Big Book of 0rgasms: Volume Two – Launch Day!

^{I wrote a story about sacred sexuality and a 60+ queer lady reclaiming pleasure after a traumatic illness. You should read it!}

So, it’s launch day! My story, “Witness”, is featured in Cleis Press’ The Big Book of Orgasms: Volume Two, which is out today!

I’m really proud of this story. I think I made it beautiful as well as hot, and I liked writing an Older Character, particularly one making space for solo sex at a lesbian play party.

You can pick up a copy of BBO2 from Chapters, or special-order it through Venus Envy Ottawa.

Scandalous – I’m In It Too! @SincyrP @venusenvyottawa

^{A person with a lot of tattoos and dark nail polish wears black and pink mesh boxer briefs and a white crop top. They are holding a half-peeled banana at groin level. The word “Scandalous” is tattoo’d across their lower chest and the words “Edited by Zak Jane Keir” overlay the image at the bottom of the frame.}

I’m pleased to announce that my story, “Fat Slut”, will be published this year as part of the Scandalous anthology, edited by Zak Jane Keir (SinCyr Publishing):

Prepare to be scandalized… in the best possible way.

Religion gets re-interpreted, rock stars find new ways to make music backstage, politicians thrive on punishment, and a young teacher gets an unexpected legacy from the father he never met. There are startling consequences to a scientific experiment, exhibitionism indoors and outdoors, and a high-profile dominatrix remembering her notorious past during a lockdown.

Stories by Kristan X, Elizabeth Coldwell, Sprocket J. Rydyr, Jordan Monroe, Eve Ray, Louise Kane, Elliot Sawyer, Dilo Keith, Colton Aalto, Zak Jane Keir, Allison Armstrong, and Ralph Greco, Jr.

^{A deep blue, lace bra on a fuchsia background. The words “I want to drop. I want to sink into that space where I’m all focused eagerness to please and I feel like I can take anything. Take everything.” plus the author’s name and the words “Read ‘Fat Slut’ in Scandalous, out November 20, 2021 from SinCyr Publishing” overlay the image in white text.}

I’ve wanted to write a “sex in a lingerie shop” erotica piece for ages. Like 13 years levels of ages. And I’m really pleased with how it turned out:

Kinky, nonbinary femmes, Parul and Emily, are long-time friends, as well as collaborators when it comes to making BBW indie porn, but Parul secretly longs to take their relationship into “more than friends” territory. The confession of a scandalous fantasy at a party is just what it takes to make that happen.

The print edition hits the shelves on November 20th, 2021, but you can order your eCopy here (kindle), here (Kobo), or in any of these formats right now.

Big Book of Orgasms 2 – I’m In It

^{A thin, white woman reclines in a black negligee, arching her back with her eyes closed. The words “The Big Book of Orgasms volume 2: 69 Sexy Stories” and “Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel” overlay the image.}

A year ago, I decided to spend November writing 10 erotic stories, mostly because I was annoyed with myself for having nothing to submit to the Best Lesbian Erotica 6 call by its Hallowe’en 2020 deadline. I’m very happy to announce that some of those stories have been accepted for publication, including “Witness”, forthcoming as part of the Big Book of Orgasms Volume 2!

Gotta say, I’m also pretty delighted to note that I’m not the only Ottawa erotica author to be featured in this anthology. Amanda Earl has a piece in there, too!

^{A tealight candle burning low in a dark, wood-paneled room. The words “She kneels on the mattress, feels the trapped air shift and bubble under her ample, fought for weight, and finds her balance. She chooses a vibe from her stash of toys, lays out the lube like she’s planning a date with a lover, because she is.” plus the author’s name and the words “Read ‘witness’ in The Big Book of Orgasms: Volume Two – Out February 8th, 2022 from Cleis Press” overlay the image in white text.}

This is one of those stories where you start out thinking you’re writing about one thing and, midway through the story, your character finally tells you why they’re doing what they’re doing. In this case, solo sex as personal ritual at a packed, public play party.

BBO2 hits the shelves on February 8th, 2022 but you can pre-order it – in hard copy or electronic format – right now, anywhere you buy books and, in particular, from your local sex positive bookshop.

You can also do us all a favour and add it to your Want To Read list on Goodreads.

Looking forward to sharing this piece with the world.

Queer Femme Poets – Anurima Banerji

So I’ve been working on a poetry manuscript for a while now. A series of glosas riffing on the poetry of other queer femmes. Femmes get a lot done with a little, draw inspiration and strength from each other, collaborate with each other, and generally lift each other up. I think the poetic form of the glosa – a style where you take four sequential lines of someone else’s poem and write your own four-stanza, forty-line response poem incorporating one of the lines into the same point of each ten-line stanza (usually as the last line of each stanza, but not always) – works really well, in and of itself, as a metaphor for femme solidarity and mutual inspiration.
To that end: A small series talking about the poets and poems that are inspiring my manuscript.
 

