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Listen to the most recent episode of the RAH! Podcast from the Arts and Humanities Faculty at Manchester Metropolitan University on Writing about Love and Sex.
Listen to the most recent episode of the RAH! Podcast from the Arts and Humanities Faculty at Manchester Metropolitan University on Writing about Love and Sex.
This episode explores Writing about Love and Sex. In particular we explore:
Featuring:
Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.
RAH opening Jingle
Ellie Beal: Hello, and welcome to the podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University. My name is Ellie Beal. This episode will explore Writing about Love and Sex.
In particular, we will ask what makes good sex writing? Is writing about sex from a female perspective a feminist issue? What about the problem of consent?
We will speak to Catherine Fox and Kirsty Bunting about consent in sex scenes and whether romance novels have a role in teaching us how to have relationships.
Kirsty Bunting: You’ll be able to find romance to suit you, no matter what you're after.
Ellie: Then I'll speak to Sarah Perry about shame, sexual violence and gender equality.
Sarah Perry: And there was a really kind of clear sense that sex is a wonderful and great thing potentially, you know, and, like, where was that in the literature.
Ellie: And finally, I speak to Monique Roffey about her own journey with sex writing.
Monique Roffey: And when we are in that state of arousal, it's just brilliant to write about.
Ellie: You can join the conversation on Twitter by hastagging #RAH_Podcast
RAH! mini jingle
Ellie: Today, we are talking to Catherine Wilcox, who is the Academic Director of the Writing School and writes under the name Catherine Fox, and we'll also be talking to Kirsty Bunting, who is a senior lecturer here and also writes contemporary novels about love, and she writes those under Kiley Dunbar. Welcome, ladies. And so, love writing then, if I start off with you, Catherine, perhaps you could tell me what is important about writing about love to you and what place it has had in your novels so far?
Catherine Fox: Well, I think writing my most recent novels, I was trying to do the riff on the Victorian novel and I invented some rules for myself as a writer, which seemed to be in-keeping with Victorian fiction. One of them was that we don't - we don't go into the bedroom. So still quite a bit of steamy sex going on, but it tends to happen off stage. That, I think, is, to my mind, more interesting, or it seems to me at the moment, because then you - you end up with the reader having to bring their own imagination to what's going on.
Ellie: Entice them in! And Kirsty you have described your novels as kissy novels. So what do you mean by that?
Kirsty: Yeah well, I like the term kissing books, it avoids the terms romance or romantic fiction or a category romance that are a bit confusing, really. If I say I write kissing books, people know that I'm writing, probably, contemporary romance. So where Catherine, you don't follow those romantic tropes that dominate the rom com marketplace whereas I’m working within a set of generic expectations that romance readers are expecting so happy ever after, for example.
Ellie: Do you find that there is like a stigma still around sort of popular writing - writing that’s about relationships and eroticism and intimacy in general?
Catherine: I suspect that there's a sense in which if you can colour it pink and label it women's fiction it’s never going to have that kind of gravitas. And I think there's a sense in which people haven't necessarily realised the degree of sophistication in the writing and - and the kinds of things that are engaged with. So I know you talk about miscarriage and that might be examined in - in what would rather rudely, I think, be called chick-lit. And some really weighty, difficult human challenges are explored through this means. And I think, yeah, there's still I think there is a stigma and that's a shame really.
Kirsty: I think that's what happens when there's a genre that has traditionally been written by women for women. I think if there are books that are about centring women's pleasure and women's experience, largely written by women, then that marketplace is going to be conceived differently to a crime marketplace where there are a lot of male writers and male readers, but I think things are changing.
Ellie: One of the things that interests me is that, Catherine, you teach how to write this stuff.
Catherine: I think, it's mostly giving people permission and giving people confidence. A lot of people are aware that they they're trying to write maybe quite a serious book, and looming, about a third of the way in is the sex scene and they're anxious about it. So I developed this course with the view, partly to addressing that anxiety, to help people write more - more confidently, strong feelings in any relationship. And because feelings are abstract, I suppose it's tempting to kind of go wafting away into abstract imagery, and the other danger is that you end up writing clichés about the – the physicality of the experience. So trying to find fresh ways in into that area of writing is always interesting.
Ellie: Sort of brings me, I guess, to - because the way in which we write, or writing about sex or love or intimacy changes from time to time and I want you to talk a little bit more about the idea of consent, which you mentioned to me is becoming something that's more written about.
