Hi all,
I started this AWP 2024 report when I got back, then got swallowed up in other business. The conference feels like old news now but since I got some new subscribers when I told Instagram I’d started a Substack about the “Writing Trans Sex” panel, I’ll share some short thoughts. I shall not disappoint you, new followers. Welcome! Stay.
(AWP is short for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. When writers say “AWP” as a place or event we’re referring to the organization’s annual conference, which is national and big, typically bringing ~12,000 attendees. It’s an academic conference that’s centered around creative writing programs and because it’s designed for people with access to institutional funding, the steep registration fee is a barrier for those without that support; but many writers who are unaffiliated with institutions still attend.)
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There have been AWPs I spent mostly at off-site events, or at the bookfair, or getting meals and coffee with friends. This time I went to panels—trying to hit as many of the unusually plentiful queer and trans and sex writing panels as I could, and a few others on hybrid nonfiction and the state of literary criticism. I did only one sweep through the bookfair, and not even a full sweep, affected as I was by the desperate cries of the lonelier book displays. I made it to just two offsite events. I was happy to spend time with Andrea and Cathy and KJ; and Cassie and Rani and the Weird Sister crew. I was happy to get back to my hotel room and slide into my king-sized bed.
I spoke on two panels, on favorite topics: “Writing Trans Sex” and “The Trans Fantastic.” Both opened with the statement written by the Radius of Arab American Writers acknowledging genocide in Gaza. Both conversations have stayed with me but I’ll focus on the first because I have more to say as a postscript.
“Writing Trans Sex” was moderated by A.E. (Austen) Osworth; my co-panelists were Meredith Talusan, Aureleo Sans, and Denne Michele Norris. (I was pinch hitting for Alex Marzano-Lesnowich, who couldn’t make it.) We each read steamy scenes, all wildly different in tone and kinds of people and sex acts/dynamics represented, then shifted to a roundtable responding to Austen’s smart, very generative questions.
I chose two short T4T scenes. The first was an abridged excerpt from “Slug,” in which a character’s sexual encounter with a giant slug turns her into a giant slug, leading to ecstatic Slug4Slug / T4T sex. The second was an excerpt from a new unpublished essay “Muscle Milk” that describes an erotic circuit training scene I enacted with a lover.
Austen drew from Garth Greenwell’s great essay on sex writing to set up their first question, about what it is we are trying to do when we’re writing trans sex.
I framed the excerpts I read as examples of two strains of sex writing in my work. In my fiction, weird/queer sex is often ecstatic and transformative. My nonfiction—while also interested in fantasy—has a more diaristic or documentarian quality informed by New Narrative and also (some) Samuel R. Delany.
Post-panel, I’ve been thinking more about the stylistic differences between these two strains. The erotic scenes in “Slug” are explicit, unrelentingly so. Since it is a fantastic scene involving a fantastic body, I wanted the events of the scene to be absolutely clear: yes, this giant slug is now sliming their way into Patty’s cunt. Because the scene only exists as imagined on the page, I’m using the page to do, and hold, the work of imagining.
“Muscle Milk” on the other hand is oddly shy and more intimating. It describes the circuit training setup but not the sex acts. In preparing an excerpt for this panel, I was worried it wasn’t explicit enough and so I added the language “slipping my tongue into their asshole” to make it clear, in case it wasn’t, what we meant by “shoulder stand.” At the time I was thinking about this in terms of permission – i.e., the panel’s imperative to be steamy opened the window for me to be more explicit. But I’m realizing now that in capturing this scene, I didn’t need that permission: I had already (collaboratively) enacted the scene. In writing about it, the work I was doing was different than the work I do in my fiction, where I use the story as an imagination space—and in some sense a permission-granting space. In “Muscle Milk” I am recording what has already taken place, and I want to share it with others while keeping some things for myself and the person I collaborated with. (Reading this essay again last week, I took the added language back out.)
The previous day I had attended the “f/Lawless: Writing Queer Sex” panel, with Melissa Febos, Jeanne Thornton, Lydia Conklin, Asali Solomon, and Annie Liontas. It was among the best AWP panels I’ve seen. Everyone was brilliant and hilarious and invested in making space for the vast range of sexual experience we might have and can write about.
There was an audience question about getting caught up in the question of “literariness” when writing sex. I loved how Melissa reframed the question, noting that when we say “literary” we mean “artfulness” and how we get to decide what that means. (Everyone should read her essay on sex writing, which is also included in her book Body Work.)
In our panel, a similar question came up. I paraphrased what Melissa said, then went on to challenge the tendency of writers to want to distance themselves from smut—i.e., “I want to write about sex but I want it to be art and not porn.”
