A Generation of Erotic Romance

I loved giving my erotic writing workshop on the East Coast last month.

Twice. (Well, once is never enough, is it?)

-- First to Maryland Romance Writers, in a roomier, more leisurely time frame -- with opportunity for some excellent, challenging questions.

-- And then at New Jersey Romance Writers' delightful Put Your Heart in a Book Conference -- where I had to squeeze the thing into 45 minutes, which I managed exactly. And though there was, sadly, no time for Q&A, I did get to speak afterward to conference participants, including hoydens Janet Mullany and Diane Whiteside, ex-San Franciscans Candice Hern and Julie Anne Long, and many other friends and writers, established and beginning -- all interested in the risky business of imagining and representing the most profoundly physical and yet emotional sensations in little black marks on white paper.

Renewing my faith and strengthening my understanding of the generation-long period I and others have come through, both within the romance-novel community and outside of it.

And continuing to excite my interest in how the two intellectual worlds I occupy -- of romance-writing and of what was once called "sex-positive feminism" -- are beginning to converge and enrich each other.

Which was how I framed my talk. Which began with this PowerPoint slide:

Imagining Sex: From Arousal to Craft Writing Erotic Romance With All Our Sense and Sensibility

but which then paused (dramatically, I hope) for one of my favorite narrative devices: the oft-maligned prologue, for historical context. And to let me situate my self within that context as well.

Because I date the beginning of this phenomenon 38 years back (let's call it a long generation), with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss's 1972 debut novel The Flame and the Flower, the book that appears to have started the bodice-ripper phenomenon and perhaps even spawned the word "bodice-ripper" itself (not to speak of a baby-naming craze -- I mean, was anybody named Heather or Brandon before the 70s?).

Also the first romance to be published (by Avon) in paperback, with a beginning print run of 500,000, soon to be upped to 600,000.

And also a book that begins with a rape. Yes, it's based on a misunderstanding, but yes, it's unquestionably a rape. Hard to read -- though, in truth, I find all the prose pretty tough going, from the immortal opening sentence of:

Somewhere in the world, time no doubt whistled by on taut and widespread wings, but here in the English countryside it plodded slowly, painfully, as if it trod the rutted road that stretched across the moors on blistered feet.

No matter that it's the readerly ear that's blistered (particularly by that last dangling modifier). The Flame and the Flower is an important book.

Not that I was paying attention back then. Because I'd just begun working at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco, the first bookstore in the city (and one of the very few anywhere) to feature an explicit feminist presence and an imposing bookcase solely devoted to women's issues -- fiction on one side, non-fiction on the other. No romance novels, but I did find one of my secret guilty favorites on the shelf -- the intensely, if elegantly, sadomasochistic Story of O.

"What's that doing here?" I asked Karen, the lovely woman who was teaching me the ropes of bookselling.

"Well, it's by a woman and it's about power," she said wisely. "And so is feminism. About power."

Indeed. And if we'd been just a little wiser, we might have included The Flame and the Flower. If we'd been as wise, say, the romance author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, who tells of her own encounter with the bodice rippers of the 70s in an essay called "Romance and the Empowerment of Women."

The heroes of these books, Phillips pointed out, were "perpetually sardonic, and committed some rather violent sex acts on the heroines."

And, she continues, though she might like to say that she and a romance-reading friend "were horrified," that they "picketed" or "wrote outraged letters to publishers." But they didn't, because, as Phillips continues, "the undeniable fact was that... we loved those books.... despite the fact that we were the two most unspoken feminists in our neighborhood."

I love that essay (which you can read in Jayne Ann Krentz's Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women anthology), not least because it's a kind of funhouse reflection of my own feminist soul-searching during those years -- though mine, of course, was directed toward the secret cherished pleasures of books like Story of O.

Because in those early, heady, years of feminism, it was hard to separate out issues of power and pleasure, both for those who read romance and those who didn't.

And so my workshop prologue continues through that history, marking some moments of particular interest to me,

-- as when feminists did, in fact, picket bookstores: 1978, the first Take Back the Night March in San Francisco, when I had to take a stand and tell my friends I wouldn't be going, because I didn't think that anybody had the right to tell my younger self not to read the books that were so important to me.

-- continuing through the censorship of the early Reagan era, when small-press lesbian and feminist erotic books were censored (though not, I have to add, big-money sexy romance), with the complicity (shameful, to my mind) of some feminists.

-- to my writing my own piece of literate smut, my 1995 comic BDSM novel Carrie's Story, where the ladylike SM heroine of Story of O is reborn as an overeducated, motormouthed, perpetual English Major San Francisco bike messenger.

-- to the romance industry's realizing that sexy romance was here to stay, and the brilliant creativity of the late editor Kate Duffy in creating Kensington's Brava line.

-- to my own realization that something fascinating was happening in those books in the supermarkets, and my crossing the aisle to find out what was going on -- culminating in my early erotic romances, Almost a Gentleman and The Bookseller's Daughter (published, I'm proud to say, by Brava).

All of which, I hope, was in the service of showing how this complicated, conflicted, fascinating history, so full of energy, passion, and honest self-scrutiny, is the basis for a serious attention to craft. Because this was, finally and emphatically a craft workshop -- embodying my deepest experience and cherished belief that voice and craft originate in self-understanding.

Originate, but of course, don't end there. Because as for the specifics of embodying physicality and emotion, time and space, all in those little abstract black marks on white paper... well, that was the body, if you will, of that talk. But that's too long for a blog post.

There is a tiny little reading list from the talk posted on my Passions and Provocations blog, but mostly, I hope to give the workshop again, and hope to see you there when I do.

And I'd love to hear your thoughts, as a reader and a writer, of the fascinating decades we've come through.