An anthology of true stories about sex, edited by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell.
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Come DHL with me.
Our advance copies departed from Oddi today. They arrive tomorrow. (You know I’m gonna:) (!) (!) (!)
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Uncorrected proof.
I made Meaghan mussels marnière and we smoked a cigarette each on my fire escape for the first time. (Whittling away at my sympathetic Gauloises stuck in a drawer after the volcano, and some cloves I’ve probably had since we shot our project pitch video.) “It’s like joint custody,” she said, passing me the uncorrected proof back.
Every time I read my story it gets less autobiographical. It could prove that Hélène Cixous maxim, “‘Author’ is a psuedonym that fools no one.” She wrote memoirs that read like literary criticism. I ate up The Book of Promethea at nineteen. I loved women and didn’t trust my feelings and wanted to know what people meant by post-structuralism. I had all these confessions but the ones about words were harder to own up to. A graduate student who taught Duras and Trinh T. Minh-Ha invited me over to watch “The Lover” with her and her partner after I missed an in-class screening. (I had been supporting a building occupation in protest of racist campus policy changes by liasing with the press. The AP ran a photo of me huddled in a blanket on the steps of the administrative offices. My grandmother told me I looked like a refugee.) I never went to her house. It was too intimate, even for me with my no-boundaries. And just too much, to consider sleeping with a teacher of Francophone postcolonial feminisms.
“You’re producing evidence,” this observant boy said after Meaghan’s party, us trailing behind the rest. This page I can hold. (This proof that costs more than a book will!) We can’t change a word now. I can’t (I did at the last minute, one or two).
We told the writers, give us a real story, as true as it can be for your ethical understanding of truth. I am pretty sure I wrote the right story for this book, but the wrong story for myself. I trust myself now. I couldn’t until I’d followed this thing through to the end (the affair, the book — which cannot be the same thing, I need to accept that the book came first, that I grafted one to the other as a way to propel myself through the production, that a book is not a person, that me the author knows everything there is to know about a story but the story is not my life).
I’d like to love something else now, in addition to this.
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I’ve been published in various venues before, including websites and magazines and books (yes, books sold in Barnes and Noble, not books I wrote and handbound myself and charged family members $5 for, although maybe some of those as well.) I grew up thinking of myself as a writer, assuming I would make a life as a writer, and that “writer” would be my name in the world. I expected I’d feel a certain way (breathless, teary, ecstatic?) upon seeing my full name in magazine print, in book print, upon receiving my first real check for something I’d written, but I didn’t. Which is part of how I learned that I truly love writing, the process, and not writing, the finished product.
But I am so excited about this. Near giddy excited. I have never been so eager to hold a book in my hands or to immediately read it from front to back. For the first time, I feel the way I thought I would feel. So thank you, M & M. I cannot believe you are making us wait until September.
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“978-0-615-38494-8”
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I saw, or we saw, some mockups of Coming & Crying laid out today and it was very overwhelming. I don’t even write about this on the Internet because I am not sure where to begin? Also it means too much and I have no critical distance. I know. I didn’t even pay anyone to help me realize that; not in any traditional sense, anyway.
The book looks fucking good, I might add. Damn fucking good. Seeing my name laid out all book-like is new and surreal. I have never been in a book and you might say this one doesn’t count but to me it counts much more.
We printed out pages with different LEADING which is pronounced like LEAD like LEAD PAINT as Peter and Jacob were very excited to tell me about 3x each as I continued to mispronounce it and squint at the pages, trying to tell the difference between 14 and 14.5. 14 what, you might ask, but I couldn’t tell you except that 14.5 won. That means there will be more space between the lines for us to underline and circle and draw little hearts and OMGs, which is my favorite thing about books and why I don’t want them to ever end.
Seeing my story all laid out all book-like makes me instantly see every word that should be changed as if my brain is connected to the Platonic ideals of all sentences and all possible stories. I imagine I am taking some philosophical liberties here but in some superstitious, secret, stupid part of me I believe in that—that the perfect sentences are out there. I think fucking Katie Holmes said that to Michael Douglas in this movie tonight, even, which is beyond appropriate, excuse me while I jump out this window, et cetera.
Anyway it is ALL WRONG, my story, but I am comforted by the fact that at least three different of ‘my’ writers said the same thing about their stories when I emailed them with a Final Pass (Melissa and I kind of split the book in half and have teams; hopefully one day we will compete against each other in a three-legged race or something else less entendre-y in some way I don’t even understand).
God damn I want to punch my story in the face. But it is still good; not perfect but good. You’ll like it I think.
