 All right, I'm gonna hit the YouTube live and the webinar is live. Welcome, hello. We'll give it a moment for the room to fill. Thank you all for joining and being here in a rainy evening in San Francisco. I've put the links to tonight's document, which will have library news and events and info. And then it will also have links to tonight's presentation and to all of our panelists, to their websites, their socials, and their library holdings. Welcome YouTube viewers to the evening as well. All right, welcome, welcome. And we'll continue to let people fill up the room while I give some library news and info. And again, I wanna thank everyone, our library community for showing up tonight. And I wanna thank these amazing humans and just, you know, it's a complete honor. Every day I'm just like, I can't believe the amazing humans I get to promote and just support. And I wanna thank our friends of the San Francisco Public Library for allowing us to do this with everyone that comes our way. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Ramutishaloni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramutish community. The link that I placed in the chat box leads to a great reading and resource list sort of Bay Area focus, but really it's everywhere. Great organizations, particularly in the Bay here that you can donate to, that you can pay land tax too. And a great reading list to get you started on learning more about the Elonis and First Person Culture. And some upcoming events, we're super excited. So we're in person again, we're virtual. We are your library, we're everywhere 24 seven. Tomorrow night, we are at the Oasis. Yay, SF Oasis in person. I hear there's gonna be a free drink ticket if you come. So we are gonna be celebrating the amazing book by Mallory O'Meara, which is a feminist look at the world history of women in alcohol. She is so thorough, it's an amazing book. Come check it out. We'll be masked, we'll social distance and we'll gather and have a good time. The amazing journal in San Francisco Journal and Letters. Zizava is joining us January 24th to celebrate issue number 122, the inter-transnational issue. So we'll have writers from all over the place joining us for that event. And Friday, we have the amazing author Deborah Miranda coming to join us for an afternoon talk. And this is on the same page, which is a bi-monthly read at San Francisco where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book. So Deborah Miranda will be in the virtual library this Friday, 2 p.m. All right, I think one last, oops. One last shout out and that's to Total SF Book Club with our friends at the SF Chronicle will be interviewing San Francisco's own Charlie Jane Anders celebrating her latest book, Victories Greater Than Death, but also just highlighting the amazing she works, she does in San Francisco for our bookstores and our bookshops and our authors. She works tirelessly, not only in her own work, but for everyone else that she supports. So come check that out. And this is a hybrid program. So it'd be in our beautiful correct auditorium as well as streaming and you can catch it on YouTube or on Zoom. All right, and now I'm going to stop sharing and I'm gonna turn it over to Megan Milks who is the author of the novel, Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories, both published by Feminist Press. Their personal history of barely online fandom, Tori Amos bootleg WeBrain, is recently out from in-star books as part of the Remember the Internet series. Also out this year is We Are the Babysitter's Club an anthology of essays and artwork responding to the legacy of Ann Ann Martin's iconic series. And Megan is tonight's moderator. And again, thank you all for being here. Megan, take it away. Thanks so much, Anissa. And thanks to the San Francisco Public Library for hosting us tonight. Thanks everyone for joining us. Please don't be shy about sharing comments, feedback, applause in the chat box. We will devote time to an audience Q&A at the end of the event. So if you have questions, please share in the Q&A box at the bottom of the Zoom window. We have four incredible panelists with us tonight. Julian Telemann says, Berlasky, Jean Thornton, London Pinkney, and Eileen Miles. I'll introduce all of them at more length in a moment. First, I'm going to introduce Dodie. Say a few words about the letters of Mina Harker and its publication history. And then we'll hear from Dodie reading a short excerpt from the book. Dodie Bellamy's writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, nonfiction. Oh, sorry, fiction, the essay and poetry. In 2018 to 2019, she was the subject of On Our Mind, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings organized by the CCA Waddis Institute. In October 2021, Semiotech's published Be Reaved, an essay slash memoir collection circling around grief, loss, and abandonment, as well as a new edition of her 1998 POMO vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker, which is why we are here. And here it is. This is the third edition. The Letters of Mina Harker was first published by Hard Press in 1998, then republished by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004. And this October alongside Be Reaved saw the return of Mina in this gorgeous, luscious, enticing third edition from Semiotech's. So there's just a little bit about the book. The Letters of Mina Harker is an epistolary novel that borrows the character of Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Mina is in that book Dracula's victim and nearly becomes a vampire herself, though she's saved by the end. In Dodie's novel, Mina is full vampire and has taken possession of Dodie, the author, taking over her body to go on a glorious, merciless sexbender. And she's writing about it to all of Dodie's friends. Her correspondents include local queer writers, Sandy Alessandro and Bruce Boone, who appears as Dr. Van Helsing. So I'm gonna share my screen really quickly. The book actually began not as a novel, but as a letter writing project, Dodie would send letters written as Mina Harker to friends and other writers, many of whom wrote back. Some of these letters