My first publication, Dregs, is live and online at Outsider Writers Collective. It was published two hours to midnight on new years eve. What a way to start 2011. Here’s to more, and better. Continue Reading…
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Sex & Violence Podcast
The Velvet was kind enough to invite me to be a panellist on a (somewhat) recent podcast episode about sex & violence in literature, available here:
Episode 008: Don’t Pull My Hair Unless You Mean It.
Aside from the distinct pleasure of getting to chat with everyone, what I enjoyed most about the experience was the opportunity to discuss the usefulness and dramatic function of sex and violence in literature on an intellectual level, where it could so easily -had it not been The Velvet- have been some soap-box set of judgements on it’s mere presence. Much respect to all involved.
If you enjoyed the podcast, or the topic, I have my notes for it in a little off-the-cuff essay below. Many of these points were not directly addressed in the podcast.
Tagged podcast, the velvet
Starting Out
I don’t want to talk about how strange it is writing one’s very first blog post, because that’s obvious and uninteresting. Instead I’ll talk about developing an interest in fiction.
I’ve always read. It’s in my family. I have no romantic stories of first discovering books, because they’ve been around since I can remember. I do, however, remember discovering that literature can hand you your own life in a display case, pulled apart and labelled. I was eighteen years old, on an aeroplane. Maybe this discovery was a result of being on my way to Edinburgh, Scotland, on my own, with no plans and two years to find some in. This is something I had decided to do exactly two weeks prior. Maybe it was because one of the books I took along was The Catcher In The Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Either way it changed things. I started devouring anything that made our little lives seem bigger, and soon wanted to know how these books, these authors, were doing this to me.