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I’ve spent many hours of my life listening to other writers read aloud


– at conferences, at bookstores, and at the residential meetings of the MFA programs in Creative Writing where I have been an instructor. Some of the participants were faculty. Some were guest artists. Some were students.

One aspect of these readings was a constant: Women would read about pets, politics, personal responsibility and prosciutto.

Men would read about sex.

They would read elaborate, graphic, first-person narratives about themselves having sex in every possible setting or configuration: Sex in an airport bathroom. Sex on a train. Sex in the alley behind a fancy restaurant. Sex sitting on the toilet in a latrine at a temporary base camp during a war.

Some years ago, the director of the MFA program I had just joined stood before a group of students, other faculty, visitors, family members and guest artists and read a long piece of personal autobiography called ‘Blue Balls.’ It was about his first sexual experience and the months of … how can I put this, anticipatory agony leading up to that seventeenth summer.

I would like to say here, I’m not a prude. I would like to say this, but the truth is that I am, in fact, a prude. For this as well as reasons more universal, I did not want to be subjected to a graphic description of anyone else’s sexual escapades, particularly as part of a large group that included some of the students’ grandmothers.

I glanced around me. People were visibly squirming. They didn’t know where to look. One of the young men rested his elbows on his knees and slipped both hands around his eyes like blinders. Catching the gaze of my colleague, I began making cutting motions at my neck, telling him, for mercy’s sake, read the crowd, stop now. He soldiered on, blithely, grinning at his own jokes.

Later on, I accosted him, telling him that his choice of performance material was inappropriate in about ten different ways – as a role model, as the program director, as a grandfather. He was unfazed.
At the next residency, he chose a short story about two young men heading for a year abroad who bet which one could score first – and the reader was the victor, on the train leaving the station. To boot, the girl was better looking than his friend’s conquest. Fully four pages were devoted to her breasts. When I combusted, my colleague protested that this was fiction and so therefore exempt.

One of his former students then read a long essay (perhaps it only seemed long …) about masturbating on a latrine toilet while enemy artillery shells landed all around. Perhaps this was a metaphor for endurance under stress of the life force. I’m being charitable.

Truly, his reading was intended only to shock: The guest preceded his reading by asking people with “gentle sensibilities” to please leave. But why? Yes, the purpose of art is to unsettle the complacent. Art should be shocking, even offensive. But its shock and its impact should come from its integral social or psychological value – not the writer’s egocentric concern.

So in answer to that reader of some years back, I would put that another way. You leave. Or pick a different topic – one equally lyrical.

Thus to you lads-who-must-recount-their-bodily-functions, screw you. Or, more truly, un-screw you. You seem to think that having sex is a unique and mysterious experience that only you can elucidate, when in fact,   it’s universal and a mystery to no one.   Thus, you seem to think that your reading is some kind of act of outrageous anarchy, when, in fact, that hasn’t been true since D.H. Lawrence was censured for pornography at the turn of the 20th century.

Let me hasten to add, women do this, too, but not as much, and why they don’t do it as much is something of a mystery to me.

Perhaps not as many women consider their individual sexual experience so compelling that they must share every detail of that moment – even if that moment occurred 40 years ago.
Hmmmmm.

TIPS ON SOMETHING TO WATCH


This movie, Mass, currently is streaming on Amazon Prime. It is mesmerizing. It is unforgettable. It will take a great deal out of you, as the audience, but it’s worth every harrowing moment.

Some have called the film debut of director Fran Kranz a story perfectly told, and, if you can bear it, I would agree with that assessment. It tells the story of four parents – one couple the parents of one of the victims of a school shooting, one the parents of the shooter.

The performances, particularly by Ann Down as the shooter’s mother, but also by Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney and Jason Isaacs, are transcendently authentic.

You can see the trailer here and let me know what you think.
Last, here is a link to an interview with me by well-known book coach and editor Lisa Tener, about the inspiration for my new novel, The Good Son, which bears some relationship with the movie mentioned above, although the circumstances of these stories are very different.
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Copyright © 2022 Jacquelyn Mitchard, author, All rights reserved.


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