselessly restrictive. Literally "the writing of harlots," pornography has ancient and primal roots in kindling lust, working as both a substitution for and supplement to actual sex. Generally belittled for its crude goal of arousal, the "low form" of pornography offers the writer a singular chance to interrogate Western culture's hostility to bodies and pleasure. Before we workshop, we will read a few prototypes of sex writing and pornography, which is the binary from which we build. This is not a class for the faint-hearted. Whether we approach it objectively or provocatively, representing sex is almost always transgressive. Our frank and robust conversations on erotic content will have equal rigor as our discussions of clauses, punctuation, and syntax.

RGCMWP - Creative Writing Program Only