How Was It For You?

OK, faithful readers, if you were not at Wednesday evening’s Main Stage event you missed quite a treat. Not only did we get Matches and Misses, we got quite a bit of sex. By the end of the evening I needed a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke.

Well, that’s not quite true as most of the sex discussed was unsatisfying and generally quite unpleasant. If it’s true that bad sex is better than no sex then what can we say about great writing about bad sex?

Well, my keen observations of my fellow audience members tells me that we love to hear all the excruciating, squirm-inducing, horrifying details. Is that because it makes our own relationships seem not too bad, or because it feels all too true?

If you don’t believe me about the amount of sex we had going on Wednesday night you should have a look at The Prairie Bridesmaid for bare butts stuck to frozen lakes, and Nicole Martokic’s Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot for descriptions of intercourse without intimacy and almost entirely without touching. Sad encounters, for sure, but touching and funny too.

Gerald Hill finished off the first half of the evening reading his poems of absent or imagined lovers, and did anyone else notice that the one called “My Cock” was the longest?

The first sex filled half of the evening was balanced, fellow fans of fiction, with a second half of missed connections, monsters of varying stripes and characters seeking those who may not want to be found.

But if there’s one thing you should take from this blog post, savvy readers, it’s that you must immediately seek out Rebecca Rosenblum and Pasha Malla. Both authors were new to my consciousness and you can trust that I will be following their careers.

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Emma Hill Kepron is a librarian at the University of Manitoba.

She is also an aspiring poet.

Her writing takes place in a small blue house near the river, which she shares with her husband and her dog.