can be found in Dodie and Kevin's archives at the Beinecke Library, which is where I encountered them on doing research for a profile on Dodie a couple of years ago. So here are a few images that I took of the original letters. Here you can see these are letters written to Kevin by Mina. Up here, you can see that. And then a card from Kevin to Mina. So let me just do this. Okay, and here's that card from Kevin writing to Mina. I'll just read this, the recto. Mina, not these, but another flower, like near your typewriter in another room, down the block, down the hill through the hall with a highly burnished wood coming to your door. X, X, X. And here is a letter written back to Kevin from Mina. June 22nd, 1985, Mr. Kevin Killian. How dare you tell Dodie you like her better than me? How dare you indulge in the shocking promotion of sibling rivalry, rivalry? I won't read all of this, but I just point out, why don't you want to love me sincerely, Mina? I love this. And then here's a postcard from Sam D'Alessandro. This is the front from the Holiday Lodge, and this is the back. Dear Mina, the man who sells it, I fucked him in this hotel innocently, Sam. So those are just a few of the many, many letters that were part of the sort of like originary epistolary project. From here, the project grew into a novel. The book begins with Mina slash Dodie's marriage to KK, aka the late Kevin Killian, obviously, and chronicles her erotic adventures with KK and three other lovers throughout Mina's voice is scandalously uproariously over the top and it shifts frequently and abruptly into and out of passages lifted from other writers, such as George Bataille, Dennis Cooper, Sylvia Plath. It is a work of studying excess. Mina now stands as a classic example of new narrative writing, as well as the groundbreaking work of feminist experimental and erotic literature. And it is terrific news for all of us that it is, that she has returned to us in this new form. So I'm gonna turn it over to Dodie now who's gonna read from Mina. I think it's Megan, that was amazing. And so much, too much. You did too much work, but it was great. And thanks to the library for hosting us. And also this was Megan's idea to do the panel. And I would never have been so bold as to try to get people to do this. So thank you all for the other panelists and for Megan's great idea. So I'm just gonna read the very beginning of Mina, which was obviously as most books, the last thing written. July 3rd, 1986, dear reader. KK says all horror novels begin with the locale and a description of the weather. The reader likes to feel situated. It's a cool, clear night in San Francisco. Street lights diffuse the vast panoply of the heavens. But if you drive an hour north, the stars are astonishing. The sky speckled like the black-suited shoulders of a guy with really bad dandruff. So many holes in the black, your heart speeds up for a moment. What if the black collapses? A misty glow flows along my recumbent silhouette, long white gown, long white neck. A livid face leans toward the bed. Translucent claws lift my hem. Immobile flies, white, white. Over my breasts floats Nosferatu's head. An exaggerated egg-shaped powdery with pointed ears. His lips stretch open, pencil-thin, taut. I am so aroused, my clit flicks like a tongue. So tender is his bite, but I will never love him. He's too weird, too intense. From my open throat, dark rivulets curve. Sucking sounds in stereo suck across the suck dim air of the Roxy Theater and suck dissolve in the audience's laughter. Faces radiant with ridicule and popcorn, I shout. That's me on the screen, you assholes. The laughter pauses and soars, fine grains of salt stinging the corners of its collective mouth. Who am I anyway? In Dracula, Mina Harker was this plain Jane secretarial adjunct to the great European Vampire Killer, Dr. Van Helsing. I'm the one who gathered the notes, the journal entries, letters, ship logs, news clippings, invoices, memoranda, asylum reports, telegrams. I transcribed them and ordered the morass so the reader can move through it without getting lost. No hassle, no danger, i.e. a plot or an amusement park. Safariland, Transylvania land. For my performance evaluation, Van Helsing wrote, oh, Madam Mina, how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am dazed, I am dazzled with so much light and yet the clouds roll in behind the light every time. And that's a quote from Dracula. After Dracula corrupted Lucy Weston-Raw, I was next on his hit list, before brave Christian men destroyed 50 coffins filled with dirt to save my soul. Return to the last page of Stoker, presto abracadabra. On the anniversary of Dracula's death, my saved loins heave forth an offspring, a.k.a. sequel. A big T is a big mistake. For the past hundred years, imitators have barged into my story and hacked out enough sequels to fill a library, bunglers with no credentials. They keep shackling me to the most insipid suitors, macho types who stomp around with crucifixes and bad British accents. They're acting as wooden as their stakes. These men save my soul. Doty's the latest intruder getting it all wrong in her attempts to be civilized. Forget about her. Forget about them. This is the letters of Mina Harker, the authorized version. If you want anything done right, you have to do it yourself. Sucking sounds suck up the silence. My throat is a cunt. Never will I perish in domesticity like a Jane Austen heroine. I dart across the moor, and I fall condensing on my long plate of hair. My lives, my deaths, multiple is orgasm. Hark in the words of Mina Harker, fortune cookies from beyond the grave. The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else. And I'm going to stop there because I want to leave as much time for the panelists, but you get a sense of hopefully. Okay, thanks Doty. Okay, so we'll turn now to our panel discussion and I'll introduce all of the panelists, and then we'll turn to our panel. Julian Telemantez Brilasky is the author of of Mongrelatude, of Mongrelatude rather, advice for lovers and go on as our atropolis, as well as the recipient of the 2020 Sy Twombly Award for poetry and the 2021 Pew