When I was home for this wedding, I met one of my mom’s good friends and she said that my mom knew she wouldn’t like all of the book but that she was really excited to read it. I think that was when I realized my mom might read my story.
Maybe I will glue the last few pages of it together. Not in a WINNNK way. In a literal way.
My new apartment has a fake fireplace and exposed brick and the sink has a soap dispenser built into it. The camera on my phone is broken so you’ll just have to trust me that it is empty, but nice.
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“…whatever typeface we decide on for the main copy, it needs to be one in which the word ‘fuck’ looks outstanding.”
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“Dolly is in fact quite a curvy typeface, with lots of rounded ends and flowing joints. There is nothing rectilinear about its outlines, yet the effect in text is straightforward; it doesn’t look soft or flaccid, like Souvenir.”
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on editing, and (no) agendas.
Meaghan and I have far more editing experience in a workshop environment, and so when we passed drafts back and forth a few times for comments before going back to authors with suggestions, it felt a little like a time-shifted workshop. We’ve been editing stories since mid-February (so that’s about two and a half months of editing about two dozen stories, while working full-time jobs), and to account for this being experimental, we’ve been adding new strategies to our process as we go. We’ve also been editing in public, and that’s challenging. Contributors can try to guess from our project updates when they think they should have heard back from us — and as we treated each story differently, and put each through multiple rounds of edits before we ever went back to the author — it took some stories more time to settle then others.
But back to the difference between what we did and what other anthology editors — especially erotica anthology editors (which we are not, not really) do — I’ve only participated, as a writer, in three anthologies, but each time, I got so few edits back I felt as if I was just being copyedited. (I am not perfect. And definitely not that perfect. And for this, we hired a copyeditor for C&C.) But it’s maybe a helpful distinction, between curation (where one edits only by placement, proximity, context) and editing (where the editor, well, edits). I took my editing cues in C&C not from my anthology experience, but from my experience being edited once an hour in the blog mines — where I had to learn to write fast and without attachment. It’s my editorial opinion (oh god) that this painful, ego-cutting-up process made me far less precious about my words. I trusted my editors to hold me to a goal my ego as an artist sometimes got in the way of (a lot of the time gets in the way of) — communication, speaking directly, reaching a reader in a relatable way. I mean, this is my editor — and if he can’t wade through what I want to say, and he’s getting paid to do so, there’s a problem with my work. We all have trusted First Readers, and those should probably be close friends who will tell us how painfully brilliant we are at the same time as they hold us accountable to whatever standards we tell them matter to us in our work. But an editor’s job is to hold the writer to their own standards and their own vision.
And last — we may not have had a sexual agenda going into this book (how could we?) but we certainly had an agenda as writers. We didn’t try to bring any story into alignment with an agenda of what it should be “about,” but we did push stories in directions we think are important and need pushing to happen — to be more raw, to be less needy, to be more human about sex.
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We were decorating our storyediting folders like 9th graders and trying to think of who we could ask to write our forward. “it’s on the tip of my tongue!” Melissa said from the couch. “me too!” I squealed and said I’d go look at my books for ideas and walked into my room.
“oh, Joan didion. That’s who I was thinking of,” she called after me. “oh yeah, ha me too.” “not gonna happen.” ” Oh. I was thinking of anais nin.” “ha. Dead.”
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We definitely took a risk with the title. First it was sort of the Working Title, the joke thing we stuck in until we thought of the real one, because we knew we’d never dare call it that. But then after talking about it with enough people and laughing about it for so long, I think we grew attached and we figured shooting from the hip was sort of the name of the game here.
So yes, it is done with a wink and I think it is clear that one of the many hopes for this book, in terms of the message it communicates, is that all experiences are valid. There will be funny stories, filthy stories (if we didn’t appreciate the kind of experience you are alluding to I really don’t think we would be doing this book in the first place), awkward, sad; I hope there will be love stories. Angry stories. All of that stuff— the point being, we could sit here and talk about “ideas about women and men and sex,” or we could just honestly talk about our own experiences.
The rest of it is all abstraction and intellectualizing of something that is so individual and so complex (even when it isn’t), and it’s tempting to talk about stuff that way— really tempting (as in, I do it all the time)— but this book, if not my blog, is being done with the hope to counter all of that bullshit. Because there is something about telling your story, the whole story, that can never be invalidated. Whether you come or don’t (or laugh, or, yes cry) I think storytelling, and in this case storytelling about sex, ekes us all closer to understanding and mutual respect and compassion and a little bit further away from “typical male experiences” and “typical female.”
But yes, to answer your question, There Will Be Pounding.
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