This week is the New Zealand Young Writers Festival, a fantastic range of talks and workshops that Dunedin is lucky to host. One of the events is Pleasure and Pain: Writing about Sex and Sexuality. The editor of NZ erotica journal Aotearotica Laura Borrowdale is speaking to Pantograph Punch’s Lana Lopesi about Pacifika sexuality, and to young adult author Karen Healey. Critic spoke to Borrowdale about her work and what it’s like having your name and face out and proud in the world of erotic fiction, and why good erotica is important.
Borrowdale’s journals contain works from a diverse range of authors, in terms of culture, genders, and sexualities. She says she’d love to see a “reflection of our culture” in literature, which has historically tended to be “very white, and very middle class. I think it's important that everybody's experiences are shared, particularly when you're writing about sex.”
A diverse range of authors also helps break down stereotypes around sex – “the blond with the big boobs, the MILF, the bored housewife” – which Borrowdale believes are empty vessels for fantasies rather than characters. She sees erotica as distinct to pornography in that "pornography is generic, erotica is very specific". Pornography is a blank canvas where people can imagine themselves doing something, or having something done to them, whereas “If you are reading about a character who feels real, you can sympathise with them”.
Borrowdale began the journal because “I was so frustrated by the writing that I could see about sex was actually just crappy writing, and that's really frustrating.”
She says writing about sex is notoriously difficult because “we're kind of weird about it”. She says a lot of mainstream erotica, such as Fifty Shades of Gray, are “not good. They're awfully problematic, and then they're just also just bad writing. I got really sick of kind of wooden characters. It wasn't erotica, it was pornography. The characters were just an excuse to talk about an explicit escapade.”
“We get a lot of submissions. Bad writing about sex goes from bad to. . . so funny.”
Borrowdale loves reading both the good and bad submissions “for different reasons”. She chooses what she likes. Being and English teacher and a writer, “if it's not good writing I'm not interested”. She says the fastest turn off is “poor grammar or clunky description. My writer-brain switches on and I'm immediately pulled out of the mood.” She likes to have a range of experiences and a range of voices, “but then it just comes down to do I like it, or not”.
Check out Aotearotica at
http://aotearotica.co.nz/pageus/
https://www.facebook.com/aotearotica/
Follow @aotearotica on instagram
For more information on this and many other events, including writing workshops, industry tips, talks by authors, and poetry, go to https://youngwritersfest.nz/