Foundation Fellowship. Brilasky's poetry was recently included in when the light of the world was subdued, our songs came through, a Norton anthology of Native Nations poetry. And we wanted all an anthology of radical trans poetics. Brilasky is also the lead singer and songwriter for Juan and the Pines. Jean Thornton is the author of Summer Fun, The Dream of Dr. Bantam and The Black Emerald, as well as the co-publisher of Instar Books and the co-editor with Tara Madison Avery, of We're Still Here, in all trans comics anthology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in N plus one, Wired, Harper's Bazaar, Evergreen Review and other places, she lives in Brooklyn. London Pinkney is a writer, editor and educator. She's a fiction MFA candidate at San Francisco State University. Pinkney is also the co-founder and editor and chief of The Honor. Her work can be read in various places, including Mirage number five, periodical, Black Warrior Review, Black Warrior Review's ugly boyfriends and omniverse. She's from the Los Angeles area. Eileen Miles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include, for now, an essay slash talk about writing. I must be living twice, new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue NYC. Miles has received a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, Texas. Okay. So, and Dodie, you know, feel free to jump in here. This is not a silent workshop. You don't have to, you know, have to start by just hearing some thoughts from each of our panelists about your personal relationships to this novel, The Letters of Ena Harker. When did you first read the novel? How has it affected you as writers and as readers over time? Let's start with Julian. Thanks, Megan. And thank you to the library for having me. It's a real honor to be here with Dodie and Eileen. And all of you, I first encountered Dodie's work. Actually, an anthology that Eileen had edited called The New Fuck You, anthology of lesbian writing when I was an undergrad at Santa Cruz in the 90s. And then I moved to the Bay Area in 99 and read Ena Harker at that time. I'm pretty sure it must have been in the hard press edition. Some friends of mine, Stephanie Young and Cynthia Saylor's Julia Block and I started a vampire reading group, which I'm pretty sure must have been inspired by Ena, even though Ena says something like vampires are so over. Vampires were pretty big at the time and like Buffy was going on. And we read that book. And pretty soon, a lot of us were writing epistolary poems. I think it had a pretty profound influence on my writing. At the time I was just getting into country music and I was obsessed with Hank Williams. Julia Block wrote this book. Letters to Kelly Clarkson. And so I started writing my little chat book, which was Letters to Hank Williams. And I think I used Hank Williams kind of the way that Doty uses Meena. Hank was me and he wasn't me. He was sort of like a muse and also an object of desire. I was him and I wanted to fuck him and I wanted to be him all at the same time. So he was sort of like my transaction of a transsexual, homosexual version of Meena. Like my muse and spiritual daddy. And he could do this yodel thing that can make his voice like really feminine or really masculine. And I think Meena gave me this idea or cognitive space to use this persona, like a persona I could project absolutely anything onto. He was like Hank was like my gender and my sexuality rolled into one convenient package. And it was, I came across this line in the book where she says Meena is like a sexy construct, a trope, Doty's embarrassment. And I think that embarrassment was another big gift from Doty, this concept of embarrassment. And I found the idea of embarrassment so erotic, really, the idea of like feeling embarrassed was so thrilling in one's writing. And Doty says something somewhere, I'm not sure if it's in Meena or if I read it in an interview, something about how like the only writing that is any good is writing that's a little bit embarrassing. You can correct me, Doty, about that. And I think that was something that really attracted me to poetry, this idea that you could really embarrass yourself, I found so thrilling. So I'm just going to leave it there for now because I'm really excited to hear from what other people have to say about Doty's influence. Awesome, thank you so much. I loved all of that. Dianne, how about you? Yeah, totally, absolutely. I loved that also. I'm very excited that I've wiped a lot. I'm Jillian with what you said about like writing to Hank Williams in this sort of production of Hank Williams. This is like people wrote a book about writing to Brian Wilson that sort of has a similar vibe to it in some ways. And that it didn't even realize until I was rereading letters to Meena Harper for this panel that was like, there is clearly a line of influence. I think I didn't connect that dot in the same way that it's sort of the book in letters and the possibilities that it allows. I feel, I may be slightly incoherent, like now and in this night just because I feel like really overwhelmed to be on this panel. Like I first became aware of Doty because she was my teacher when I was like a child of 21 at like my MFA program, which is when I first read the book. Just to sort of coming in there. So it's like, there is this feeling of like heady circularity, just to be talking about this book that I read. But first of all, so far back then, like before I was like out as trans when I was still like totally closeted and everything like that. And this book kind of represented this vast queer world that I could move into. It was kind of, I remember I was trying to think back about what it felt like to read this book for the first time to sort of like, because this was the first kind of book of this kind at all that I had read. Like other than like, like the wildest thing I had read before this vis-a-vis like sort of like straight literary world was like the beats or something like that. Like a not particularly wild thing, right? And then I sort of like come across this book that like, my writing teacher had written that was about like vampires and