"List Item #10 — The Motel Room "
Excerpt from The List
Winter 2007

"She shifts her weight, she's sweating, so he hears her skin peel off plastic, and he's thinking about lurid hearts, slick flesh on full, exposed view, getting that deep, and he suddenly sees the revealed, deep inside of her...."

[Excerpt]

"A Heart, Beating"
Excerpt from The List
Spring 2007

"He took her hand, kissed her little finger. Sweet, he said. Then he bit until the finger pad went white and strained. It was some kind of victory, that he still cared enough to want to cause her pain...."

[Excerpt]

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"First Erotic Lit..."

I discovered my parents' porn stash when I was around nine or ten, home sick from school, queasy, mildly feverish, forlorn, achy, and itching to discover something....

[Full Text]

"La Vie en Rose — Pretty In Pink "

"It's 1986. The Challenger has exploded, and Chernobyl is about to burn. U.S. air strikes againts Libya loom, and a terrorist bomb will blow up a TWA plane. U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop will want children taught about anal sex as a defense against AIDS. A toxic gas eruption will float a lethal cloud over Cameroon. I am abruptly 22 years old, and everywhere I turn: radiation, lies, viruses, a shower of burning debris.... I will spend a lot of this year at the movies...."
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"The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent..."
Fall 2001

...Of course, not drawing from our lives, not writing the "real" life story that draws blood, that pains us, is often what keeps it safe.  The writing and the life....  But how much, as a writer, am I willing to pay for my work?  How much am I willing to earn?

[Excerpt]

"Are You Somebody?"
2006

...I live in Los Angeles, so I live by the same rule all my single girlfriends do: Don’t date an actor. We respect the stereotype. Actors are self-involved, self-obsessed. Actors are superficial. Actors are fucked-up. Actors are trouble. An actor is a guy, Marlon Brando once said, who if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening. Ask an actor a question, he’ll tell you his credits, as Neil Simon says. “Even Laurence Olivier is probably vain and self-centered,” Mia Farrow says in Rosemary’s Baby, complaining about her actor-husband, who, as we soon learn, is not only vain and self-centered, but, in a career-advancing move, is actually in league with Satan himself.

[Full Text]

"Timing"
Spring 2005

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