Kirsty: Yeah, I think there's a new movement sort of post-2016 and in the wake of #MeToo and now I think in the age of, I'm going to say it, Donald Trump, there’s a sense that you can't write certain types of romantic trope anymore. So the, sort of, more violent fantasies where sex could be read as assault, which was very common, you saw it a lot in the 70s. I think romance has responded - that's popular contemporary romance has responded to these debates really quickly. And there's a new movement led by American writers, people like Courtney Milan, Ruby Lang, Helen Wang, who are writing novels which centre female pleasure where consent and safety and sexual agency are foregrounded as part of the whole romantic journey. Those are really interesting to read. I've read one really recently, Ruby Lang’s new book and the love scene, the hero asks the heroine, maybe three or four times “Is this okay?” and then she checks consent as well. So they're asking each other “is this alright?” And I think that was really interesting to build in caring into what is actually a very long, I think it's about five pages, quite an erotic love scene. And I think that shows that romance is changing. That pussy-grabbing hero, his days are gone.
Ellie: Is one of the things that is being navigated now, is how does consent happen? You know, how to keep up intimacy, how to keep up a sexual trajectory, and without, you know, coldly stopping at certain point because, “okay, I consent to this now”. And what I think is quite interesting is the way you're explaining it, is it just seems it's not about somebody telling you. It's about you asking at certain stages, and that's the important part. And it's almost like, why could you not have a space where you can ask to transgress with someone?
Kirsty: Yes, exactly, and I think that exactly what you've described there is happening in these - these gorgeous new novels.
Catherine: So do you think there's a role in educating readers? Maybe just as generations of women readers, who - who thought the ideal was that this man would sweep you away and you would beat feebly on his chest saying “no, no, no”, but your body betrays you. So that was just how - how romance how - how sex, how love worked. Whether that would - just shaped our, the way we approach relationships?
Kirsty: Yes. Yeah, I think so. I think if you look at the criticism around these texts, the critiques, authors talking about their own writing, they very much see themselves as being part of this discussion and - and providing fantasies that we want to read. There's a new movement as well coming out of Netflix as well, all these new Netflix original movies for very young audiences, so for the young adult audiences where there's no question that there's going to be consent inbuilt and there's going to be, you know, there's talk about safe sex and condoms in the movie.
Ellie: And if you think of the age group, I suppose most people are interested in the romance, the sort of young adult, well sort of older adolescent to young teen age group, which is when these novels sort of begin to be - young adult fiction begins to be more sexual. Then there must be something in that that tells you the way in which relationships are supposed to occur, the way in which you are supposed to be intimate with somebody, when you are active when you are passive. And that's really important that we incorporate the changes that we're making in society.
Kirsty: You'll be able to find a romance to suit to you, no matter what you're after, you'll be able to find that from the new authors. And I’m thinking of people like Helen Wang who is writing a neuro-diverse romance, where a character who is traditionally – you don’t see autistic people in romance novels, and here is Helen Wang who is autistic herself writing these incredible romances. I mean that is transgressive in itself, just exploring love and power and saying “well you’ve been excluded from romance for so long, here is a romance that centres you”.
Catherine: What if I'm transgress this rule about, you know, what if someone doesn't gain consent first? I suppose your bad characters might - might
Kirsty: Quite. Bad characters, yes. My naughty characters do not obey the rules.
Catherine: No, they grab!
Kirsty: They do! And that's okay for my readers to find them sexy too, because they're meant to be. The rules are suspended in a way and if you like something in that book, that's fine. If you don't, that's also fine because you're just - it's about feeling at your own boundaries and seeing what you like and what you don't like. Isn’t that what romance is?
Ellie: Yeah those sort of extremes and most people will probably work a little bit in the fringes, in between the margins of all of those sort of extreme characters. What's coming up for you then on Love Writing?
Catherine: Well each year in the Manchester Writing School, we run a range of short courses and the Writing Well, in brackets, Writing (Well) About Relationships will be running again this year. The dates can be found on our website.
Kirsty: Catherine and I are working on an event that's coming up on Saturday the 15th of February here at the Writing School and it's to launch our Love Writing Manchester series of events on the topic of relationship writing, romance, intimacy, and how to write those. And because it's Valentine's weekend, they'll be cupcakes and champagne.
Ellie: That’ll be fun. Sounds fabulous!
Catherine: Yes.
