Recently, I had the honor of being interviewed by Susie Bright about my piece in Best American Erotica 2006.  Here's what went down:

Peggy Munson, "Fairgrounds"

Hungry femme gets a tour of the seamy side of the Midway by her "Daddy" dyke lover, and hooks up with a crippled "boi" who works the fairgrounds.

The way you describe kinky sex at the Midway reminds me a lot of how gay life used to be described in pre-Stonewall pulp novels, where everyone is crazy and dangerous and warped— all with tremendous allure.

The carnival is a place where freaky outsiders could always flip things around, prey on rubes, and create a magical alternate reality— like queer culture. 

As a disabled queer, this idea appeals to me, both because the carnival once recruited a lot of people whose physicality made them social outcasts.  There they could, when not being outright exploited, reclaim their bodies and live better lives.  But I also often go to a magical place full of bearded ladies when I write.

Your main characters are all dykes, but they're a femme, a Daddy, and a "boi."  How is this different than writing a traditional butch-femme dirty romance?

When I'm writing erotica, it's like watching a movie from a dog's perspective: I’m inside of the characters' desires for raw meat and I don't think much about who they are superficially or why I'm writing what I'm writing.

I don't like anything I write to be too fixed, and this comes from being a poet, and seeing words as things that evaporate as you write them, like fuel. 

While I love a dirty romance, I like an uneasy feeling in my work, with charged, changing identities.  I think this is what makes sex sexy— honoring the prescribed, animal parts of life and reaching for the terrifying, transcendent parts. 

I also love sexual clichés that work, and those come out of identities like butch, femme, Daddy, boi.  I love this easy theater of sex— how the right costuming and script can take on such import.

How do you relate to the mainstream lesbian life that gets portrayed in pop culture: the Ellen's, and Melissa's, and other dyke celebutantes?

I recently flipped to this episode of "Martha," where Melissa Ethridge was showing Martha Stewart how to make her favorite cookie recipe.  She was making horrible-looking lesbian cookies: granola-y and unappetizing. Melissa was mixing them with her bare hands while Martha pretended to be all post-joint jiggy with it.  I love Melissa Ethridge for being so outspoken about cancer, but I did not want to eat her cookies.  That's how I feel about most celebrity dykes: I like when they're out and proud and making waves, but their cookies are just not sexy to me.  I need sexy cookies.  

Your "boi "is in a wheelchair, and I found  myself imaging a female MacCauley Culkin (not hard) because he played a horny boy in a chair in that fundie satire movie, SAVED! Did you see that movie? What did you think of his portrayal as a sexual person, rather than the innocent "crippled" boy?

When I saw the preview for "Saved!" I thought to myself, "My God!  Is someone going to dare to defy the inspirational crip narrative?"

The filmmakers did. It was great. 

Disability theorists write a lot about the limited portrayals of disabled folks in the media, and how they often tend to fall into a finite set of stereotypes, such as the "supercrip" and "heartstring-yanker." 

Every disabled person I know is super horny and talks constantly about sex, yet disabled writers bitch to me about how nobody will publish their stories about disabled people fucking, as if there is no "market" for this work— or, as one publisher told me, it's too "serious" and "issue-oriented" Do I still have to point out why this is offensive?

Our culture believes that disabled members of society should accept subhuman conditions: poverty-level government disability benefits, horrible institutional conditions, etc.  Some disabled folks need adaptive equipment to have sex but can't afford new shoes.  Some disabled folks need personal care attendants to help them have sex.

These are such taboo ideas: that a disabled person should not just be allowed to barely survive, but should be provided the means to pleasure.  It's a huge loss to the cultural dialogue around sex.  Who knows more about the body and what it can do than those who have had to face its limitations, work around them, and expand sexuality into untapped senses and cells? 

Disabled culture, like queer culture, has a lot to teach everyone about sex, because it has had to reinvent it, in odd, perverse, innovative ways.  I hope to expand people's ideas about disability and sex. Mine, for example, can sometimes appear invisible if I'm not using my adaptive equipment, and people make all sorts of assumptions around that.

You mentioned to me in our correspondence that you are handicapped. As a writer, do you feel like you are obligated to write lots of revealing, honest, consciousness raising material about living (and fucking) with disability, or do you say, To Hell With It?

