I love meeting with book clubs to discuss my first novel, Dreaming the Marsh. What author of slight renown wouldn’t love to talk with a group of people who (mostly) have read her book, people who want to discuss it and learn about the author? 

Middle-aged women gathered on a porch at night posing for camera

I also love performing at nursing homes and retirement communities with my singing partner John. It was at one of these retirement communities in a nearby town that I met Phillip Johnson, the Coordinator of Entertainment and Social Activities at Halcyon Gardens.* When John told him about my novel, he eagerly asked whether I might be willing to come talk with their book club. I told him that he could check out a book club kit with ten copies of my book from the library. With a little back and forth, we set the date.

Phillip called a week before the meeting and after a few rounds of phone tag we connected. He hemmed and hawed a bit, then admitted that some of the book club members were uncomfortable with my book and didn’t want to talk with me about it. I rapidly reviewed the book in my mind. Was it the theme that opposed environmental destruction? Was it the mysterious magical elements?

bleak landscape of scattered logs with one downed tree looming in foreground. image by picography at pexels.com

A prophet: my drawing of tall Black woman in red and orange caftan and headwrap over loose black pants

No. It was the sex. To Phillip’s relief, I laughed. I was astonished. I silently reviewed the few bits of sex in this environmental fable. I think no one would call the passages explicit or pornographic, but you can be the judge:

Randall, driving a business acquaintance back to her hotel from a dinner gathering, realizes she assumes they will have sex. “He wasn’t one for cruising bars or coming on to a woman at a party just because she was unattached. But as long as his equipment was in good working order there was no reason to pass up an invitation.” He was uncomfortable at her take-charge, businesslike approach to seduction, and “felt himself shrinking” as she sat in an armchair and watched him remove his clothes. “He was sure propinquity would do the trick; it did, and quickly. Her skin was warm and soft, and she smelled delicious. She pulled down her gown so he could reach her breasts…She was in rather a hurry, and he was a little disconcerted by her instructions on position and pace, but together they got the job done.”

woman (torso only) slips red lace gown off shoulder

Tyler falls in love with Carol. “He’d never understood other people’s obsession with sex until he began sleeping with Carol…The first time was a couple of weeks after their picnic. He plunged into her flesh, soft and warm, almost steamy, and it seemed infinite. She moved and turned under his hands. Every place she touched became in that moment the right place.” In one scene they go for a hike in the woods, and after skinny-dipping in a muddy creek, make love on the forest floor. This is the full description of the sex act: “Her skin was still cool, but inside she was warm.”

Cross Creek, Hawthorne Florida. Lush trees reflected in creek

 Recalling his only previous intimate relationship he remembers that “he found Wanda’s body a pleasure and a comfort, but from the beginning their love-making was as simple and plain as bread.”

For her part, Carol recalls the excellent sex she used to have with Randall. “She could still feel every inch of him, his surprising bulk when she stretched her arms around him, crisp curly hair between her fingers, the soft skin of his side, his big tight balls banging against her.”

Jade and Jasmine are twin sisters who plan to build a condominium development in the environmentally sensitive Marsh. When they were young they dropped out of college and traveled around together for a couple of years, ending up at a communal marijuana farm. “Within a week the twins felt completely at home, part of the family. Together and separately they’d slept with every member of the commune, not excluding Lillian, the woman with the baby, whose milk dappled her nipples like dew as they caressed her breasts.”

2 white men sleeping in crumpled sheets with white woman under window opened to view of tree and clouds. Image by cottonbro at pexels.com

That’s all. Six vivid but hardly explicit sex scenes in 247 pages. Halcyon has an excellent reputation, and I told Phillip that I had thought I might eventually move there, but now I wasn’t sure I would fit in and find friends. He hastened to reassure me that it was only a few members of the book group who had objected. Of course. There are over 900 residents at Halcyon; surely they come in many stripes.

image by vlada karpovich at pexels.com. bald white man blue sweater and snowy haired white woman gray sweater, hugging nose to nose

I began writing fiction over thirty years ago, and I have come to understand what I love about it. I love making stuff up. I love messing around with language, making sentences that sing. Maybe most of all, I love my characters, the creeps as well as the nice guys. By the time I have finished a novel, I understand everything about them, and to know all is to forgive all. I don’t write about sadists or other types who horrify me; I can’t spend years exploring the humanity of brutes. But I do make up people who are very different from me in their fears and insecurities, obsessions and joys.

I keep thinking about the small group of women who were offended by the sex in my book, and I start creating a character. How did she feel reading it? What memories did it stir?  I want to know more about her, and I expect she will show up one of these days as a minor character in the novel I’m currently working on.

Explicit descriptions of sexual acts sound mechanistic, cliched, or simply ludicrous. But sex is such a fundamental part of being human. I can’t imagine creating a world full of people in which it doesn’t play a part. 

*name and identifying information changed to protect the innocent and my new-found friend “Phillip.”