Writers Reading About Sex at Ottawa Festival

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

Zev Singer reports for the [I]Ottawa Citizen[/I], 29 Apr 2012:

[url]http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Writers+reading+about+bring+crowd+festival+event/6538582/story.html[/url]

On the surface, the evening didnâ??t look like anything out of the ordinary: a few dozen appreciators of literature crowding into a bookstore to hear authors read.

Itâ??s not like the Ottawa International Writers Festival is a new thing in town. Even the fact that the literature was erotic was not a big shock. The â??smutâ? vs. â??literatureâ? debate has a much longer history than this city itself.

But in a subtle way, the stream of shoes over the pavement of Lisgar Street and into the Venus Envy book store Sunday night to hear authors who write about sex, may have been a little marker of social change hitting Ottawa.

Among the writers featured at the event was Tamara Faith Berger, whose recently released erotic novel, Maidenhead, has been getting mainstream attention. It has been reviewed in the Globe and Mail and the National Post, which praised her writing as â??infusing filth with intelligence and sophistication unseen in much of Canadian literature.â?

According to the director of the festival, there is a breakthrough happening at the moment, where sex is becoming more accepted as literary turf than ever before. The fact that a big publisher like Coach House Books published Maidenhead says a lot, according to the festivalâ??s artistic director, Sean Wilson.

â??This is the first time that weâ??ve seen this kind of stuff get a lot of mainstream reviews and itâ??s being seen as literature is supposed to be seen â?? as something interesting that somebodyâ??s doing and you either like it or donâ??t. The prudishness is certainly not a factor anymore. People are open to things that are a little bit more edgy.â?

The trend is also marked by the popularity of E.L. Jamesâ??s erotic Fifty Shades trilogy, which sits at the top of the New York Times bestsellers list.

In a way, a counterpart to the evening at Venus Envy may have occurred nine days earlier, at the Lac Leamy casino, where people came to watch a competition of UFC, a form of mixed martial arts.

At the same time that erotica may now be fighting to elevate itself from â??smutâ? to the legitimacy of â??literature,â? mixed martial arts appears to have turned the public relations corner.

Where it was once considered savagery, it is now being elevated to the level of â??sport.â? It became legal in Ontario last year, it now has its own tab on the Sports Illustrated home page and even Canadian Minister of Heritage James Moore has endorsed it. Some folks are hesitant about accepting it into the mainstream, Moore said in Ottawa in September. â??I think thatâ??s silly.â?

Nerys Parry, an Ottawa author who read at the Venus Envy event Sunday night, from her novel, Man & Other Natural Disasters, said the increasing break into the mainstream of erotic fiction and MMA do have something in common.

â??They are sort of similar. Theyâ??re the edges of our animal being and they are still the somewhat taboo topics,â? she said.

In the case of MMA, the sport had to introduce more rules â?? like no attacks on groin or throat â?? to help get it into the mainstream.

Some of the authors at the event didnâ??t relate to the idea that â??smutâ? needed to elevate itself at all. But Parry, who doesnâ??t write erotica per se but just writes about sex when she feels itâ??s justified, said she does impose rules on herself and is careful not to be more graphic than necessary. But writers need to have the whole field open to them.

â??I think people can tell the difference between what is higher art or what isnâ??t,â? she said. â??Or they can try.â?