Gina

1. I’m TA-ing Dodie Bellamy’s Writing On The Body class at SF State this semester. Today I led my group of students in some sex writing exercises. This was one of the results. Then Donna de la Perrière (who is another one of my favorite profs) came in to say hi, and she & Dodie took a bunch of pictures & insisted we leave the dirty words on the board. :) Grad school kinda ROCKS sometimes, y’all.

2. To put on my Teacher Hat for a sec: This picture is actually a really good example of the exercises I do with students when I’m teaching sex writing workshops. One thing I always have folks do is make Erotic Language Yes/No/Maybe Lists, and then we share our lists with each other. You might notice that there are a lot of words repeated under all these particular yes/no/maybe categories. This usually happens when I do this exercise with folks, because one person’s OH YEAH can so easily be another person’s HELL NAWWW. And as a writing instructor, I’m not into directing people to use or not use certain “dirty” words. The exercise is more about people developing comfort with sexually-explicit language in general, and each writer figuring out what feels good to them specifically/individually.