Kirsty: So it’ll be a very romantic weekend. And the tickets will be available for that on the MMU website. Great.
Ellie: Great. That's fantastic.
RAH! Mini Jingle
Ellie: Today I’m talking to Sarah Perry, who is a PhD student here in creative writing, and has recently won the Berlin writing prize for her short story, A Wide Neon Yell. Okay, so welcome, Sarah.
Sarah: Thank you.
Ellie: Congratulations on your prize.
Sarah: Thank you.
Ellie: What was it that led you really to this, as I say, a research topic in particular?
Sarah: Okay. Well, I was on my way home from a literary festival where we'd been given one of those, like, free newspaper things that has different articles and stuff that I think have been pulled from The TLS The Times literary supplement. This review, this book review that Eimear McBride had written of erotic writing, and the critique had been centred around the fact that the vast majority of the extracts that have been selected for this anthology, I guess it was, were very, very violent. And she was kind of looking at sexually violent pieces of writing as being quite a normative trend in literary fiction. And there was this kind of question that had come out of the article that was very clear, like how do we do a better job of this? Why are we not doing a better job of this? And there was a really kind of clear sense that sex is a wonderful and great thing, potentially, you know, and like, where was that in the literature and how sad and disappointing that here was this collection of erotic works that were all deeply deeply problematic. And I had done a lot of kind of campaigning and community organising around gender and around the way conceptions of gender interact with relationships. And so suddenly, I felt this PhD project coming together.
Ellie: Yeah because it is - it is one of the things that, like, I think anybody who is a fan of literature has to kind of endure, I think, more than enjoy. There's, like, a non-access to kind of language because there isn't much writing about sex out there.
Sarah: I think that's true. And so part of my research is kind of looking into people like Meg John Barker, Justin Hancock who approach sex education in a sex education practitioners from a kind of queer non-binary perspective and definitely a feminist one also, and really kind of talk about things like enthusiastic, ongoing consent and kind of, you know, ideas like that. And one of the things that practitioners like them consistently talk about is, not just in in literature, but in our day to day lives, we have this real lack of access to ways to speak about our sexuality. I think that putting words to our desires, putting words to our boundaries, this is not something that most people are encouraged to do. So then, if these aren't even conversations we're having in our most intimate relationships, how on earth are you going to write that? But I think this is still an area of real growth in society more widely.
Ellie: I wonder if it has something to do with like, if we're not having these conversations, do we have like a sort of deep seated prudishness around sex still?
Sarah: I think that that is definitely a concern. Something I'm really interested in, in my research, is shame as a kind of societal phenomenon broadly, but one which is very linked to sex and in my experience is also linked to kind of sexual violence and survival and things like that. And I think that it's immensely frightening. The very first time I thought about doing this writing which felt so transgressive, right, was in my MA Creative Writing unit. And my teacher was this guy, and he kind of had said to us that his novels always have sex scenes and they were the scenes that his mum was always like “Can you can you just leave this out?” but at the end of the day, you know, life is full of - of shitting and fucking, and if we don't put that in our novels, like we're doing a great disservice to life. And I just started to have fun with it. Like I started to just try and try and write it honest - as honestly as I could and with - with as much integrity as I could and not - not make it more than it was or less than it was just like, allow the sex scenes to be what they were.
Ellie: And of course that honesty is still facilitated through the characters, which is you know that lovely -
Sarah: Yeah makes it easier.
Ellie: thing that allows you to both, kind of like, explore and experiment but it's also a kind of shield. You are putting yourself in the place of someone else, to an extent, when you're writing, so it's not necessarily directly related to you, it’s how you think that person -
Sarah: One hundred percent!
Ellie: would deal with a situation or explore situation.
Sarah: Yeah, there is there is something about writing fiction that - that is fiction. So of course, writing about sex within - within fiction is a permission to not be yourself and a permission to maybe write something that you couldn't say.
Ellie: Do you have like a set of like a few things like that just never works ever and I will - I'll never write like that?
Sarah: What I went into my PhD really wanting to find the better. I really wanted to ask the questions about that work, like why does this work? Because I think that is a big focus on - on what goes wrong. Like, for example, the Bad Sex Awards, they’re so high profile, you know, we can access that almost more easily than the good stuff, which doesn't necessarily come forward as often.
Ellie: I want to talk a little bit more about your own sort of personal writing. So you've -you've written a book that came out in 2017.
Sarah: Yes, yeah.