queerness and like voices and all of this like intensity, right? And it really, it opened so many doors in terms of just like what you could do as a writer, like what you could do with writing in terms of like, I'm actually really fascinated because I did not know that this had started I think as a letter writing project initially and kind of grew into a novel. I'm like really, really fascinated to kind of unpack that because when I was reading it again and thinking about it felt like this work of at the time, this work of like, it was so smart and so like engaged with all of these theoretical things that I just didn't understand on a deep level. Like I was reading the book and it was like, I'm getting like 20% of this going through, but I'm also connected to like, there are jokes in the book. There are like vampires. There is like this energy. There's this strong emotional presence, this will to like see people. I'm fascinated by the fact that some of the subjects of some of the letters become the recipients of later letters in this different way that there's a sense that the letters aren't in my own letter writing project. There's a kind of like unidirectionality of it where the letters are sort of like being projected outward. I was really fascinated with letters kind of like instantiated community that they're spreading like news from some people in the community to other people in the community feels like this really fascinating thing. So much of this had just been weird, but I think it's like the deep structures of my brain. Like I've had the part about the three signs to how to recognize associate path was just like filed away is like, I'd forgotten that it came from this until I came across that again. It comes up early on the image of like, when like, I mean, as writing to professor Van Helsing about like what it feels like, like female embodiment feels like and says, like imagine these like balloons full of water. I realized like, oh my God, I had forgotten that that was, I mean, I had forgotten that it came from the image, right? I think that I was very surprised by reading it. Now in my 30s was that I'd almost totally missed the duality of Mina and Dodie originally. I just think I straightforwardly read it is like, these are the same person rather than these are like a sort of an ability to express like things through Mina. That like Dodie may not say in other ways, like I just totally missed that as a 21 year old and it's just like, oh my God, this is what writing being a writer will be. This is amazing. It was very sobering to realize that I missed that completely the first time through. I'm speaking of embarrassment, I think. I don't know. And I wanted to read relevant to that. I wanted to read this thing that stood out for me, right? If it is okay to read apart from it as part of this, that's cool, right? That's not like gauche. Okay. So it's, I know I'd better show more compassion or the reader won't think I'm a good person. But sing, I'm not a person. If I ever was, the story ended that I am I, I am she, I am Mina Harker, a sexy contract, a trope, a simulated force of nature, Dodie's embarrassment, a vortex of urges swirling around a void. All I see is my character, a woman in a bath, an empty bath, but she's oblivious, masturbating under a jet of water. Another female incompetent at being female in a culture where the feminine is muted. Sing what I need from you is the permission to behave excessively. Will you grant me that much? And I feel like that is in some ways for better or for worse, but this book granted me when I was a closeted 21 year old. And I am very grateful to be part of talking about it now. Thank you. And I just want to say the bath part. I don't know if it's either a quote or just a reference or tribute, but that's Gail Scott's heroin. The bath part, you know, because it, the novel is a woman, the entire novel, this woman's taking the bath and then like reviewing her life. Thank you so much, Jean. London, I'd love to hear from you. I know you are also a former student of Donnie's. Is that right? Yes, I was. I first was introduced to Dodie's work when I was a teenager. On my tumblers, deep feminist pages around 2014. And when I came to state in 2017, I worked with Dodie on transfer. And I'm sort of new to Mina. I read it actually just in June. And I'm so happy that you read that section, Jean, because it was that part that really. That whole concept of just the duality of self. And having a, of course, that whole concept of just the duality of self. And having a voice that you can, having an entity of persona that you can sort of live your fullest self within and also sort of reckoning with embarrassment really helps me because I'm since I'm still new to Mina, I'm still, you know, in the process of writing what I am. So I haven't been able to implement everything that. Dodie's taught me, but at least personally, I think this book gave me a lot of freedom to just sort of sit in my desires, sit within my queerness and feel comfortable with, you know, all the different sides of myself and the influxness, I think of identity. You know, we were capital T going through it last year. And I think that in reading Mina and thinking about the different ways in which media and just media has influenced us and just my own personal desires for connection, whether that's through writing, through sex, through friendship, I think Mina's really encouraged me to go full throttle into all of those relationships here. Thank you so much. Eileen, let's hear from you. I'd love to hear your perspective on Mina, someone who is, you know, part of that scene at the time. