Erotic fiction writer, slash writer and phone sex worker. Now you're all thinking "Daniel interviewed Dick Cheney?" Well not this time. I got a chance to talk to Lynn Reed who has a new story in the "What the Fuck: The Avant Porn Anthology" published by Soft Skull Press.
Lynn grew up in the very cold town of Syracuse which may account for her fascination with porn. When it's cold I know I like to stay inside, read and fuck. Of course when I go outside I like to fuck also but that's beside the point. But Lynn is a fascinating young lady who knows a hell a lot of about erotic fiction.
Check out Soft Skull's website.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did get involved with the "What the Fuck: The Avant Porn Anthology"?
Lynn Reed: My friend Nick Mamatas was involved with Soft Skull as their editor for a while. He gave me the heads up that the anthology was in the works. He knew I had been writing erotic fiction for a few years. I wrote the story specifically for the anthology.
DRE: What's your story about?
LR: I think of it as a lesbian piece of erotica which is about Scrabble [laughs]. It's about the sensuality of small things and how two people can get intimately involved when they are playing a game together.
DRE: The press notes define the book as post-porno sexualized fiction. Does that sound right?
LR: Well its avant garde fiction as well. I definitely think my story and a lot of the stories in the book are way past the point of erotic fiction where you pick it up, get off and that's the end of it. I think they have to do with exploring subtleties of what is erotic fiction and who people are when they feel the way the characters in the book feel.
DRE: But you can still get off right?
LR: Oh definitely [laughs]. That's a very important part of it. You don't have to be mindless to be sexy.
DRE: How has erotic stories changed in the 21st century?
LR: Anyone can write them and anyone can publish them. There are hundreds of thousands of authors out there who write things for free and people can read them on the internet.
I think the internet has given everyone the ability to explore their own ideas of what eroticism is. Also access to more and more fetishes that were totally outside the mainstream for so long and now can reach anyone has reached people.
DRE: Do you think more fetishes appeared because of the internet or were they all always there?
LR: I think they were always there. But I think people are getting more creative with the more tools they have. I think that the human brain is inherently a little sexually deviant because we're so far away from where we started. There have only been more fascinations, more variations and more weirdness. But now that people can connect and share ideas they'll probably come up with some new stuff.
DRE: Do you think erotic stories are more respectable now?
LR: That's hard for me to say. I'm a professional phone sex worker. I think people still get off on the fact that its still taboo and they don't want it to be acceptable. I think it's more normal and not necessarily respectable.
DRE: How'd you get the job as a phone sex worker?
LR: A friend of mine was working for a really great company, a very unusual company which is very much about empowering employees. That friend of mine told me to try it out and I did about year and a half ago. I had been writing porn for ages and ages. It's been working out great.
DRE: Do you do it in an office that looks like a telemarketer's office?
LR: No I work from home. I have a great deal of freedom with setting my own schedule.
DRE: Do you ever tape your calls and then write them up?
LR: No, occasionally the company will tape our calls for evaluation purposes. I definitely have taken ideas from my calls. I don't really write the kinds of things that I would do on calls most of the time. Avant porn is not really the phone sex realm [laughs]. Just recently I wrote a story where a woman is looking at a photo album of penises and I got that idea from a call I did a while ago where someone was talking about the idea of being completely surrounded by genitals. It definitely gives me insight into what people think is erotic.
DRE: Do you speak to guys mostly?
LR: Guys exclusively. A few transsexuals.
DRE: So are you bisexual?
LR: You could say that. I play it by ear. It's not a big deal to talk to guys though. It's probably easier if anything because the guys who call me are easier for me to break down and understand what they want. I treat it as a transaction even though there is a personal side to it. But I give all my clients the best that I can.
DRE: Do the guys ever gross you out?
LR: Oh sure. But I've read about practically every fetish topic whether I've liked it or not because I'm curious. I've been investigating the darker areas of human sexuality for a long time. The guys don't really shock me. Occasionally I will get something that's like "whoa". But I will look at it like it's a challenge like writing a story. I can talk this out. The point is to look at it from his perspective and make it a good call for him. I used to challenge myself by writing stories about stuff I found gross.
DRE: When did you first start getting interested in pornography?
LR: Well I've been online for about 11 years. When I first got online I wasn't really on the internet. It was BBs. I think practically as soon as I discovered people were out there writing stories about this stuff I was out there looking for it.
I was always the one who wanted to play truth or dare and poke into people's minds about their fantasies. So it just seemed natural to me to start perusing. I'm definitely more word oriented when it comes to pornography but then again I was also browsing it on a text based internet.