Being disabled and writing smut is still a radical political act.  Writing smut has been a way for me to escape my disability and to "write what I know." 

For most of the last 13 years, I've known my bed, a few rooms, and my body's dreams and demands, and have seen the world through TV screens and windows, and thus writing fun sexy prose evolved naturally out of that. 

I never intended to write erotica, but almost all of my writing over the past decade became about sex or illness, and both writings have freed me.  I feel a sense of mission around disability, and a lot of this has to do with survivalism: the more I co-create a positive portrayal of disability, the more people are forced to broaden their views on what disabled people deserve in life. 

In my forthcoming novel, Origami Striptease, I portray disabled characters who deal with hard-core issues, like caregiver abuse and battering, but they also have wild, interesting, amazing sex.  These are two areas I really do want to raise consciousness about: the diverse and perverse sexuality of the disabled and violence against people with disabilities, which is shockingly common.

In my intro to this  BAE edition, I noted that I turned in my manuscript the day the Andrea Dworkin died. With hindsight, what, if anything, of Dworkin's influence made a difference with you?

Any analysis of violence owes Dworkin, no matter how much people agree or disagree with the specifics of her argument.  I love that I have to  trouble myself about the dark sexuality and pseudo-violence in my work: to ask where it comes from, what it feeds on, what it feeds. 

I was fortunate to start writing erotica after the infamous pornography wars had died down, so the biggest influence on me was that there was an explosion of erotica anthologies that fed my newfound desire to write smut.  Would this explosion have happened without such a heated discussion about sex, what it is, what it means? 

I did not have the visibility at that point to be on any end of a firing squad, but I loved watching the cultural shit go down— like a hot mud-wrestling match between tough-ass women. It was so much more articulate than the pornography wars of today — i.e. sportscasters discussing Janet Jackson's boob.

Susie Bright has the nicest voice. She left a message on my machine not long ago about Best American Erotica. She really does sound like a 1950's homemaker.

I should be writing in my blog, or writing period, but I've had more urgent concerns, and my brain is totally busted from cognitive impairment. After being disabled for 13 years, I have learned one thing: everyone thinks she has a legitimate malady these days, just as everyone thinks she has a blog-worthy voice. Not to discount the horrors of IBD, but most of these people don't know what it is to be SICK. To be crushed into a dish-pack box all day long, barely able to move or think. Recently, I had a totally annoying visit to my integrative medicine doctor (a heinous field) in which I had to listen to a bunch of pseudo-sick people talk about their problems with IVs hooked up to their arms, meanwhile barely dodging anaphylaxis. A doctor's office is quickly becoming the worst place to have an actual health problem, and more of a Center for Social Kvetching. After receiving 4 abnormal/borderline abnormal EKGs that day, the insipid New Agey nurse gave me a lecture about how "every heart is different." "Some hearts," she said, "are even on the right side but not the left. So you see? You shouldn't worry too much about 4 abnormal EKGs." It had taken me 8 months to get there: I had been too ill to make the 30-minute trip.

In August, it becomes particularly clear to me how absent I am from the world, as everyone is a) doing stuff, or b) going places. I can't do stuff or go places. This is what it is to be really fucking sick. When you get to be this sick you don't kvetch. You remember those evil parents who would say, to a crying child, "If you don't stop, I'll give you something to REALLY cry about." My illness is those parents.

Even if I weren't too sick to go anywhere, I can't risk running into people who are wearing Off bug spray. These are the people who don't seem to care about having a blood brain barrier, and who are more afraid of mosquitos than of having a hole in their heads. Yesterday, I turned on a show called I Want That! on HGTV in which they were talking about bug-repellent clothes. These are clothes with bug repellent woven into the fabric. "You can't smell it," said the representative. "You don't even know it's there, except that the bugs stay away."

A lot of people who know me know how sick I am, know I'm living in total exile and can't participate in any of the motions of life, but they rarely give up all of their chemical products. I can't emphasize enough how much this is an access issue, how much every person using Tide detergent is preventing access to people with MCS in every cafe, on every bus, and in every hospital. Using fragrance-containing and chemical-containing products is also a direct assault on those with MCS, and an affront to our freedom and dignity. Please consider this the next time you go shopping for shampoo. It's more important than any poem I will ever write.