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I think it's amazing to see Mina right now because it's such a tome, you know? It's a big book, you know? And I do think generationally, you know, I had to like look at the date and think that it's so it's kind of amazing that, like, you published this, I published Chelsea Girls, Chris did, I loved Dick, and a few short years of each other. And they were all the books that kind of stated us in a way, as writers and kind of, you know, and I think we all have to continually deal with those books as they arrived and as we arrived, you know? But I mean, I knew you for 10 years before this book came out and I think I was first introduced to your work in those little, what is it, EG? There was like a chap book series. We talked about it lately and I had one of yours and one of Kevin's and I took them on a trip to, I was in Venice in a hotel room reading these works and they were just so mind-blowing because they were, you know, they were like, like kitschy fabrication, you know? They were kind of, I mean, they were memoir-ish, they were going in so many different directions and I think you've always, I mean, this feels like the manifesto of your writing, but I think that so much of what happens in Nina, stylistically you were always doing, you know? And definitely the leaning on pastiche, which I just have to say I simply think of as italics, you know? I just think I respond, as a poet, I respond to the page typographically and so I think when I first read your work and saw that it was fun, it was dirty, it was kitschy, it was, but the pastiche always sort of indicated that it was theory, there was a theory part going on, you know? And it just like, but what was that theory, you know? And I think that was the part that was always disrupted by the writing in general and in particular in this book, you know? Because I feel like the italics always kind of suggest different weights on the page all the time and they wind up being like these traffic cops so that it means that all different things can come into the text and they do, but I think there's just a formalism because of this typographical way that you, you know, render the page that always makes that freedom both visual and, you know, narrative, I guess. I also just, it's funny, looking at it now, I forgot how much. I think, you know, it's sort of like you're kind of running parallel and away with Kathy Acker because I think that, again, it was just like, I think when I thought kitschy fabrication, it's like that's what she does and that's what you do and this is pronouncy and it's just sort of like I'm kind of writing, it's clunky fiction, I'm kind of writing a novel, I'm kind of not writing a novel and you're watching me write a novel and the kind of layeredness and the self-consciousness is always, you know, it's sort of like it's like attacking the form of fiction itself and it seems like it's a, it seems like it's a feat that only a poet could do, I think. And I think that's when I think about how I related to you and Bob and Bruce and Camille when I met everybody, it was so exciting to be kind of freed from language poetry and then led back into it through the body, you know, because it was taking on those, you know, that discourse but like fucking it up in a way that the language poets wouldn't do and I felt like when I had met you guys I felt like I met my home at last, you know, because it was such an invocation and such a welcome and such an invite to do this stuff too, you know, and it just, you know, long dirty poems, you know, it's just like nothing else that was happening and writing at the time. But I think, you know, this is just like the Bible of Doty and I think I just feel like when I read it now it's like everything that you do and have continued to do, if you didn't weren't already doing them, you started doing them here, you know, and it just kept going, you know, and so it's great to kind of see it codified like it seems like it's the Bible of your work in a way, you know. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much, Eileen. Yeah, I totally agree. It does really read like the Bible of your work, Doty and one of the things that struck me and rereading it is just the way in which and now it seems like very, I guess like I would share with Jean some of the kind of like in my first encounter with this book I was very befuddled and I was like very young and it just did not have a context for it and felt very challenged but also exhilarated by it and I definitely like really took it seriously though as like a novel quote unquote and now it seems really clear that it's totally readable as like an experimental memoir and it's part of, it definitely belongs to what has become like a longstanding diaristic practice that's very important to your writing. Anyway, I'm sort of... I've gone off script but I wanted to get back to just like the original context of the book. Yeah, and I was curious in hearing you know people's perspectives on how the book reflects the time and place in which it was written the late 80s early to mid 90s, AIDS taking hold, new narrative becoming sort of like solidified as a school and community of writers but I'm also just really interested in hearing more about letters and people's relationship to letters in the epistolary mode. One of the things that was really like maybe sort of like surprisingly astonishing to me was just when I was looking at Dodie and Kevin's archives doing research for that profile on Dodie just like the sheer quantity of letters of correspondence like just like boxes and boxes of letters which of course was like much more you know part of the fabric of communication at that time now that's been a little bit supplanted by emails. So, okay, what is my question? Letters, say more about letters but also I'm curious yeah like re-reading this book in 2021 like how do you see it kind of reflecting back this moment of San Francisco in the late 80s and in the 90s would anybody like to respond? I want to say one thing which is just obviously in relationship to AIDS it's spectral you know it was sort of like death was in the air and this seems like such an interesting way to kind of put your par into it and to even deal with your friends who were living and dead and weirdly it's like I've never been very into vampires but I had COVID last year and I was lucky I had a pretty light but what I was led to was true blood and I just binged out on true blood for the 11 days that I was sick in bed and suddenly I'm so interested in vampires but it was kind of because death was back death was back and I was thinking about my blood and I was thinking