Ellie: So Let Me Be Like Water. And you said that this is very - this is really about the relationship between sex and grief. I wondered if you could explore that a little bit more with us.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, the novel is really about grief, and - and I would say the sex is like a part of that. And it is the novel that follows the protagonist called Holly in the first year of her grief, basically, her partner dies. She's in her very early 20s and has been in one of those relationships that starts at university and is very intense and kind of formative. And he, Sam, dies very suddenly in a car accident and then the - the novel takes place for one year living from the immediate aftermath of his death into that first year of grieving. So I think one of the things I was really conscious of when I was writing the book is how embodied grief is, how physical and experience grieving can be. And I guess thinking about how that physical experience of grief would interact with sexuality in sexual encounters, and it felt inevitable to me that - that had to be a part of the book that as she was grieving and - and kind of contemplating life without her sexual partner, what like rediscovering her sexuality would look like whilst grieving. The kind of loss of orgasm is something that I explore in the book and how kind of like her grief kind of impacts on her physical experiences of pleasure and of sex as well.
Ellie: I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about how intersecting dynamics of things like, you know, race and gender or homosexuality, or class might inform your writing.
Sarah: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I think one of the things I would like my writing to do like an aspiration is kind of destabilising or challenging even the notion that there's like a normative and a non-normative. So I think like some of the problems that occur in relational dynamics happen when there is this kind of normative positioning, which is, you know, I guess, kind of classically presented as like white male, able bodied, straight and middle class amongst other things. And that - that is kind of given this like neutral position in terms of how we cast each other in real life and how people are cast in novels. And I think that, that is - is really problematic that there's this kind of normative position and then there's everyone else who is kind of othered in lots of ways, some violent, some kind of process of marginalisation, a kind of exclusion, of dehumanisation and in lots and lots of different ways. And of course, like when it comes to sex and sexual violence that dehumanising, that normalised dehumanization, that there's this one strong personality type and everyone else diverges from - from that one is really problematic in terms of the way sexual relationships form, the way that there becomes a context or not a context for consent, the ways that we relate to one another and kind of humanise or dehumanise one another can become really important in that - in that perspective from, from the sexual perspective. But I guess, yeah, in the way that I want to tell stories and then the people that are central to those stories, I would kind of be trying to look at destabilising the idea that there's anyone norm that like everyone is a centre. And that doesn't mean that there's one big centre that is the same, it’s that there are literally, you know, hundreds of combinations of different subjectivities and identities that anyone can occupy and any one of them is - is normative. The normative idea is the kind of problem in a way.
Ellie: Yeah. And one of the things that we talked about, on one of our last sessions on Love Writing was the idea of the way in which maybe the culture of writing around eroticism and sex is becoming more open to the idea of having to write about consent. How - how is it - how do we write about things like permission? Yeah, whilst making it sexy. Because that’s the other thing, you have to think about your audience don’t you?
Sarah: Definitely. I think that's partly why I'm really engaging a lot with kind of sex education practitioners, having conversations about consent and about different ways of consenting and about ongoing and enthusiastic consent. And something I'm interested in is that context of consent as well. So where a relationship is kind of broadly manipulative, is that still a context for consent? And I think we sometimes fail in our storytelling in that way. I think it’s interesting then to look to this kind of sex activism and the discussions around kind of socio-sexual norms, and then kind of blending the two. Like I think you can really learn from kind of other areas outside of storytelling about how stories and narratives are being told about society, how we can relate to one another in real life and suddenly you’re like “oh what would happen if I put that into this book”. So yeah we’ll see, I’ve not done that yet. But fingers crossed!
Ellie: So that’ll be the next one. We’ll keep an eye out for that one then.
RAH! Mini Jingle
Ellie: Today, I'm talking to Monique Roffey who works here in the creative writing department and has done since 2016. So hello Monique.
Monique: Hi there.
Ellie: Hello.
Monique: Hello.
Ellie: So I just want to start off with some of your work, so your most recent one With the Kisses of his Mouth in 2011. And then The Tryst in 2017, so the most recent two. Can you tell us a little bit about their stories and what kind of role sex and eroticism plays in them?
