From the Archive: Unbound
It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
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Join NOW!It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
...moreWhere my masculinity dwells, I am in control.
...moreMy dad, a psychiatrist, wants to write a sex book.
...moreEvery poem in I Live in the Country sells what it’s craving.
...moreWhen Ashleigh Bryant Phillips lets loose, she can shock.
...moreMy body tightened as the knee-jerk worry of being seen and outed flooded back.
...moreGreenwell tells his story on the narrator’s terms, and that makes all the difference.
...moreI remember driving a bird mad once.
...more“Understanding that you can have what you desire can be healing and transformative.”
...moreMelanie Abrams discusses her debut novel, PLAYING, and a forthcoming novel, MEADOWLARK.
...morePlace is context in part, but it is not context in summation.
...moreA writer must push her pleasure into risk, expose herself publicly to strangers with no knowledge of how she might be received, and become something that must be seen.
...moreIf there is going to be pain, let it be by choice.
...moreThe pressure to prove ourselves can have a distorting effect, causing us to doubt our instincts in favor of following others we perceive to be experts or “genuine.”
...moreIt is about the essential parts of story. The bones. The steel rods and rings. The skin that goes white with tension. Tolerating that kind of discomfort takes practice, yes, but it is exhilarating.
...moreThe way I think about my writing is similar to the way I think about my kink—both have to do with history and the ethics around appropriation.
...moreI don’t mind being left with a bruise if it reminds me that someone imagined something for me, that art can be part of the experience.
...moreI am an emerging writer and fairly young kinkster. The letters on my keyboard are just starting to fade; the leather of my cuffs is just starting to crack.
...moreI discovered leather nearly fifteen years ago, at eighteen, right around the time I started writing.
...moreWriting is not just about expressing myself creatively, or even about having my voice heard: it is about releasing some part of myself.
...moreWhat do we as writers tell each other about the intersections of trauma and desire? How do we encourage (or discourage) each other to reveal the power and tensions in those margins?
...moreI wanted to uncover the nest of wires comprising my gender identity and describe its complicated mass.
...moreIs it really that human capacity is limited? Or are we limited by what it is we believe we are able, and allow ourselves—are willing—to see?
...moreThe more secrets I wrote about, the fewer I wanted to keep. And the more secrets I made public through my writing, the more I gained.
...morePoems and rope that make me plumb my depths and stretch my limits of my poetic language: that’s the worthwhile project.
...moreWhat is a career, and how does it define us?
...moreMy kink used to be my Deepest Darkest secret, and now it is an integrated part of my everyday life.
...moreI would go so far as to say that the entire reason I write is to detect all the irony that language allows and twist it around the truth like razor wire and ivy. That’s how I like my truth: twisted.
...moreLast month I reached out to LA-based expat Anna Span, an English porn producer (and one-time Liberal Democrat candidate) who awhile back, fought the UK’s ban on showing female ejaculation in porn—and won! I was anxious to hear her take on the recent crackdown on sadomasochistic practices in adult films, specifically whether “BDSM-themed art porn” […]
...moreNatasha Gornik’s photographs of people involved in New York’s BDSM scene capture the honesty and community that are essential to practicing kink. Check out her work here, and read about it on her blog.
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