DRE: How did growing up in the extremely cold city of Syracuse New York influence you?
LR: Well we had the university there with a freaky college population. I was working for erotic zines when I was 16 years old but no one knew how old I was. I left home when I was 15 so I was working on my won. There is definitely a freak subculture up there.
DRE: I find that many girls are into the kinds of things you are into because something horrible happened.
LR: That can be oversimplifying it.
DRE: It definitely is. But you understand my point.
LR: I think that sometimes in life people can be blown out of the standard framework by traumatic or big events. I've had my share of them. But I don't know if there is a direct correlation. I think it's just that once you've been placed outside the normal boundaries you start exploring more.
DRE: I had an argument with a friend about the movie Secretary.
LR: I love that movie.
DRE: My friend said that the main character in it [played by Maggie Gyllenhaal] was so young that she never had the chance to do anything and then she meets this guy who abuses her the way everyone always has. I wanted your take on that idea.
LR: I would definitely disagree. First of all her age isn't relevant. It depends on the person's internal context rather than her external context. She was obviously someone who was very introspective for a while. A lot of young women have relationships at that age. I don't think he was treating her in the way everyone always did. For the first time she was being treated with the respect she deserved. Respect for her needs and desires and not just treating them to get what he wanted but as an underlying part of the exchange between them.
DRE: Some people are into things like that from birth and they just don't know it yet.
LR: Absolutely. Like I said some things could shock it out of people and make them look inside themselves. Some people who have been abused can find it very empowering. For Maggie Gyllenhaal's character I think the problem wasn't that she was hurting herself and now she found someone else to hurt her but she was able to find within herself her own needs and desires to articulate them and then achieve them with someone else. They relationship they had in the movie is probably a little more usual than people think. Whether it's all out spankings I think everyone has a little power exchange in every relationship.
DRE: What do you think of Suicide girls?
LR: To me it looks great. The woman who are posing there seem to be very much allowed to be themselves. They have their own personality. I'm not really interested in pornography that's just a meat market. But those women seem to be very strong and sexy. The content of site seems to support the idea that porn and brains don't necessarily have to be separated.
DRE: I did see your article on disinfo.com about Slash fiction. What is that exactly?
LR: It's called slash because of the slash between the names of the pair. It started with the original Star Trek series, Kirk and Spock. It takes something that's supposed to have happened and transpose it into something imaginative. Primarily straight women write in slash write about romantic and/or sexual between usually male characters on television shows or movies.
It's very different from the pornographic stories involving the Brady Bunch for example. Most slash is about relationships, tension, dialogue and interaction. There are many types. There aren't a lot of female characters in those mediums that women can identify with. So I think its one way for women to deepen and broaden the characters they already love as well as be part of something they may be left out of when they look at the screen. There is some slash that can qualify at really good story writing. But slash is a funny thing. It's funny when you think about Spock and Chekhov getting together.
DRE: Spock and Chekhov? Gross. At least Spock and Kirk.
LR: Spock and Kirk does make more sense. Some people will slash anything that moves and don't really care about the subtext.
But some of these shows definitely have a homoerotic subtext. The X-Files between Fox Mulder and Alex Krycek are some of my favorite characters. I think it's really interesting the way the media portrays male characters with the energy and the tension between them.
DRE: A lot of it could be attributed to blending of sexuality amongst the Hollywood community as well.
LR: I definitely think so. The slashers have become a pretty important force. There are a lot of them and its 90 percent female which is an important audience.
DRE: I remember that a lot of critics were pointing out that 2 Fast 2 Furious scenes between Paul Walker and Taye Diggs are very homoerotic. They wrestle a lot and driving cars at each other.
LR: Yeah driving phalluses down the street. I've seen slash for that too. I'm on a mailing list which has rare slash which maybe comes from one movie. I love to see the kinds of things that people pick up on.
DRE: Is there any certain websites you do to for slash?
LR: Not so much anymore. Most of my slash I read on mailing lists. I've written slash as well for X-Files, original series Star Trek, Northern Exposure and I wrote a piece of Matrix fiction slashing Neo and Agent Smith. I think that was the first one to do that. I discovered recently that I couldn't find a copy of it anymore but someone has translated it to Japanese. Like my fiction my slash usually takes a long time to get to the sex.
DRE: What are you writing right now?