Monique: They’re both books about sex and sexuality, sex is central to both these books. So I began writing a novella in my late 30s about a kind of very happy couple, who are in a stable, monogamous relationship and that wasn't functional where it just was - there was something wrong between them, erotically they weren't compatible. And it's about Jane, it's about the woman who hasn't really found her dark erotic self or her true erotic nature, and she has to fight to find it and to get her husband back. But of course, that's the story I know now. When I was 37 and I was writing this I was really grasping and grappling around. And I was also very ashamed because it was very biographical, I was in a very happy monogamous relationship. And the same thing was happening, you know, sexually we weren't compatible. So that book came first, The Tryst was always going to be called The Tryst. It was always a novella, but the shame of it was such a big problem for me that I just kept it on ice, it was - always followed me around on different computers. In the meantime, me and this man broke up quite dramatically. And I decided to sort of throw myself into all these erotic adventures. So it was an exciting time, and I was taking notes. Of course, I was because I'm a writer. So after two or three years, I thought this is really - this is a great book. And at the time, I was always saying to my friends, you know, “guess what I've done” and they just couldn't believe what I've been doing. And I'd say, “Come and do it with me. Come with me”. And they'd be like, “No, no, I can't do that”.
Ellie: Was it like to enlighten them? Was that like the kind of motivation to invite your friends in? was it sort of like, you were having such great experiences?
Monique: Yeah I was like “come and see what's going on”, but nobody was interested.
Ellie: Yeah it’s fearful, isn’t it?
Monique: Yeah, too scary. So at that point, one of my novels have done quite well and was getting lots of attention, so everybody wanted to know what I was going to do next. So this is what I came up with, was a sexy memoir. Which to this day I don’t regret. There's all sorts of writers who've tried to write anonymously or write under a different name, and sooner or later they get tracked down, they get outed and shamed by usually other women. So I decided I was not going to do that, I was going to write under my name, which is also a very good idea, because once you've stumped up and said, “This is me”, and you own what you're writing about, then it – you can't really get outed or shame. Yeah, it's very empowering.
Ellie: Yeah, and I think this is quite interesting to me, because one of the topics we have talked about with some of the other writers that have been on and talking about this topic, is both the importance politically to talk about honest sex experiences in writing, but also, of course, how kind of scary that is. There is that element of yourself goes into, into it. And we’ve sort of often talked about like how, that's something that you have to overcome in your writing.
Monique: Yeah, it is a political act, it's a feminist act to be an agent of your own sexuality. And not just be an agent of what you do, but it but then write about it. It's a hugely important thing for women to do. And men! Everybody needs to be writing about the sex that they really have, the sex that they want, the sex they're not getting. I like to think that the more women who do it, it becomes easier for everybody else.
Ellie: Yeah.
Monique: But anyway, to crack on with the story. So that was published in 2011. It got quite a lot of attention. But The Tryst was still hanging around, which was the book I’d initially started, and to cut a long story short, years afterwards, I - I kept looking at it, and eventually I put it together and I said to my agent, “what do you think of this?” and it was - it was good, good enough to publish, but it was really sexually explicit. So by the time I published The Tryst, I was old enough and strong enough to stand by it and read from it publicly and own it and put it out there in the public realm.
Ellie: It sounds like that kind of that journey you've taken started off almost in a kind of journalistic fashion. Like you know, you seemed to be writing for yourself foremost. You are collecting these stories, you're writing about every single one of these sexual experiences.
Monique: We've got to really look at what we really want. And you can't go wrong, If you're honest about what kind of sex you're having, and what kind of sex you want.
Ellie: I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how is sex integrated or intermeshed with things like your characters. Is there a journey involved with - with sex?
Monique: Well, with The Tryst, Yes, a big one for Jane because she was really shut down. So Jane is one of these women who are unambitious and she hasn't been out there, And I think that's quite common. So the whole book is about her journey, is accessing herself and accessing her darker side of Eros and finding herself and then finding her husband, finding her way back to her partner. So yes, the character is all about her sexual journey. And with my new book, my mermaid book –
Ellie: This is your book that’s coming out in April of next year, so The Mermaid of Black Conch, which is released –
Monique: April 2020.
Ellie: And you seem to take a bit more of a kind of fairy tale fantasy feel with this one, or a rewriting a myth.
Monique: Um yeah it’s a magical realist - It's a feminist rewrite of an old myth. So mermaids have been around longer than Jesus Christ and the Buddha, they're about 3000 years old. So they're an older symbol, an older image than the than the cross. And they're like a really strong really powerful and very negative image of femininity, because it's a woman who's somehow been cursed from the waist up. She's been shoved together with a fish, welded with a fish. So there's something quite -
Ellie: Quite horrific when you think about it, isn’t it?