Today I thought a rejection letter wasn't one. I read it as "Although you were amongst the finalists" and didn't see the "not." I was all ready to put it in my "finalists" file and then I spotted the pesky not. Not amongst the finalists.

But I was amongst the finalists for a couple of other good things. I also had the most amazing exchange with a collegiate poetry lover who did a class presentation on my poem. The best part was that she gave out props -- water guns and bitter chocolate -- to the class. To that fine person: you made my month. She didn't even know that I could freebase bitter cocoa and like it: I'm that fanatical about chocolate. I loved the shiatsu practitioner who advised me "more chocolate -- bitter food is good for your heart." Bitter food and play are good for every heart.

Now that I am getting ready to move, I find out that the guy across the street -- the one who is always sitting on his porch when I am sitting on my porch -- is a writer. I thought he must be one, because people who hang out on porches alone are almost always artists of some kind. He properly introducted himself last week but our porches had been dialoguing. The neighborhood is great now that I am moving. There is a manly man across the street who mows his lawn with a push mower and whose groupie dog follows him everywhere. I caught him talking to a squirrel. The little girl upstairs broke my hammock because she is too light to float, with no body fat at all. The lilacs bloomed for three weeks with an aggressive fragrance and then died. I don't see these things in the winter, when I am cooped up and sick. I don't see the quiet baby who sits in the grass like a Buddha, or the skateboarders that my dog used to hate so much. I am thinking the guy on the porch writes slipstream, and the manly man lets birds land on his shoulders. I will catch him one day, outfitted in finches.

Today's rejection letter from Wesleyan University Press put me in a very good mood. "Dear Peggy xxxxx, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to Wesleyan University Press. Your work is highly accomplished and certainly worthy of publication. However, blah blah blah blah blah. Our resources permit us to publish only five to six books of poetry a year, yet the poetry program receives nearly a hundred unsolicited manuscripts every month. The competition is tough, and we must turn away many publishable projects."

Do you think it's a coincidence that the glut of new MFA programs that have created such intense competition amongst poets sprung up around the same time most homes were switching over to electric ovens? Could poets really deal with this much competition otherwise?

I read a quote by Quentin Tarantino today that said something like, "the relationship between the director and the audience is an S & M relationship, and the audience is the M." Are poets the M, loving every rejection letter they can turn into an origami crane, or are they the S, forcing tight, hermetic little phrases down the audience's throat?

I say to this rejection letter: Thank you, sir(s), may I have another?

I got an unintentionally comical review of my book the other day. It somehow turned my anthology about chronic illness into an anthology of lesbians aspiring to be supermodels. Of course, here's where I'm paranoid. The reviewer is from the same University where much of the government-sponsored Gulf War Syndrome research is being done. Do you think George W. came up with the thing about lesbian supermodels (after renting too many girl-on-girl flicks in the Oval O?) to try and squelch the truth about Gulf War Syndrome (which is dealt with in the book?). The review was almost as funny as the prank calls I have been getting from a 17-year old kid who claims to be Roy Munson, my long-lost cousin (note: Roy Munson is a character in a movie about Amish people and bowling). The kid leaves me messages that end with "Goodnight, sweet Munson," because he doesn't know my first name. I think this is hilarious, and his intonation on Goodnight (long pause, sigh) sweet Munson is excellent. He keeps mentioning -- hint hint -- that he likes older women. Do I admit to him that I am an aspiring lesbian supermodel? I mean, aren't we all?

I know you're thinking -- who the f*&k is she not to entertain us with her blog for the last six months? It's true that I'm a lousy pusher. I am not skilled at getting people addicted to the things I do. I lack consistency and this is part of what my latest rejection letter -- the one I seem to have passive aggressively misplaced -- said. With a snotty sigh, it admitted that a number of my stories demonstrate real literary talent, but the remainder are highly inconsistent, and in fact many of the stories seem to be -- this is the word they used -- throwaways. Looks like it's back to the dead letter office for me.

When I received this bit of rejection, I had just returned from a date with a dud professor, who I will call -- for the sake of anonymity -- a literary critic. The "critic" found the letter to be downright positive (duh, she's a critic -- she can dish it and dish it) and waxed all pomo about how I just needed to fix the manuscript. I don't know about you, but I think throwaway connotes something unfixable.