LR: I just finished an erotic story about a magical sex toy shop. I'm hoping to send it off to a couple of places. It's actually longer than most of the stuff I've done. After having taken a whole year off from writing I cranked it right out.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
Lynn grew up in the very cold town of Syracuse which may account for her fascination with porn. When it's cold I know I like to stay inside, read and fuck. Of course when I go outside I like to fuck also but that's beside the point. But Lynn is a fascinating young lady who knows a hell a lot of about erotic fiction.
Check out Soft Skull's website.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did get involved with the "What the Fuck: The Avant Porn Anthology"?
Lynn Reed: My friend Nick Mamatas was involved with Soft Skull as their editor for a while. He gave me the heads up that the anthology was in the works. He knew I had been writing erotic fiction for a few years. I wrote the story specifically for the anthology.
DRE: What's your story about?
LR: I think of it as a lesbian piece of erotica which is about Scrabble [laughs]. It's about the sensuality of small things and how two people can get intimately involved when they are playing a game together.
DRE: The press notes define the book as post-porno sexualized fiction. Does that sound right?
LR: Well its avant garde fiction as well. I definitely think my story and a lot of the stories in the book are way past the point of erotic fiction where you pick it up, get off and that's the end of it. I think they have to do with exploring subtleties of what is erotic fiction and who people are when they feel the way the characters in the book feel.
DRE: But you can still get off right?
LR: Oh definitely [laughs]. That's a very important part of it. You don't have to be mindless to be sexy.
DRE: How has erotic stories changed in the 21st century?
LR: Anyone can write them and anyone can publish them. There are hundreds of thousands of authors out there who write things for free and people can read them on the internet.
I think the internet has given everyone the ability to explore their own ideas of what eroticism is. Also access to more and more fetishes that were totally outside the mainstream for so long and now can reach anyone has reached people.
DRE: Do you think more fetishes appeared because of the internet or were they all always there?
LR: I think they were always there. But I think people are getting more creative with the more tools they have. I think that the human brain is inherently a little sexually deviant because we're so far away from where we started. There have only been more fascinations, more variations and more weirdness. But now that people can connect and share ideas they'll probably come up with some new stuff.
DRE: Do you think erotic stories are more respectable now?
LR: That's hard for me to say. I'm a professional phone sex worker. I think people still get off on the fact that its still taboo and they don't want it to be acceptable. I think it's more normal and not necessarily respectable.
DRE: How'd you get the job as a phone sex worker?
LR: A friend of mine was working for a really great company, a very unusual company which is very much about empowering employees. That friend of mine told me to try it out and I did about year and a half ago. I had been writing porn for ages and ages. It's been working out great.
DRE: Do you do it in an office that looks like a telemarketer's office?
LR: No I work from home. I have a great deal of freedom with setting my own schedule.
DRE: Do you ever tape your calls and then write them up?
LR: No, occasionally the company will tape our calls for evaluation purposes. I definitely have taken ideas from my calls. I don't really write the kinds of things that I would do on calls most of the time. Avant porn is not really the phone sex realm [laughs]. Just recently I wrote a story where a woman is looking at a photo album of penises and I got that idea from a call I did a while ago where someone was talking about the idea of being completely surrounded by genitals. It definitely gives me insight into what people think is erotic.
DRE: Do you speak to guys mostly?
LR: Guys exclusively. A few transsexuals.
DRE: So are you bisexual?
LR: You could say that. I play it by ear. It's not a big deal to talk to guys though. It's probably easier if anything because the guys who call me are easier for me to break down and understand what they want. I treat it as a transaction even though there is a personal side to it. But I give all my clients the best that I can.
DRE: Do the guys ever gross you out?
LR: Oh sure. But I've read about practically every fetish topic whether I've liked it or not because I'm curious. I've been investigating the darker areas of human sexuality for a long time. The guys don't really shock me. Occasionally I will get something that's like "whoa". But I will look at it like it's a challenge like writing a story. I can talk this out. The point is to look at it from his perspective and make it a good call for him. I used to challenge myself by writing stories about stuff I found gross.
DRE: When did you first start getting interested in pornography?
LR: Well I've been online for about 11 years. When I first got online I wasn't really on the internet. It was BBs. I think practically as soon as I discovered people were out there writing stories about this stuff I was out there looking for it.
I was always the one who wanted to play truth or dare and poke into people's minds about their fantasies. So it just seemed natural to me to start perusing. I'm definitely more word oriented when it comes to pornography but then again I was also browsing it on a text based internet.
DRE: How did growing up in the extremely cold city of Syracuse New York influence you?
