by Jean Roberta

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,/And palmeres for to seken straunge londes.” –
(When April’s sweet showers have demolished the drought of March . . . then people want to travel, and religious pilgrims want to visit strange lands.)

– Geoffrey Chaucer, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, circa 1380s.

I’m currently making plans to go to Eroticon (annual conference of the erotic arts) in London, England, with my spouse on the weekend of March 17-18, 2018. This will require several plane rides through different time-zones because we live in the middle of Canada. I can’t afford to spend more than a week away from the classes I teach, even with capable grad-student substitutes.

There are too many writers’ cons held every year throughout the world for one writer to attend. Most of them, as far as I know, are held in the U.S., but I’ve heard scary stories about how hard or at least unpredictable it has become for people from other countries—even Canada—to be allowed in under the current regime. So I decided to go to England instead. I’ll probably go to more writers’ cons in the U.S. in the future, after the regime has changed.

Why go to a writers’ conference? Here are some obvious reasons:

– To network with other people in the publishing world, preferably with those who write, edit and publish in one’s own genre,
– To learn more about the crafts of writing, promotion, and negotiation, and to get first-hand news about calls-for-submissions, contests, jobs, and to get a feel for different publishers, trends, and writing groups.
– To promote a personal project.
– To add experience to a resume or CV. (This especially applies to academics.)

Here are some less-obvious reasons:

– To take a trip away from home! Why not?
– To socialize in person with on-line friends.
– To check out a particular city as a possible place to live.
– To breathe polluted air for a weekend, the better to appreciate the fresh air of the Canadian prairies when one comes home. (This reason probably only applies to me.)

Of course, there are downsides to writers’ cons. I consider myself very lucky not to have experienced the kind of drama I’ve heard about from other writers. Here are some disadvantages of going to a con, in ascending order of importance:

– Expense!! It often seems that those who need the most financial help get the least. Academics, especially those who teach literature, composition, or creative writing in some form, can often get a trip to a writers’ con subsidized by their employers, and the more socially-conscious writers’ cons offer their own subsidies, but those who work outside the Ivory Tower and don’t know anyone who could take them in during a con can pay a considerable amount for travel to the site, accommodation, food, city transportation, conference fees, entertainment, and impulse shopping. The cost of a trip can cut into a writer’s writing profits, if any, without producing any quantifiable return on the investment.

– Isolation. This can take various forms, depending on the circumstances. Writers tend to be introverts, and newcomers can find it hard to connect with those who seem successful and connected.

– Ostracism, rejection, sarcasm, confrontation, turf war. This is the stuff of nightmares, and possibly the inspiration for one’s next horror novel. (When given lemons, writers often find ways to make lemonade.)

Writers in some genres vehemently reject other genres. Sex-writers, in particular, have been sneered out of rooms. Romance, which seems like erotica’s closest cousin, is both widely popular and still widely rejected by writers and institutions which claim to be intellectual, avant-garde, or unflinchingly honest about the hell of this world.

Professional rivalry and political in-fighting (of the more-woke-than-thou variety) are additional obstacles that have caused some con-goers to say they will never return.

– Unforeseen disasters. What insurance companies define as “acts of God” (extreme weather, plane and train crashes, accidental fires, epidemics) are more likely to happen to travellers than to folks who follow a routine at home. Deliberate sabotage in the form of bombings and shootings tends to happen more in large cities than in less-populated areas. (Where I live, “terrorist threat” means the possible contamination of the wheat crop.) I assume that writers who already live in large cities have developed a tough-enough shell not to find writers’ cons any scarier than everyday life. And again, lemons can be the raw material for lemonade, as long as one survives.

So there it is. I find the lures of writers’ cons to be more compelling than the possible drawbacks, especially since the university where I teach encourages “professional development” in the forms of readings and attendance at cons. I’ll probably keep going to them as long as I’m able to board a plane.

Chaucer would probably be amused.

Toward the conclusion of Costa Gavras’ 1969 political thriller ‘Z’, an array of high-ranking military figures being interrogated by the investigating magistrate describe the attacker during a political assassination as “lithe and fierce, like a tiger.”

From the low-life thugs who carried out the killing to the highest ranking officer who condoned it, they all utter the same phrase. The magistrate takes it that all of them were in on it and all of them have been coached.

I’m reminded of Gavras’ bit of satire whenever I hear another phrase that writers and editors have become fond of using: It took me right out of the story.

It’s a phrase that spurs the suspicious chief magistrate in me to ask, did it really take you out of the story, or did you think it should have taken you out of the story?

ITMROOTS is most commonly applied to lapses in POV. Beginning writers are schooled in keeping their stories, or at least individual chapters in a single point of view. To fail that is to commit the cardinal writing sin of head-hopping. This is sound advice, as sound as grounding oneself in the basics of grammar and maintaining a single tense.

But I worry that sound craft is being turned into dogma, because dogma, after all, hinders not only craft, but art.

I was born right smack in the middle of the twentieth century. I enjoyed books, of course, but the dominating art forms of my day were movies and television. Perhaps for this reason, supposed POV faults don’t bother me all that much. Because the camera, for the most part, when it pulls back from a scene, it appears all POVs are covered. True third-person omniscient. Great directors – Hitchcock comes to mind – then could slice into a scene and pare the POV down to one single character. Hitch, however, usually kept it in our POV, the audience.

 It bothers me when someone cites head-hopping that I just don’t see. How am I missing this?

ITMROOTS is also applied to other perceived faux pas in writing, and in all honesty I also have been taken right out of a story by any number of things, such as anachronisms in historical settings, a shift in tense, an action by a character inconsistent with what has gone before without explanation. That was a big problem I had with Gone Baby, Gone.