 
Some Thoughts About This Book: To the surprise of nobody, I first came across Anurima Banerji’s writing in Brazen Femme. When I first started looking for femme poets to gloss, I went hunting through my various explicitly femme (and butch/femme) anthologies, both the tables of contents and the bio sections, for, sure, individual poems to work from, but also for poets who had other publications I could look up.
Anurima Banerji’s Night Artillery (TSAR Press, 2000) is one such manuscript. Her poems draw heavily on Persian mysticism and Hindu mythology to explore the themes of queer/bi love, sex, and relationships. As someone who incorporates sacred sexuality and other elements of my own immanent faith practices into my poetry, I found this volume to be very relevant to my interests. And yet, even with all this to work from, I still chose to gloss the poem that also appears in Brazen Femme.
I chose “Summer or I Want the Rage of Poets to Bleed Guns Speechless With Words” for a number of reasons. First being that it touches on rape survival and consensual (not to mention queer) sex as a direct way to heal from that kind of trauma. The second being the metaphor of water, which is one of my own go-to images. And third, because the line “I could not tell you where water ends and her body begins” is echoed in Amber Dawn’s titular “Where the words end and my body begins” which, itself, is echoed in Kai Cheng Thom’s “Shelter: A Glosa” (“I want to find the place where my fear ends and your body begins”). There are personal reasons for choosing this poem, and for writing a glosa that talks about the work it takes to navigate the after-effects of sexual trauma, to stay in my body instead of dissociating. But I also chose it because I wanted to show the way glosas can nest like dolls. I wanted the lineage of these poems, of my poems, to be visible.

Queer Femme Poets – Kai Cheng Thom

So I’ve been working on a poetry manuscript for a while now. A series of glosas riffing on the poetry of other queer femmes. Femmes get a lot done with a little, draw inspiration and strength from each other, collaborate with each other, and generally lift each other up. I think the poetic form of the glosa – a style where you take four sequential lines of someone else’s poem and write your own four-stanza, forty-line response poem incorporating one of the lines into the same point of each ten-line stanza (usually as the last line of each stanza, but not always) – works really well, in and of itself, as a metaphor for femme solidarity and mutual inspiration.
To that end: A small series talking about the poets and poems that are inspiring my manuscript.
 

 
Some Thoughts About This Book: I found Kai Cheng Thom through her essays – mostly on Everyday Feminism, particularly the one on Indispensability Culture, so when a place called No Homeland (Arsenal Pulp press, 2017) came out, I jumped on it. Stylistically, her work ranges from prose poems to glosas to concrete poetry to multi-page pieces that would be at home on a slam stage. Like many of the poets I’ve chosen to gloss in my own manuscript, she explores themes of magic, ritual, community, rape-survival, and emotional trauma. (I can’t tell how much of that is because these are themes that resonate with me personally versus how much of that is just testament to how many femmes endure this crap, but here we are).
 
Which Poem I Chose to Gloss and Why: To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the poem I chose to work from, and riff on, was “Shelter: A Glosa”. Because, when I can, I want to gloss the glosas of other femmes, to show the way we build on, and build up, each other’s work explicitly through the medium I’ve chosen. However, I also chose it because it talks about relationships that aren’t working anymore, about the way a shelter can become a prison (like coral, like the seventh figure in geomancy), about sunk costs and letting them go. My response to this piece was was a reflection only in the sense of flipping everything around, writing a piece about wanting to shake up that stuck feeling so that the “us” in question could feel like home again.

Queer Femme Poets – Eniss R Bashe

So I’ve been working on a poetry manuscript for a (long) while now. A series of glosas riffing on the poetry of other queer femmes. Femmes get a lot done with a little, draw inspiration and strength from each other, collaborate with each other, and generally lift each other up. I think the poetic form of the glosa – a style where you take four sequential lines of someone else’s poem and write your own four-stanza, forty-line response poem incorporating one of the lines into the same point of each ten-line stanza (usually as the last line of each stanza, but not always) – works really well, in and of itself, as a metaphor for femme solidarity and mutual inspiration.
To that end: A small series talking about the poets and poems that are inspiring my manuscript.
 

 
Some Thoughts About This Book: Full disclosure: The author sent me this story in poems for free, as a review copy, which I am finally getting around to actually reviewing.
Meteor Family is a queer science fiction romance that explores the relationship, adventures, and chosen family of two mercenaries: Cameron (a human (or possible half-human?), butch former gladiator) and Azar (a chronically ill(?), genderless reptilian person).
Thematically, these poems are grit and glitter. Fighting, skirmishes, smuggling living cargo, butting up against eye-gazing, hand-holding, love-talk and puppy-dog eyes.
Individual vignettes that almost stand alone, and which I probably would have had an easier time with if they were stand-alone pieces. As it was, I kept trying to feed them into a cohesive narrative with some kind of temporal continuity and… I’m not sure I succeeded.
As individual pieces, I enjoyed “Isah and Mazlee Get Drunk” (which begins with “This is my big gay hypothetical space wedding” and ends with “lavender-glittery cheeks” – so, no surprises there), the sentiments behind “Alien Allies Join The Fight”, and the imagery in “Activists”:

dull gold to a subtle sheen
wrapped not in night, but in snowdrops and leaves
emerald gloss
clean elegance like everything she’d seen of spring.

