In my early sixties, I read a New York Times article by a romance writer in her fifties. She advised her peers that if they wanted to get published, they should write about characters in their twenties. I was nearing retirement from a biotech career in which I wrote what my employer needed me to write, and I’d been itching to write for my own enjoyment for decades. Had I missed the boat? Was I content to write fiction closeted as a young woman? Hell no.
So when my friend Lynx Canon invited me to perform at her monthly reading series, Dirty Old Women, I began to write erotica. Nervous but intrigued, I read stories to a full house at Octopus, a bookstore café in Oakland, California. It was way more fun than I expected. My sister writers were smart funny women with plenty to say. And our monthly audiences were glad to hear that the erotic side of life didn’t end for women on their fortieth birthday.
Two very different books came out of that experience. Lynx published a collection of our stories, the Dirty Old Women Anthology. And with great support from North Atlantic Books, I published a how-to-write book, Aphrodite’s Pen: The Power of Writing Erotica after Midlife. Lynx and I also started a writing group called Elderotica that ran until I moved to North Carolina five years ago. That group was tough to leave behind.
This month my partner and I travelled back to the Bay Area for Thanksgiving, and the Elderotica gang reunited for lunch. My friends remain lively and involved. One of the women in our group just won “Best of the Moth” for a story she performed there. Two of us are forming writing groups; one woman is starting a sex positive group that may include carefully chosen men with more to say about sex than, as she put it, “Insert tab A into slot B” (If you have any doubt about the differences in approach to erotic writing across genders, read Joan Price’s wonderful anthology Ageless Erotica. You won’t need to look at author names to know what gender wrote which story). Another woman is working on a film to showcase older women talking about their abortions before Roe. And then there’s my new vampire novel about the love life of a powerful 500-year-old woman. We Dirty Old Women have plenty to say.
We brought poems to lunch and read to one another: some favorites from other writers, some we wrote ourselves. I brought a Hafiz poem, “Venus Just Asked Me,” which I always transpose with female pronouns. We talked about how things have changed since we started: how much more dangerous the world has become, how much less affordable for new people coming up. We talked about how our bodies have changed in the last seven years. And most of all we reflected on why we loved writing in Elderotica. Everyone in our group had distinct voices, and combined with great writing prompts that bounced our brains in different directions, there were marvelous cross-currents in our monthly meetings. We would often marvel at how we arrived at such different places. As one of us said at lunch, “A really good writing group raises the bar and takes you to the next level.”
We reflected on the importance of agreements about what kinds of feedback group members provide. Negative feedback feeds the Inner Critic and can make it difficult to write, especially in a writing group when material is new and rough. Negative feedback is often about the ego of the person giving the critique. Feedback like that can effectively silence the voice of the writer. Instead, our feedback stressed what captured our attention in one another’s writing. This gets to an even deeper point: that intimacy and vulnerability in a group is key. We created that with each other. And we miss us. As our luncheon ended, we decided to begin holding a Zoom Elderotica meeting once a quarter.
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