Then there’s just bad or mundane writing. A late and much missed friend of mine used to say of some writers, he or she writes perfectly, but with a tin ear. Hey, you know it when you read it.

I suspect ITMROOTS originated in a creative writing course. It sounded okay and spread through the writerly community. Like all once-glib phrases, with time it has become set in concrete. Editors use it frequently, and it always makes me cringe, because I wonder if the dogma is perhaps quelling a new style or innovation.

New fiction is emerging that employs different, or perhaps no punctuation. Right now I’m enjoying Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, a western saga told in the manner of a rambling monologue without quote marks and what I can only describe as improvised punctuation.

I can also think back to Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga, in which white space was deftly used to convey great interludes of silence, or just the sounds of a vessel plying the seas at night.

Still, I worry that the dogma is hindering creativity and experimentation. Particularly when an editor says something or other assuredly takes the reader right out of the story. Really? Because I’ve never heard a pure reader use that phrase, nor seen any study that proved readers are ever taken right out of a story by anything other than bad or dull writing. My experience has been that readers don’t get into a story in the first place and so never get to the point where they get taken right out of it.

We who have been schooled in writing perhaps need to sit back and ask this: Does it work? And if the answer is yes, decide for ourselves why.

by Jean Roberta

Lately, there has been an avalanche on social media about sexual abuse and “bad sex” (for lack of a clearer term), which is unsatisfying for at least one participant, and is based on miscommunication, even if one person (usually the girl or woman) consents to some kind of intimate physical contact to avoid worse treatment.

All these revelations, some dating back many years, are probably inspiring every woman who has ever had sex with a man to sift through her memories. How much was “bad sex,” and how much was downright abuse? Was any of it based on enthusiastic consent, as in “Hell yes! Let’s go!”

Although I have identified as a lesbian since the early 1980s, and I’ve been faithful to one woman for many years, I haven’t forgotten my heterosexual past. And some of the sex was as delicious as a glass of fresh, cold water on a hot day.

I could swear on the holy book of your choice that in some cases, I was as horny as the guy of the moment, and my orgasms were absolutely genuine. Some of my male lovers were skilled and empathetic, at least in bed. Since I never considered myself very attractive in my youth, I thought some of the sex I got was better than I deserved. That assumption in itself suggests that something was wrong, but at the time, I didn’t blame my male companions for my low self-esteem. I assumed they had nothing to do with it.

As Donna George Storey explained recently in this blog, there is a double standard of sexual behaviour which negatively affects all women. There is an ancient vocabulary of insulting words for women who are assumed to have too much of a sexual appetite, or too much sexual experience. Being labelled a whore, a slut, a skank, etc., is the kind of sexual abuse that usually comes after the sex, even when it has been a peak experience for everyone involved.

Let me introduce you to a healthy young man I’ll call the Viking. (I wrote about him in an earlier version of this blog.) He was proud of his Scandinavian roots as well as his psychic ability. I could believe there was something magical about him because he had more endurance than any man I ever met, before or since. He could keep going all night long, with no rest periods to recover his strength. If my memories are accurate, I never tried to stop him, even when I was exhausted and I had a university class to attend the next morning. I didn’t feel intimidated; I simply found him as impressive as a powerful racehorse.

I was 21 years old and full of energy myself. I was attending university part-time toward a degree in English, and I thought I would probably take Education classes after that, so I could get a job teaching English in the public school system. I discussed my dreams for the future with the Viking, and he found them amusing.

He asked me rhetorically whether I could really imagine myself as a teacher, and whether I would teach high school students all about sex.

I was taken aback, and told him that I would follow the curriculum, though I wouldn’t shy away from sexual innuendoes in literature, such as the ones in Hamlet’s speeches to his girlfriend Ophelia. (On second thought, I realized that Hamlet is also sarcastic and contemptuous to a young woman who hasn’t harmed him in any way.) The Viking always responded to my philosophy of literary analysis with a smirk.

He claimed he could read futures in playing cards as well as in the tarot deck. When he read mine, he never saw me as a professional in any respectable field. He saw degradation and addiction, bad luck and suffering. He implied that I was doomed to a career in the sex business, which would be followed by homelessness and disease once I was no longer attractive enough to attract customers.

I would always ask whether he saw any success for me as a teacher or a writer. He would shake his head and tell me he wouldn’t lie to me. When there was bad news for me in the cards, he felt it his responsibility to warn me.

The Viking sometimes entertained me with stories of his former life in Ontario, where he sold dope and hung out with a biker gang. Once he told me about a memorable session he had with a young woman who was known for her voracious sexual appetite. Apparently she would willingly take on the whole gang, and this gained her a certain kind of admiration, although no one who knew her expected her to live long or happily. The Viking casually explained that she was a nympho, like me.

I tried explaining to him that I didn’t need sex constantly, and in fact I could live without it when I was between relationships, and not feel as if I were starving.

I had told this man that if sex were a sport, he could win a medal in the Olympics. He clearly didn’t feel the same way about me. In fact, the Viking had much more experience with illegal activities and addictive substances than I did, yet I never assumed that his past would have to determine his future.

It was probably just as well that our relationship ended abruptly in the summer I turned 22. My parents were planning to spend a year in England, and I chose to go with them.

I never saw the Viking again, but his influence on my mind lingered for years. Was my sexual appetite unnatural? Did I deserve a horrible reputation? After all, I couldn’t honestly claim he had ever coerced me into sex, so did that mean I was thoroughly depraved? Did I need to spend years in therapy to become “normal?”

I’m glad to say that my life has not been the tragic, downhill slide the Viking read for me in the cards. It’s been more like an interesting hike through a terrain of peaks and valleys. I’m still not sure if my experience with him qualifies as “sexual abuse” as the term is currently understood, but I’d be willing to bet that the mind-rape was all mine.
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