about dying and I was thinking about sleeping and I was thinking and I just this book is such a period piece in that sense too and also the fact that the author is female and certainly female people were getting AIDS and dying of AIDS but not so much not as much you know so it was a different way to interpolate yourself into that too I really appreciated the Pistolary form of Mina and I don't think I told a book being written like this today I think especially of from younger folks because there's always a fear of something being in writing and the internet being forever and I think there's a wonderful generous vulnerability in the letters that are written in Mina that feel so of its time that I wish we could have again because I feel like especially after the lack of connection and communication and touch and everything because of the pandemic we really need that type of vulnerability and that generous vulnerability I got to fight with that a great deal I was thinking about I feel like a lot just with everybody being indoors for two years and just slowly climbing the walls in this way particularly on social media I think there has been this feeling of like I realized in part we're reading the exchanges in this book how much of my like social media world was sort of formed by this idea that you should kind of go Mina Harker toward things like you should go toward maximum vulnerability you should go toward maximum participation again like kind of alighting distinction between this is a persona and this is like the author over here but there's I felt like this really really strong urge to sort of moderate and I think everybody is sort of feeling this urge I don't know if other people buy with this as well but just like that urge to not be as vulnerable to not be as direct that it actually seems like even though this book was written you know some of the letters dating back to the 1980s I think the book is published originally in like 97 or something like that how raw it feels like how it feels like much more idinic than we have it supposedly this like just how far we've regressed in terms of like being able to be in this sort of space of openness I felt like also with what you said Eileen about this sort of being death being in the air in some of these I'm thinking about our like our cat just died which is like just a weird thing to be thinking about but the part just about not having a place to send the letters and the part about the way that a letter is sort of you can write it to someone who's not there you can send it to someone who's not there you can sort of continue those connections or the things with like the letters to the reader that are going on feels like this really powerful way that it stretches beyond like what the practical community can be I'm not saying that very well but there's the way the letter can kind of stretch outside of like someone has to be there to receive it I guess I don't know that feels very powerful to me Eileen when you said it's a period piece I thought it's like kind of literally a period piece in the sense of menstruation like there's so much about blood in the sense of like blood coming out of women in this book and like I was thinking about the image of like I don't know someone it's some like seen from a horror film where Dodie describes her as being like a walking cotex and then there's that other part where I don't know like the fan boy David is like writing to her and like asked for a picture and said she like smears some period blood on a letter and sends it like my DNA so it's interesting to think about this in the context of like AIDS and the proliferation of fluids and the exchange of fluids which is all over this book and fluids get alighted with ink so much and there's also the other great part where Dodie is talking to Sam about like how they're both fucking people who are fucked and you know that like the cum comes into their use the word nethers like it comes into their nethers like spews out of their spews out of their mouth as gossip so I'd be sort of interested to hear people's thoughts on gossip between fluids and writing particularly in this kind of scene in the Bay Area yeah that's a fantastic prompt I too would love to hear people's thoughts on that it reminds me of the statement that Emily Gold makes in the intro to this edition writing in sex are the same in this book yeah and yeah I guess we can maybe open up that question to talk about the book as a work of sex writing overall and kind of like yeah how we think about it now as a work of sex writing how does it read differently now than it did two decades ago if it does or you know just like how it relates to you know a tradition of feminist sex writing that has evolved curious if thoughts come to mind for folks I would ask London if she thought that how the sex would fly and how the book would fly now and London seemed to think that of her generation they're into sex again so I'd be okay right um no I I think it flies really well and I think that I've been having a lot of conversations with my friends who that have been more about how sex is not really about sex but it's about the intimacy and when I think about the sex in this book it almost sort of feels like it's its own language or it's its own tool of craft sort of like it's like it's not really it's a vehicle or a form of articulation of connection rather than about the sex itself because I mean I think of there's one image of like a tongue ejaculating and I'm just like it's not about the fluids or even the sexual image but it's like that passion sort of like wanting to like eat a baby because they're so adorable and I just see so much joy in that articulation of sex in this book and I think it's incredibly radical to have that especially given the time that it was happening and how fearful it was to be having sex in the queer community at this time but I would just weigh in on that is because I mean that was so much of the politics of the time because because sex was bad and it was killing people and I was making a point of writing about sex making art about sex having as much sex as possible like sex was the pushback