Late night guilty pleasures Wife, mother - Porno writer? BY VICTORIA GRAY •
rently teaches writing at Ryerson University and Sheridan College. She agrees with Mavison that it is difficult for most erotica writers to openly discuss their work. Although Simmons is proud of every romance novel that she has written, she moved on to writing about other aspects of relationships, like what happens after the ‘happily ever after.’ “For me, the problem with continuing to write romance novels was that the relationships between men and women are not the only relationships we have in our lives,” she said. “They are not always the most interesting either.” Mavison agrees that sex may not be the most important aspect of our lives, but it is a large part of it. She thinks sex scenes in novels can often be used for character development and that people are the most honest during sex. “Sex itself is kind of funny,” she said. “We’re kind of goofy, we lose control… One of the things we need to do to get comfortable with sex is to talk about it.” However, romance writer Michele Ann Young, 63, believes that sexual fantasy is important, but scenes written in Harlequin novels should only be included if they add to the plot. “I don’t shy away from the bedroom door at all,” she said “What we are doing in historical romance is presenting a kind of fantasy of how it might have been. It also has to be part of the story. It has to really drive the story forward. If you can take out a love scene and not change the story, then the love scene shouldn’t be there.” Mavison’s next erotica novel, The Way You Say, is being published by Dreamspinner Press and is set to come out in January 2011. It chronicles the past and present meetings of two archaeologists and their sexual relationship. “I decided to combine two of my interests, sex and archaeology. I really love archaeology,” she said. “It explores a lot of the embarrassment of sexual attraction for someone that is inappropriate. Either it’s in an inappropriate place or it’s an inappropriate situation.” She enjoys being able to make sex a more realistic reading experience, writing what she calls “more legitimate pieces.” Sex can be awkward, she said, and dealing with the aftermath is often a great way to get over yourself because you will have better sex as soon as you do. “Sex has always been something I’ve always considered to be just part of your life, I don’t consider it to be something that you hide away and I’m not shy about it,” she said. “Writing about sex is just like writing about anything else that’s part of my life.” Courtesy of Dar Mavison
Dar Mavison takes sex out of the bedroom and into the office. Mavison, 46, lives in Toronto and is the mother of two young adults. She’s had the same partner for 25 years. She is very involved in her children’s lives and makes every effort to keep it that way. In 1999 she was looking for part-time work with flexible hours to supplement the household income. She stumbled upon an ad for a sex writer in Eye Weekly. She has been writing pornography ever since. “There is this stereotype of the people who write porn. It’s like some guy in an undershirt with a big belly, his hairy belly showing under his undershirt,” she said. “And he’s sitting at a typewriter in a dimly lit basement with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and it’s like, ‘no, no, no, we’re not like that at all.’” Mavison got a contract to write 60,000 words per month for 11 different pornographic magazines, making approximately $20 per hour for doing so. She wrote letters posing as men and women wanting sexual encounters. “This was very much ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’... I wasn’t creating three-dimensional people with fully realized lives,” she said. “It was like, ‘well, you know I’m going to be a girl and I’m going to be this age, and I’m going to have this kind of a body, and I’m going to be really horny, and I’m going out to wherever to find a guy.’” Mavison caught the attention of her publisher with her fetish writing. Subsequently, she was published in eight different fetish magazines. However, after a few years it became difficult to think of new and interesting ways to write about fetishes. “It did get very boring,” she said. “At one point in time when I was writing a lot of the fetish stuff, I would write out these lists of fetishes and write out these lists of possible combinations of (people involved). Then I would pick randomly from the lists and put them together to put into the story to make it fresh.” Mavison, who takes pride in her work, is somewhat reserved about her career. However, she believes there is nothing worse than repressing a healthy sexuality. She thinks one can experience a healthy fantasy through erotic novels, which she now writes, and come to terms with their sexual identity. “A lot of what I like to write about is people discovering things about themselves and I think that we discover new things about ourselves, when it comes to sex, all the time,” she said. “If we’re not then we are having boring sex.” Lynda Simmons, 56, is a former Harlequin romance writer who cur-
Sexposé | 15