Some days I fantasize about how liberating it would be to throw away words completely. Another writer I know just did it. She broke up with her writing. Her friend said, "I support your fuck it!" and she's getting other "you go, girl" support from her social network. Meanwhile, I'm hunched at home over a dim page and a codependent relationship with a poetic phrase I scrawled at 4 am, someting not even worth a bad country song, and I am trying with my tricky heart to love it like a bad marriage.

The best thing I learned in recent months is that I look like Fonzie in drag if I have long hair. There is a website where you can upload a picture of your face and then put hairdos of celebrities on your head. I tried hairstyle after hairstyle, and in every one with long hair, I looked like Fonzie in drag. I also learned that I don't look even remotely like a celebrity. I was so relieved -- after years of futile attempts to grow out my hair -- to learn that I just shouldn't bother. My hair is like an African Violet -- a nice color but really hard to cultivate. Probably because of my CFIDS-related brain injury, I am just like the woman in the recent New Yorker article who could only identify objects by their shape, or certain hallmark visual characteristics. I am like that with hair. I can only identify people by the dead strands of waste floating on their heads. I watch people on TV waxing eloquently about bone structure, eye color, and lip shape, and when my lovers ask me "What color are my eyes?" and put both hands over their eyelids, I rely on probability.

So I cut my hair again the other day. And then I was talking to my brilliant poet friend on the phone. Recently, her favorite living American poet did a reading with her in NY, and he told her at the reading -- naturally -- that all of his friends think she is the most important young poet writing today. She IS the most important young poet writing today, and she deserves that kind of praise, so I couldn't really be bitchy about it even though it did cast a fading wan light on my own pathetic sinking non-career. Then we started -- like poets -- talking about death and the afterlife (I was secretly thinking of my pathetic non-career and wondering if I'd get another incarnation to be the most important young poet writing today) and I told her my Mom thinks I look like John Edward, the TV guy who talks to dead people (Mom used to say I looked like Sandra Bullock). And my friend said, "Oh my God, you look EXACTLY like John Edward" and I said "But isn't he butt ugly?" And she said, "You look like him, but you're not weird looking." Fabulous. What exactly do I look like? A Fonzie in drag talking to dead people? I am going to go sit on the toilet and read about the return of the flippy 'do in Shortcuts magazine, and ponder where genetics went wrong.

My dog, Rowley, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, or bone cancer, on Friday the 13th. The day before, I woke up from a series of dreams about reconciliation. All of my lost friends, all of the estranged characters from my life I still love and think about, were hugging me and making up. I woke up and these words came into my head: "Today is the end of grieving." I thought the phrase all day, because it was September 12th, 2002, and it seemed like a good day for grieving to end. That night I talked to my friend from the Midwest who fancies herself a surfer, just as my stepfather in the Midwest fancies himself a sailor. I told her I had had strange dreams the night before, but didn't mention the phrase. "I did too," she said. "And when I woke up part of a Buddhist phrase passed through my head. Just a fragment of it. 'The end of suffering.'" Then I told her about my phrase, how our words wound together and overlapped. When I got off the phone, I wrote on my page-a-day calendar, "The end of suffering in here." I wrote it on Friday the 13th. It was the first thing I saw after receiving the call, the call about my dog and his cancer.

I can't remember how the x-rays were described. Osteosarcoma has a classic appearance, something like a sunflower, or snowflake. It is "aggressive," they say. It eats away at the bone. Stepping off a curb can cause a fracture. Amputation must come quickly. Even then, 98 percent of dogs have cancer elsewhere in their bodies, on a microscopic level if not full-blown metastasis. Metastasis -- I see it like a sunflower, or a snowflake, some kind of awful bloom.

Today Rowley checked into the hospital. He rarely barks, hardly ever, but he barked incessantly in the waiting room. Not a nervous bark at all, a buoyant bark. He was ready. He was excited about the acoustics. He wanted to make sure everyone heard his unique and booming voice.

