.rokwon has edited a talked-out book of short stories exploring love, desire and BDSM 🖤
about the languages of kink, how they chose their stories, and how, in the literary tradition, so many authors fail to write convincingly about sex.RO Kwon: I had written a story which was published in. I remember I was really anxious, because it was the most sexually explicit thing I’d ever written, but by and large, the responses were so lovely. It was people saying “thank you for writing this,” “I feel so much less alone after having read this,” and I just thought about that.
AM: I think that’s what’s nice about the stories: they don’t play out in a predictable way. They play out all of the molecular emotions, at each moment of the kinky encounter. I was wondering how you wrote yours, and whether you wanted to go on a journey with your characters – essentially, whether the characters came first or the kink?
ROK: Just in terms of demographic representation it was really important to me, just generally, that if I’m involved in spearheading or organising something literary, it’s really important that there be at least as many people of colour as white people, at least as many people of marginalised genders as men, at least as many queer people as straight people. Increasingly it’s becoming very central to what I want to do in the world.
ROK: I have such trouble generalising, [but] something that I do see increasingly among the writers who I’ve been reading, is a lot more openness than there used to be. There’s an idea that anything can, and should be, literature. Anything is fit for material to be literature. That involves sex. That involves cake. That involves literally anything to do with our bodies. Anything at all that is in our lives could be subject to literature.