Let’s be honest: When we think of the holiday season, it’s not exactly the sexiest time of year. Family, too much rich food, “O Christmas Tree” on an endless loop, shopping crowds, snow and ice and early sunset, endless travel: It’s exhausting and stressful. Here are some tips to keep your holidays as sensual and […]
Carmen Machado
Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The American Reader, Tin House’s Open Bar, Five Chapters, Best Women’s Erotica 2012, VICE, The Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Dean’s Graduate Fellow, and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
N.S.F.W: Tips to trick out your treats this Halloween
One of the pleasures of Halloween is seeing the hilariously improbable costumes that some companies manage to create. Some of them are just stressful—a child’s geisha costume?—but others are just gloriously strange. Iowa City is gonna be full of sexy [insert random profession, object or cartoon character here], and if you can’t beat ‘em—well, you […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
N.S.F.W: 12 songs to make Tipper Gore gasp
When I was young I sought out music that had any hint of eroticism. I remember Merril Bainbridge’s “Mouth” giving me shivers: “When I kiss your mouth, I want to taste it.” I was entranced. Could lips be salty? I wondered. With neither an internet connection, the money for audio cassettes nor the ability to […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
N.S.F.W: How to write a sex scene
From the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award to the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, sex in literature—and the ways it can go terribly, terribly wrong—is being talked about a lot these days. But sex in fiction is hardly a new trend. Some writers, especially writers just starting out, tend to balk […]
Posted inCommunity/News
N.S.F.W: Should you nom de plume?
When I decided to write erotica, I approached a professor who was openly known for both his literary and erotic fiction. I had been dabbling in the genre for a while, and wanted to begin to submit stories around, but first I had to establish the answer to an important question: to pseudonym or not […]
Posted inCommunity/News
N.S.F.W: Take it outside
By the time you read this, the first of May will likely have passed, but that’s okay because it probably would have been too cold to fuck outside anyway. But let’s assume that by the time you read this it is warm enough, and you’re feeling frisky. The first of May is a magical day. […]