Monique: Yeah, it’s not a great – you know, on the one hand, she's quite a sexy image but really she's been cursed. So there's something really strong there for us all. They're – they’re objects of blame. You know, they lure sailors.
Ellie: They’re connected, aren't they, with like that sirens and furies and temptresses?
Monique: Yeah, yeah, we have this woman who can't enjoy her sexuality. So my mermaid is cursed and lonely and has forgotten her language. She's so old can't even speak the language that she once had and she's caught in a fishing competition and pulled out of the sea and rescued, but by the time she's rescued and resuscitated, she's been out of the water too long and her tail has begun to kind of decompose so she finds herself going back into a woman. That's the story, really, is how is she going to survive, this ancient woman? And also is she going to find a way to fulfil her erotic and romantic nature?
Ellie: I assume that she is going to have lots of sex.
Monique: Yes she is. Lots of good sex.
Ellie: She’s going to have lots of good sex, and on that journey, re-humanising herself and that's by Peepal Tree Press, that one as well isn’t it?
Monique: Yeah.
Ellie: One of the things I wanted to talk to you, not just what it’s like to write eroticism, but what it's like to kind of teach it? Do you have, like, tips?
Monique: My first tip would be read, read good sex writing, fiction and nonfiction. So read that would be my first tip, but honesty is the key, is being honest and being candid. And also, I think Virginia Woolf first talked about the angel in the house, the sensor that keeps women from writing anything too out there. I sort of say shoot your sensors. Shoot mom and dad, shoot your friends shoot anybody, your colleagues, all these people who, you know, it means something to you to be well off. You’ve got to put them out of your head. Otherwise you will be worried about what they think if they ever read it and -
Ellie: Sort of like getting rid of that kind of fear of judgement, isn't there as well? But I like what you said, as well, about, like, reading a lot, like reading a lot of writing that tackles the subject of sex and love and relationships and things, because one of the things that we’ve gone back to is that women seem to have a lack of language around their own sexuality.
Monique: Well, lexicon is really important, what you feel comfortable with in terms of parts of the body, there's loads of words that are really really unsexy. If you want something to be erotic, give us the right words.
Ellie: Yeah.
Monique: And also, I think there's a - there's something about intimacy that is sexy. So a really great sex scene doesn't have to have explicit sex scenes. For scenes to be intimate, you’ve got to write true character. You’ve got to write deep character. I also think that every sex scene needs to earn its place in the narrative. So sex, like violence, shouldn't be gratuitous and it shouldn't be titillating.
And the other thing I wanted to say about Eros and erotic love is - telling how great it is for plotting, because when Eros draws back his bow, and shoots you, so you're struck, your complex has been triggered. Somebody has walked into the room, and it's just like “Jesus”, when you when you have a real attraction to someone, there's a huge - dramatic possibilities and that tension because you have to manage that feeling until it's mutual. And when we are in that state of arousal or when we are erotically attracted to someone, I mean, we make all the wrong decisions, we do terribly stupid things and it’s just brilliant to write about. Rationale goes out the window. I mean, it's - there's lots of comedy drama, tension, sadness, tragedy. It's all there.
Ellie: Yeah, absolutely.
Monique: I'm going to be teaching a class in, oh, it's the weekend of the 18th 19th of April in London, with another writer called Rachel Connor. And it's two day workshop set in Hackney in London.
Ellie: And your book, The Mermaid of Black Conch, if anybody is interested, by Peepal Tree Press will be out in April as well.
Monique: Yep.
Ellie: Thank you very much Monique, thank you.
Monique: Thank you.
RAH! Mini Jingle
Ellie: So what we learnt from the Writing About Love and Sex podcast? I think one of the kind of clearest takeaways that we can have from - from this particular segment, is sex is about representation. There's a lot of bad sex writing out there, if we are coming across sex writing that makes us feel bad about ourselves, sex writing that seems unrealistic restrictive. I've also learned that writing about sex can be freeing. It can be liberating. It can also be political, but essentially, it's about creating or exploring the ways in which we make connections between each other.
Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates. You can find us @MMU_RAH For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the RAH! website for full links. Tune back in soon for more episodes.
RAH! Closing Jingle
Ellie: This episode was produced by Lucy Simpson, edited by Alice Brown, mixed by Julian Holloway and presented by Ellie Beal.