Erotic City: Reading Nin While Listening to Outkast

One of my editors recently joined blogger so I stopped by Naked With Socks On to support and found the current entry to be extremely - uh- titillating. I'm not one to shy away from explicit content, I mean shit -- my first foray into fiction publishing was this joint right chere:



Look it up on Amazon if you're curious. But back to the point at hand, reading Anslem's "I Found Love In this Club" entry made me encourage him to try writing erotica, and it also reminded me of that first published story. I don't give much commentary here, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to share a little about that experience.

My mentor Samiya Bashir edited TBBWE2, and she encouraged me to submit something. At the time I'd been reading erotica for a minute, since childhood really. After shocking first encounters with Judy Blume (Wifey) and Rosa Guy I was about 13 or 14 when I became completely intrigued by the mysterious hardbound copy of Anais Nin's "Delta Of Venus" sitting innocently enough on the family bookshelf.



Inside were tales of people whose lives spilled over with adventure, passion, the arts, love, lust, beauty and travel. The kind of lives I thought glamorous, but more importantly, satisfying. When it came time for me to write my own erotica I thought about what I valued so much in "Delta" and rather than emulate (by then I had read enough bad erotica to know the difference between sublime and ridiculous)I thought about the purest elements of Nin's writing. I channeled my most intense relationship -- the greatest love I ever knew (and perhaps the best lovemaking at that) and combined it with all the sounds, smells and feelings that had made the most intense impression on me.

For me some of the best moments in the bedroom have been accompanied by candle light and music -- Sade, Miles Davis and Lenny Kravitz have all provided for some great mood music (as I documented in the poem "Soundtrack for Us") but the most appropriate song for me and my "Best of Black Women's Erotica 2" contribution was Outkast's "Funky Ride" which happens to also be the title of my submission.



Five years have passed since that story went to press, since it was excerpted for the back cover and since Black Issues Book Review singled me out for a quote in their review of the anthology. Being a writer of "erotica" temporarily changed my life. Family members smirked at the mention of the book, I blushed voicing the title a time or two myself, and men who read the story sometimes pursued me for all the wrong reasons. Fortunately those issues have passed. I've since gone on to write about other things, but I'll never be embarrassed about being included in TBBWE2 or my love for Anais Nin and Outkast.