against death in a way and so it was really so much a part of the time I was just thinking that I mean in a way you know you're doing this like classic the form of the book where you know with it being letter writing with it being diaristic female or feminist and then the part that's I don't mean anti-feminist but bad feminist is the sex you know like the sex is so in your face so over the top so that if those other forms are kind of female literary forms because they're kind of nascent and a little afraid to be a little novel and a little afraid to be a epic you're using those very those very fragile forms and doing something kind of lewd and dirty with it which is kind of I guess I mean either third wave feminism or the end of counting you know the end of counting generations anymore too you know and it's funny to have it be at the end of letters counting too because it's a epistolary novel written at the end of letters you know and so it would be getting off all sorts of stuff including you know body fluids there's something like I know that I'm struck by the way I'm reacting to the words like lewd and dirty I guess and sort of there because I remember my I feel like I had a weird take on this or something just as being so many read this book that I was like a closeted trans woman right the sort of directness of the body stuff like directness of the embodiment felt really the way it was like the body was not was just sort of there the way everybody's bodies that we sort of like see like like London to a point about the way the bodies are sort of expressing the way people are with one another that the relationship sort of come out through these sort of like ideally like these incisive sex scenes these incisive sex scenes that are about like who these people are is sort of how they have sex right in some ways something about that felt really I'm trying to put words around this that it's a very hard thing to put words around the it was a way that was like approaching bodies that were as a trans person I had there's like a really fraught relationship to the idea of like and then seeing sort of both like trans bodies and coded female bodies presented kind of as they were in a way and in spaces of variation and spaces of encounter of one another I don't know that I have a larger point I'm just saying that was like a big deal for me when I was reading the book to sort of have this like sense of like being able to approach the body through this book in some way was like very powerful and feels very queer in ways that I don't know I almost approached with this sort of like mystical like I don't know how to explain why this was so important to me but it really was well it's kind of domestic too isn't it I mean there's lots of people don't really there's so much sex with your partner who is KK and it sort of starts in the house so it feels like a TV series in which these people do these things together at home and then they go out in the world and do them with other people too and that's sort of connected to all these other worlds but it's really a very domestic book. It's true and like the remote control is this sort of like central like tool like you know like Dodie and KK are using the remote control to like you know flip between the channels as they're in bed and you know there's some line in the book like I don't understand how anyone ever wrote anything before remote controls and then that leads in where she masturbates with it you know like pumping the remote control um also I'm yeah just like the the elision of sex with writing is really interesting to me and sometimes it's like this total chouissance and sometimes it's like it becomes horrifying like like you know desire is a character but writing is also like a character that is like a vampire like it it you know there's a line about it's like writing sucks the narrow like out of unsuspecting and it's like picking its teeth with like a bone so writing is almost like this double-edged sword I gotta jump on the remote too because the remote was such a sign of the times I mean it was such a new thing that you could just lie in bed and go and it is it is pastiche and it is a disrupted narrative and it really was the introduction to this new way of suturing constantly and changing the subject and changing the you know which again I think you often use the italicized moments to do too they're like a disruptive and they're up suture at the same time great when you said that earlier about the italics because I vibe with that a lot also I'd like write down chessboard because there's something about the way that because I don't I don't even get the references a lot in the book like I just don't I just don't I recognize like the bigger patterns of internet like I recognize the stuff with like dracula and suitors and all this like big points resonance but the actual quotes I just don't know a lot of the time and it just sort of take them at face value but there's something really just reading it again I was struck by like how many just how many images and how good the images are and they're kind of braided together in this patchwork by that kind of jump between Roman and italics in this way that feels like there's just so much in this book like there's just like it's like a dense book of images in ways that are feel like I don't know like I'm feeling again a little bit just reading it again like the power I felt when I was like when I was a kid reading it was just like oh my god you get to do that like you get to just have like a million images that aren't like couched in a sentence that are just kind of braided together typographically in this way this like yeah it's the italics aren't used in one singular way like sometimes I use it as a a lot of the theory stuff is like the language has been perverted and I really was trying to make it feel like a violation of the text more than like kind of explaining the text but so sometimes you know the italics would signal an intrusion or quote but sometimes I just want it to go back and forth quickly and they're purely for punctuation so that they don't the italics in the Roman part aren't really separate or