LR: Well we had the university there with a freaky college population. I was working for erotic zines when I was 16 years old but no one knew how old I was. I left home when I was 15 so I was working on my won. There is definitely a freak subculture up there.
DRE: I find that many girls are into the kinds of things you are into because something horrible happened.
LR: That can be oversimplifying it.
DRE: It definitely is. But you understand my point.
LR: I think that sometimes in life people can be blown out of the standard framework by traumatic or big events. I've had my share of them. But I don't know if there is a direct correlation. I think it's just that once you've been placed outside the normal boundaries you start exploring more.
DRE: I had an argument with a friend about the movie Secretary.
LR: I love that movie.
DRE: My friend said that the main character in it [played by Maggie Gyllenhaal] was so young that she never had the chance to do anything and then she meets this guy who abuses her the way everyone always has. I wanted your take on that idea.
LR: I would definitely disagree. First of all her age isn't relevant. It depends on the person's internal context rather than her external context. She was obviously someone who was very introspective for a while. A lot of young women have relationships at that age. I don't think he was treating her in the way everyone always did. For the first time she was being treated with the respect she deserved. Respect for her needs and desires and not just treating them to get what he wanted but as an underlying part of the exchange between them.
DRE: Some people are into things like that from birth and they just don't know it yet.
LR: Absolutely. Like I said some things could shock it out of people and make them look inside themselves. Some people who have been abused can find it very empowering. For Maggie Gyllenhaal's character I think the problem wasn't that she was hurting herself and now she found someone else to hurt her but she was able to find within herself her own needs and desires to articulate them and then achieve them with someone else. They relationship they had in the movie is probably a little more usual than people think. Whether it's all out spankings I think everyone has a little power exchange in every relationship.
DRE: What do you think of Suicide girls?
LR: To me it looks great. The woman who are posing there seem to be very much allowed to be themselves. They have their own personality. I'm not really interested in pornography that's just a meat market. But those women seem to be very strong and sexy. The content of site seems to support the idea that porn and brains don't necessarily have to be separated.
DRE: I did see your article on disinfo.com about Slash fiction. What is that exactly?
LR: It's called slash because of the slash between the names of the pair. It started with the original Star Trek series, Kirk and Spock. It takes something that's supposed to have happened and transpose it into something imaginative. Primarily straight women write in slash write about romantic and/or sexual between usually male characters on television shows or movies.
It's very different from the pornographic stories involving the Brady Bunch for example. Most slash is about relationships, tension, dialogue and interaction. There are many types. There aren't a lot of female characters in those mediums that women can identify with. So I think its one way for women to deepen and broaden the characters they already love as well as be part of something they may be left out of when they look at the screen. There is some slash that can qualify at really good story writing. But slash is a funny thing. It's funny when you think about Spock and Chekhov getting together.
DRE: Spock and Chekhov? Gross. At least Spock and Kirk.
LR: Spock and Kirk does make more sense. Some people will slash anything that moves and don't really care about the subtext.
But some of these shows definitely have a homoerotic subtext. The X-Files between Fox Mulder and Alex Krycek are some of my favorite characters. I think it's really interesting the way the media portrays male characters with the energy and the tension between them.
DRE: A lot of it could be attributed to blending of sexuality amongst the Hollywood community as well.
LR: I definitely think so. The slashers have become a pretty important force. There are a lot of them and its 90 percent female which is an important audience.
DRE: I remember that a lot of critics were pointing out that 2 Fast 2 Furious scenes between Paul Walker and Taye Diggs are very homoerotic. They wrestle a lot and driving cars at each other.
LR: Yeah driving phalluses down the street. I've seen slash for that too. I'm on a mailing list which has rare slash which maybe comes from one movie. I love to see the kinds of things that people pick up on.
DRE: Is there any certain websites you do to for slash?
LR: Not so much anymore. Most of my slash I read on mailing lists. I've written slash as well for X-Files, original series Star Trek, Northern Exposure and I wrote a piece of Matrix fiction slashing Neo and Agent Smith. I think that was the first one to do that. I discovered recently that I couldn't find a copy of it anymore but someone has translated it to Japanese. Like my fiction my slash usually takes a long time to get to the sex.
DRE: What are you writing right now?
LR: I just finished an erotic story about a magical sex toy shop. I'm hoping to send it off to a couple of places. It's actually longer than most of the stuff I've done. After having taken a whole year off from writing I cranked it right out.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
i'm going to upload some pics of her later today.
if you're reading this: HEY LYNN!!!! i'm glad i met you and i hope we get to hang out sometime.