Talk, Talk, Talk

Today was a busy day. This morning, a dear friend/amazingly talented writer--Shanna Germain--and I sat down in a recording studio to have a "conversation" on tape about the writing life. Jeff Selin with Portland's Writer's Dojo graciously asked us to pour out on tape what we regularly pour out over cocktails.

While our strategies for success are very similar (set specific goals and work like hell with intention to reach them), our creative process is surprisingly different. Hers is about getting it down thoughtfully once; mine is about writing it five hundred times, and then rewriting it again. She lays no tracks; I meticulously plan, but allow my characters to do as they will. For me, in the interview, we talked about lifting Lipstick off the page, as well as my process in writing my novel/screenplay. And how the hell I figured out I was a writer in the first place. (I'll give you a clue: it involved sex.)

The interview will soon be on the Writer's Dojo website, as well various other outlets. Stay tuned and I'll let you know when it's live.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with one of Shanna's poems. For you Portlander's, she'll be reading her piece from Best Lesbian Erotica 2008 at Powell's next month. Will keep you in the loop on that date, as she's quite the literary rockstar.

Fire Escape by Shanna Germain

After a burn, everything tastes like
salt and ash. In the fire-station bathroom,
one lover is the same as another
to skin cross-hatched by heat.

Wild and willing as dogs uncaged,
our tongues lick cool liquid wherever
they find it: rivulets beneath chin-bones,
tributaries that trickle between seams.

Forgetting leaves no time to undress,
only for living and this cool-tiled
denial of the way we enter
flames willingly, nearly protected.

Yes, we've been here before, the way
I melt over the sink, offer my
salt-sea skin to suck as though I hope
it might nourish or quench.

Tomorrow, the fire will make
the paper, news and near-rescues
to be read over coffee and then
pushed away, with a grateful

shove and shudder. Everything could go
this quick: A door opening on flames,
that first step inside, the long low moans
that say someone here is nearly alive.