We’ve made it to the end of season two! To close things out, Bethanne sits down with Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House, to discuss how she got into writing erotica, the politics of writing about sex, and navigating creative work in a repressive environment. Join us in conversation as Carmen talks about her first forays into writing.

Bethanne puts the spotlight on Middlemarch in this week’s Canon or Can It. Will the classic novel survive Bethanne’s critical scrutiny? Tune in to find out.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Autumn by Ali Smith.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned:

In the Dream House – Carmen Maria Machado

Flowers in the Attic – V.C. Andrews

To the Finland Station – Edmund Wilson

Fuck: An Irreverent History of the F-Word – Rufus Lodge

Orbital – Samantha Harvey

Middlemarch – George Eliot

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski

Imagine Me Gone – Adam Haslett

Dept. of Speculation – Jenny Offill

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing – Eimear McBride

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

Autumn – Ali Smith

Episode Transcript:

Bethanne: Welcome to season two of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue. And as you might be able to tell today, I the Book Maven, Bethanne, have allergies. And so my voice has dropped about an octave. Thank you, dear listeners, for putting up with it. I promise we have a really great show. As you know, this season we're talking to leading authors, digging into the classics to decide which ones should stay in the literary cannon, and I'm also recommending some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all of that and more in this episode. And first this week I talked to Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House, and we talked about how she got into writing erotica, the politics of writing about sex and navigating creative work in a repressive environment. Join us in conversation as Carmen talks about her first forays into writing. I'm wondering, the first time you wrote a sex scene, was it for a short story? Was it an essay? And knowing yourself and knowing your process and your style, did you have any trepidation about it?

Carmen: If we want to be really technical, the first time I ever wrote a sex scene, it was when I was probably about 11 or 12 and I That sounds about right. Yeah. I went through this phase where I wanted to write out dirty sentences, but I didn't know how to do it. So I would be on my family computer and I would write the dirtiest sentence I could think of, which when I wasn't very dirty, I didn't know very much, but I was trying to marshal everything I knew and I would write these sort of sentences and then I got fined it that I would delete the sentence, I would write a different nonsense sentence and then I would save the document multiple times and then I would go and check and double check and make sure there was this other sentence. So I feel like kind of an origin story.

I mean, I also was reading, I read a lot of different sort of things when I was young, but I was reading VC Andrew, so when I was too young to be reading VC Andrews, so I feel like I also had encountered sex scenes. That's like an early text for so many of us. Totally. Yeah. I had encountered flowers in the attic and other books in those series and read them and not quite know what to make of it, but it was intriguing and titillating in its own weird way. I think that I was just in this place where I wanted to see what it felt like to do it myself. And then I feel like fast forward to my writing career and my life. Before I even got into grad school, I was writing on my own, I was writing erotica and it was just like a private, or not private because I was actually submitting it to things, but I was like, oh, I wonder if I could try this and see.

And I was pretty good at it. I really liked it. And then I remember this other kind of interesting moment. I was in my second semester at Iowa as a grad student and I was a runner up in this erotica contest for this magazine that was like a short-lived erotica magazine for women, for straight women. So essentially I was a runner up for this contest and they were like, okay, we're going to put it in a magazine. Do you want to put it under your name or under a pen name? And that semester I was taking a class with Alex Chee and I knew that Alex Chee had published erotica because it had said so in his bio. And so I met up with Alex and I asked him, and we had this long conversation about using a pen name. So I published that story and a couple other stories in various anthologies and stuff under the pen name Olivia Glass, which is my grandmother's first name.

And well, initially it was going to be Miranda, but Miranda Glass was like a cellist or something. I didn't want to mess up her Google results. So I did Olivia Glass and, and then at some point during grad school I was like writing about sex and I just want to fold this all into my practice. I just want to make it all kind of one thing. And so I started submitting work that had more explicit sexual content and I never looked back. I feel like it, it felt so correct when I was doing it. I take sex very seriously and I have a lot of thoughts about it and it's a very important part of my life, and this is true for many people. And I was like, I just so rarely read sex scenes in the perspective of people who are like me. I want to move ahead with that, but I

Bethanne: Also want to go back to filament for a second because you were submitting something under this pseudonym to a magazine for straight women. Was it because they had a contest? Was it because you weren't finding magazines that took the kind of writing you were doing for queer women? Or tell me a little bit more about that.

Carmen: I'm bisexual. Before I went to grad school, I primarily dated men. That was just as the arc of so many queer women go. It was like doing that until I realized, oh, wait. But yeah, I think I was intrigued by the idea, I mean the idea of a magazine centering any women's erotic desires, even straight women.

Bethanne: That's what I was getting to.

Carmen: That itself is still kind of revolutionary. Obviously I would've been also happy to write for a queer magazine, but the fact was there was just this magazine that had some funding. I mean, it didn't pay a lot, but it paid some money. And it's like how I also really love Magic Mike XXL. I mean it's a very straight, but also it's so much about women's pleasure that I don't mind that it has more of this sort of straight energy because of interested in something that I'm really interested in, which is women's sexuality and the way that women approach sex.

Bethanne:

What was the moment when you wrote something and you write about sex, like you say all the time now when you thought I've gotten there, I have put a woman right where she's supposed to be. Did you have a moment like that?

Carmen: I don't know if it was one singular moment. I mean, I think with my first book I had that story inventory, which was this list of sexual partners. That was a story that I wrote purely out of spite because I had been in a workshop where I had criticized a male classmates' sexual, but I thought sexist story, and he interpreted that as me being a weird prude who didn't like writing about sex. And I was so annoyed. That was his takeaway that I went and just wrotethe story. I was like, I'm going to write a story where every scene is a sex scene. But then of course I had to figure out, well, it can't just be that. What is the other thing happening behind it? And then eventually I figured it out and as I wrote the story, I was like, oh yeah, this is really good.

But I remember it feeling like there was a character who was at a loose end and trying to figure out what she wants and what she needs in this very apocalyptic moment. And I think for me, it felt so similar to how I think I've approached being alive, which is, yeah, what does it mean to be in a body in certain ways here? What feels like the end or something close to the end? I think that was a story that really just, yeah, it felt like a moment of kind of a revelation.

Bethanne: I think a lot of us feel closer to the end than ever, and yet here we are in these bodies and these bodies still want sex. These bodies still desire things. As you said, sex is something that's very important to you, and I don't think you just mean intellectually either. And so we have this and how do we approach the fact that we have needs and desires and all kinds of different ways that we want to look at them, assuage them, and interact with other people about them? Is there going to be an anthology, not necessarily from you about, I don't know, sex at the end of the world? How do we approach this? It's a huge question, I know.

Carmen: I think it's not even so specific as that. I also think that we are actually in a very anti-sex moment. We are in a very sex negative in the United States. The US has always been a very puritanical culture, even just compared to Europe for example. I think that we are also in this historical moment where sex is suspicious, literally. Obviously, we're also in this moment of queer policies, anti-trans policies, anti-abortion stuff, and people talking about getting rid of no-fault divorce, and all these really just unhinged. And it's like you boil it down and it's essentially queer bodies or women's bodies being out of control of the state essentially. And I think that's true culturally. It's funny, like they'll do surveys where peop

Episode ID: 1000704058594

GUID: substack:post:161643363

Release Date: 19/04/2025, 04:07:22