The Rumpus Interview with Dylan Ryan
Porn star, writer, performance artist, social worker, and activist Dylan Ryan sheds light on her positive experiences as a sex worker and advocates for the empowerment of women in the porn industry.
...morePorn star, writer, performance artist, social worker, and activist Dylan Ryan sheds light on her positive experiences as a sex worker and advocates for the empowerment of women in the porn industry.
...moreHe knew what he was doing when he looked at me and said, “Sing for me.” Had I been nude in his bed I would not have been as naked as I was then, stripped down to my brand new skin.
...moreThe gulf between the place where I sang Mozart and Debussy with people my parents’ age and the place where I went to public school and tried to make friends with kids my own was vast.
...moreThere is nothing I have experienced that is so physical, nothing that resonates in the bones and meat of a person like it does to make music with other people at that sort of level.
...moreIt is not a coincidence that among the synonyms for “practice” is “ritual,” and for “ritual,” “practice.” When you do a thing over and over—even if it is only so banal and small as lighting a cigarette—it will assume a shape and a meaning, a weight and a force.
...moreIt would be easy and satisfying to say that I stopped singing because of the crack in my throat. It would be false. It’s true enough that there was one. There was a fight with a lover that turned ugly, a forearm pressed hard across my throat
...moreMy face burned with rage, with shame, with humiliation. I was failing openly, blatantly, at the one thing I still somehow, in the back of my mind, expected to be perfectly capable of doing after more than a decade’s silence.
...moreRachel Loden is the author of Hotel Imperium as well as four chapbooks, including The Last Campaign and The Richard Nixon Snow Globe. Her second full-length book, Dick of the Dead, was published by Ahsahta Press in May 2009. What follows is a review of Dick of the Dead followed by an interview with Loden—or, […]
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