Valentine's Day Special!

In honor of Valentine's Day, we had a special Sex Writing Workshop for individuals interested in writing about experiences related to our bodies, with an emphasis on sexual experiences. We started with an icebreaker, make a list of "sexy" words. As we made our lists, we had some discussion of what it meant to say a word was "sexy." People read their lists, and we continued to notice how how some words are sexy in some contexts, and not sexy in others. "Today we're rewriting about experiences related to our bodies- good, bad and everything in-between." I said that in a bit we'd be writing our own memoir, and that great memoir relied on using sensory details to create an emotional experience for the reader. After this, three workshop participants read three different mentor texts, each by a different author and portraying a different sexual experience. Afterwards, we reacted to the texts and to the process of reading other people's memoir. Then we spent 10-15 minutes writing our own. Afterwards, participants read their work.

The Box
By Synn

I remember I kept seeing that metal box thing in the women's bathroom and it always had a pile of paper bags on top. Finally I asked my mother what they were for. They were in the bathroom of some restaurant on the highway— a road trip somewhere. My grandparents maybe. When I asked, all the other women in the bathroom stopped what they were doing to listen, so I knew it was important. Or that I had made a mistake, like the time at dinner I'd asked if my tongue went all through my body because I could see it on both ends and my brother laughed milk out his nose. My mother explains about the blood for a baby and how if you don't get a baby you lose it so you can have new blood next month. Because I'd asked about the paper bag (I had no idea what was actually inside the machine), I spent several years after that knowing— in the way that only children do— that that was why women wore skirts. That all grown women walked around with paper bags between their legs and wore skirts so no one could see.