Rowley fancies himself a beachcomber. He was born on Barbados. As I stayed up at night with him and listened to him whimper and tried to ease his pain, I told him about the first time we went to the ocean. There, he was contemplative. He sat back on his haunches and stared at the waves. He didn't run around, didn't yap, just got the biggest Buddha smile on his face and took it all in. "The ocean smelled like a big barrel of fish," I told him. "The biggest barrel of fish you have ever seen." He looked in my eyes. He needed a marlin of a fish tale. He loves tales of fish, his very favorite food. "We'll go there soon," I told him then (and it's true). "And you'll never run out of fish."

This guy I know -- who works for a pretentious literary press that can't be bothered with American writers, where people sit around in latte-induced self-hatred dreaming about future expatriatism -- wrote me to say that his press should be called "Dicks Thrive Press," because it publishes so many books by those born with dicks. Of course, when the guy I know suggested women writers they should publish, he mentioned women from, say, Uruguay. As an act of publishing espionage, I once published a piece of writing under a masculine nom de plume and within a few months was fantasizing about untimely deaths for my alter because he was getting so much praise. Straight women would constantly ask me if he was single. "He's so sensitive," they would say. "I wish I could meet a guy like that." I'm not sure how to become outsider enough to be an outsider artist, or underrepresented enough to be chic. Earlier this year, I got a rejection from a New York literary agent, who is a lesbian, that said, "Lesbian collections are next to impossible in the commercial publishing world and I have no contacts at some of the smaller, specialized presses. For this reason, I'm gonna have to decline this one" (what kind of literary agent uses the word "gonna?"). To her credit, she did read my short fiction manuscript, and wrote me "I really enjoyed this. You're a wonderful writer. But as you know, collections are really difficult unless they are linked or have some kind of a hook to sell with like Nathan Englander or Stephen Raleigh Byler. I do think you have a lot of talent and if you ever sit down and write the great American novel I do hope you'll let me see it." When I do sit down to write the great American novel, I will be in Cuba getting a phalloplasty.

I think the most successful writers are probably those who see words as good solid used cars, who buy and sell at will. The world is all Vanna White for those writers, who buy a vowel each time a toothy woman moves into the sequined light.

I could have gotten some writing done on the tailwind of my kiss-and-don't-tell weekend, but the giant hickey tainted my day. I was feeling like a Russian leader with an ice floe birthmark on his forehead, and I must have seemed really dirty. I must have looked like a 1950's slut who could not keep her poodle applique white. I tried to cover it with concealer (oh right -- like you can kill a beetle with a pamphlet) and then realized why women on the Home Shopping Network say you should test concealer on your neck and not your face. The concealer made my neck look pink and blotchy and even my dog was staring at me. I went on a stealth mission to the ATM when there was nobody there, but suddenly when I left the line outside had grown to four patrons and a begging old man, a man I had funded once before. His pants were rolled to uneven lengths and I couldn't even make eye contact with him, though he tried to engage me, because as soon as I glanced up the whole line would be looking at my eyes and then at my hickey. And this is how cruelty started. I felt a deep emptiness when I looked at the begging man, and then a kind of bruised rage. I was too many capillaries and not enough heart that day, a constellation of remorse.

My latest rejection letter: "Although portions of your manuscript are of an experimental nature, it does not seem the particular sort of experimental writing we would like to pursue." (Have you ever noticed how people who are "experimental" aren't anarchist at all, but anal little bastards who always experiment in a narrow, supposedly transgressive way?) I went to therapy and talked about rejection and was met with a faceless clock. My shrink had removed the face from a small wooden clock near my seat, because it was broken, and the remaining indentation -- looking much like that guy on Ripley's Believe It Or Not who could remove his nose and half of his face -- began to interfere with my perfected 50-minute emotional arc. When I told him the empty timepiece made me nervous, he said that we should try something experimental. He said we should pretend I had all the time in the world to feel everything, and then he showed me the clock face, which he pulled out of his shirt pocket the way a one-trick Grandpa pulls a coin from a child's ear, and explained that time was broken. One trick Grandpas are always harping about the end of time in moments of magic, and I started to emote about my childhood -- which was really one of those Vasoline-lensed photographs of puppies but I try to embelish -- and I cried and grappled for the tissue box but before I could blow my nose he did his telltale rocking motion and said, "time's up." I left thinking about Buddy Holly and how he always told people he didn't have a lot of time.