If sex scenes are so hard to write, as everyone seems to agree they are, why do writers keep trying?

1:00 - 3:00pm ET, Saturday, Jan 18 & Jan 25

Few topics are so fraught as writing sex. It’s impossible to do well, people sometimes say, or it’s not worth trying. I once heard a teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop describe her ideal sex scene as two characters sitting down on a sofa, followed by white space. And yet sex is one of the great territories of human experience, and great writers continue to be drawn to it.

In two online sessions, we’ll consider why sex can be so powerful in fiction, offering tools for exploring character, context, and theme. We'll consider the logistical questions of how to represent sex, the mechanics of bodies in space; we’ll also ask how sex can serve other aspects of fiction: subjectivity, conflict, structure, time, style. And we’ll see how writers have used sex as a generator of expansive meaning, posing questions both existential and metaphysical.

We’ll do all this by close-reading examples of classic sex writing, including work by DH Lawrence, Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison, as well as brilliant recent writing by Torrey Peters, Raven Leilani, Pedro Lemebel, Lidia Yuknavitch, Miranda July, and others.

*Limited full and half-scholarships were provided on a rolling basis, but scholarships are now closed. All prices are in USD.