 
There is a story here. Several stories, if I’m parsing things correctly. A story about getting stranded, about survival, about team work. And another one about tough and tender heroines getting up the guts to confess their feelings for each other. The plot arcs and development are there. But they’re thin on the ground. It felt like diving into Season Three of a series without having watched the first two, or exploring a series of fanfic drabbles without being familiar with the source material. I wish the story part had been more fleshed out, either by making the 28 poems do more narrative work as individual poems, or else by upping the number of pieces in the manuscript. Instead, I was left to sort of blunder my way through the first half+ of the story, trying to sort out whether Isha and Mazlee were just different names for Cameron and Azar (I think maybe they weren’t, but I’m not actually sure…) and having only a vague sense of “troubled childhood, wild escape, somehow we wound up on the same boat…?” for Cameron’s back-story and even less for Azar. (The meet-cute poems from their respective perspectives are sweet as heck, though).
 
I’ve enjoyed poetry-novels (but that’s a novel written with obvious poetic underpinnings, not a novel-in-verse or a literal epic poem) and concept albums – both musical and literary – before, and I definitely have a taste for the kind of post-cyberpunk themes that I think I’m seeing in this chapbook. As such, you’d think Meteor Family‘s queer romantic science fiction would be right up my alley.
I love the candy-sweet of “Mazlee”, the where have you been all my life longings embedded in the last line of “Cam Meets Azar”. I think if I’d stripped the names and continuous, but hard to grab hold of, narrative out of this collection, I would have enjoy it more. Maybe all that means is that the format isn’t working for me, but I find myself a little frustrated with the thinness of the narrative, and that’s keeping me from whole-heartedly proclaiming that You Must Buy This Book.
Do what you want to do.
Onwards!
 
Which Poem I Chose to Gloss and Why: In the end, I opted for the shimmering, celestial imagery from “Mazlee” that lends itself to easily to descriptions of femme magic, but also to both the imagery of Magical Girl Anime and the more “science-y” imagery provided by the Hubble telescope.
Here’s a taste:

you fall for her every time
Suddenly social
your risk-aversion
vanishes swift into lavender mist
 
In the oort-cloud of NRE
her freckles become a nebula

Remembering Corey Alexander (@TGStoneButch / Xan West)

Something I posted, over on Syrens, in memory of a recently deceased fellow leather queer and fellow writer.

syrens

Lit tea light candles against a dark background

I got some bad news yesterday.
It’s sort of the way of the internet that sometimes we miss things, or find things, totally by chance.
I found out, totally by chance – because a fellow kinky queer author had posted a screen-shot of someone else’s twitter post to instagram, of all things – that another fellow kinky queer author has died.

Corey Alexander – a writer that you may know as blogger TGStoneButch or under the pen name Xan West – was found dead in their apartment, apparently due to complications related to diabetes.

There’s been a go-fund-me to cover their funeral expenses (information here) which I think has been fully funded and, as such, has been paused (rather than taken down – possibly because there may be further, unexpected expenses to cover. Not sure).
For folks who want to…

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Bywords.ca July Issue – I’m In It!

 
I’m pleased to announce that I have a new poem – Holy Water – out in the July Edition of Bywords.ca. Please feel free to check it out, here.

GUEST Issue Nine – I’m In It!

“Iridescent Clouds During Snowfall” – Courtesy of W. Carter via Wiki Free Images – The moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. No, but actually.

 
Hey! What does a quarantined poetry-lover need if not some new reading material?
Well, friends, you might want to check this out.
 
I’m delighted to announce that my poem, “Seven of Clouds” is part of Issue #9 of GUEST: A Journal of Guest Editors, put out by above/ground press. This issue is edited by Natalie Hanna of Battleaxe Press. (Her introductory essay includes a poem of her own, btw).
 
Know what that means?
It means I’m sharing a ToC with fucking Gwen Benaway (!!!) among other illustrious poets, including Anita Dolman, Ayesha Chatterjee, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Barâa Arar, and Jennifer Pederson.
Why yes, I am excited to be getting my contributor copy.
How did you know?
 
You can pick up your copy of GUEST Issue #9 right here for $5 + postage.
Go forth and enjoy!

YES Poetry – I’m (Still) In It!

Twisted Roots of Thuja Occidentalis – Photo by Bill via Wiki Free Images

 
Technically this isn’t news. Some of you may have already picked up your free copy of The Queer Body, in-which this poem was featured.
HOWEVER, how could I pass up the opportunity to point you to YES Poetry, once again, when they’re featuring my poem on their website.
Please feel free to head on over and check out “Metamorphosis”.