I want to extend that point here. I just really reject any hierarchy where erotica/smut is seen as less crafted or artful than “real” literature. Most of the erotica I’ve read involves incredible creative imagination and often does great tension-building work while paying close attention to the body and physical and emotional response. Writers of smut know how to create intimacy with their readers and how to move characters and their bodies through scenes. We can learn a lot from it. We can learn a lot from all kinds of writing.
But let me back up, because when I say “smut/erotica” I’m not even sure what I mean. There are so many traditions! There’s erotic romance as a (huge) market and all of the subgenres within it (paranormal, Christian, time travel, western…). There’s erotic literature like Story of O and Bataille’s Story of the Eye. There’s (now honing in on queer categories) the many decades of mass market and indie queer pulp (see Susan Stryker’s Queer Pulp for a history); and a later tradition of kink/BDSM erotica characterized by classics like Carol Queen’s The Leather Daddy and the Femme and Patrick Califia’s Macho Sluts, published by feminist/queer presses like Cleis and Alyson in the 1980s and 1990s. There’s New Narrative—a school of queer experimental writing that often explored desire and sex. Samuel R. Delany’s porn novels. Sex diaries like Lou Sullivan’s We Both Laughed in Pleasure and McKenzie Wark’s Reverse Cowgirl. Alan Moore and Melinda Gibbie’s dreamy erotic opus Lost Girls. Amber Dawn’s anthology Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire (where “Slug” was first published). More recent anthologies like Tobi Hill-Meyer’s Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic.
I could go on. I’m a slut for all of it. I think of smut/erotica as another lineage that informs my work and not something to distance myself from.
Some of the scenes shared on the “f/Lawless” panel went more towards awkwardness, disconnection, dysphoria. In response to the current explosion of anti-trans legislation and sentiment we’re up against, our panel was more emphatic about framing trans sex through joy and pleasure.
I’ve been thinking more about how my sex writing leans towards sublimity only when it’s imagining weird sex between slugs or My Little Ponies. My sex scenes between humans are frank, interested, some more embodied than others, some more sociological or documentarian than others, and typically more focused on action and event than internal experience. Now that I see this pattern, I want to try some new things. (I loved what Melissa said about how she moved “from thinking a description of shitting on someone is radical to becoming more interested in mapping the experience in the body and in the mind” (this quote is probably 70% accurate).)
(There were many quotable gems on our panel, too! Regrettably, I took no notes. :/ )
We had an audience question about the cis gaze: to what extent we find it useful to consider. I didn’t (and don’t) have much to say about that but regret not using the question as an opportunity to pivot to – not an ace gaze so much as an ace perspective, which I have found important and useful to hold in mind when writing sex. (“Ace” being short for “asexual.”) This is a perspective I’ve developed from my sort-of-ace years – and through my participation in asexuality studies. (Just days before AWP I was moving through copyedits for the ten-year anniversary edition of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, which I’m co-editing with KJ—out in June.)
When writing sex, I write through a lens that combines queer sex-positivity with ace skepticism; that understands sex (especially queer/trans sex) to be potentially liberatory and potentially transformative and hugely important as a practice of resistance; and that also challenges compulsory sexuality, the conflation of sex and romance, and the common/accepted prioritization of sexual over other forms of intimacy. I don’t know how successful I am in bringing all of this into my work but it is something I aspire to, always.
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Other stuff:
Congratulations to Erica N. Cardwell on her debut work of nonfiction Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art, out next week from Feminist Press! I’m engrossed, halfway through, and savoring.
I’m dizzy with excitement for Michelle Tea’s new Dopamine Books (an imprint of Semiotext(e) no less!).
Everyone’s been saying it and I will too: Go read Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail.
My own recent writing:
Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite (book review, 4Columns)
Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name (book review, 4Columns)
Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California (book review, NYT)
“The Many Names of Barbara Grier: On Naiad Press, Lesbian Publishing, and Pseudonyms” – new essay in The Weird Sister Collection (edited by Marisa Crawford, out now from Feminist Press)
I have a few events coming up (all in NYC):
March 16 – Somaflights Reading w/Emily Brandt, Olivia Muenz, Lorraine Schein, and Bishakh Som @ Dear Friend (343A Tompkins Ave, Brooklyn), 7 pm
April 27 – Indie Bookstore Day Bacchanalia w/Melissa Lozada-Oliva and Chelsea G. Summers @ Books Are Magic Montague location, 12 pm
May 8 (we think) – Patchwork: A Feminist Literary Salon - new Feminist Press series hosted by Nadine Santoro at Sisters Restaurant – more info soon
May 21 – Book Launch for Nicole Haroutunian w/ LaToya Jordan, Carley Moore, & Amy Shearn @ Powerhouse
Thanks for reading. Permanent ceasefire now.
Yours,
Megan
This is such a generous recap, thank you Megan! I'm teaching a sex writing workshop next weekend and will definitely be sharing this piece with my students. Wish I had been at AWP, I miss talking writing with you!