differentiated in my mind at least on they're sort of the same level but you could I just want to go really really quick back and forth so it's almost like stutter so yeah I got that too it's almost like it just served to kind of like visually help you because the prose is so dense it's like these blocks and the italics do a little bit of work of breaking that up but just to go back to the idea of imagery Gina was talking about like there's so many like precise and like I don't know like use the word lapidary at one point like these lapidary nuggets of these images like you know lapidary is the word that Bob Gluck used in his workshop all the time so it's kind of like stolen from him and being a little catty but anyway well cat yeah speaking of cats that was one of the ones that really stuck with me like the cat that had so many fleas it was like a tornado around its body like a cloud of fleas around it but also to speak to what Eileen was saying about the domestic the novel takes place begins when most romance novels end right the characters get together and then it dissolves so this is like the it begins with the marriage and kind of looking at the aftermath so because it was funny because I had been married before well you know if you sort of and I never freaked out about it but when I got together with Kevin I just totally freaked out I just felt like I think I talk about it like 2000 years of patriarchy was like kind of falling and somehow I was afraid that I was going to it was going to get me this time and I was going to become like a you know it's Stafford wife or something so clearly didn't happen but there was a kind of terror of it you know but which I was a surprise you know there's other different stuff with me like it occurs to like all the different relationships there's sort of the like Mina and Lucy opposition I think where it's like how did these like open relationships kind of like run into one another what are these like politics and what are the ways people can run one another even in this very open culture feels like actually like there's ways almost like 19th century like classical novel vibes about like this is like how like how these relationships break down and how they navigate these social codes even though there's this kind of like openness there's this politeness and there's this queerness going with them that I don't know I thought it was like like I was struck like just how much how much marriage there is even though it doesn't it doesn't stay so much on the like it's like like KK is like always there right but it's sort of also about like that that long part with like Quincy and the sort of like bouncing between these two I don't was also just like intriguing it's that's always the weirdest part in Dracula where like the four like all the suitors like give I don't remember if it's Mina or Lucy but they all give like a blood transfusion to her one after another to prove their like virility and they like do this male bonding thing around it where they're like like our blood has mingled in this and we are true friends who can fight Dracula together it's the weirdest part of the book and Doty didn't you do you and Kevin did like a blood pact right was that like related to the project those letters are that's in the yeah we did a blood pact that was before we were married though yeah we used to do it yeah okay I got I've got one question from the audience that I'll respond to if other folks who are with us have any questions for Doty or any of our panelists now is a great time to drop them in here Bill asked me about the letters in the archive so this is I was researching a profile of Doty for the CCA Waddes project on our mind and so Doty's and Doty and Kevin's archives are stored together at the Byna Key which is one of the libraries at Yale so they're available to the public there are some barriers to get there but that is the answer to that question thank you for asking it hold on I'm going to how do I shift the food to answer I did answer that live okay great okay sorry last year I wanted to go back to sorry for the awkward segue here but I wanted to go back to some of what came up around the way that the book blurs fiction and nonfiction and the way that Mina is used as kind of this it's very coy construct over Doty and there is a slipperiness there right sometimes sometimes Mina is just Mina sometimes it's like Mina and Doty together and sometimes like we get Doty's voice it seems to mean like lurching out of the construct and yeah I'm curious thinking especially about Mina in relation to Doty's body of work overall how you all think about Mina as a memoir or how you all think about it in relation to recent conversations about like auto fiction or any of the sort of more contemporary not to say that those conversations were not happening you know and not yeah new narrative of course was like those conversations were happening all the time but yeah just thinking about like then versus now and sort of like you know what connections we can draw well I'll just say like I love how confident the book is in terms of like and it's rightfully like it assumes that it's going to have posterity like there's this great line about like reader you're probably too young to remember newlyweds which I don't know what I knew like it turns out a newlywed I don't know some sort of pastry or I don't know but I love this assumption of a younger reader like someone who's not going to actually like as Jean was saying like that is not going to get a lot of the references you know and you know sometimes it's almost like there's even these like Shakespearean moments where she's like whispering and I don't care if it's Dion or Quentin like I'm going to immortalize you you know like I will make you live forever just like this like serious literary vibe of these almost like Shakespearean moments or these like you know like the male lover usually the Troubadour lover like promising immortality you know to his like usually beloved and so there's that like real serious like literary vibe to it but then there's it's like and then it's so campy too I don't know I mean I don't know if campy is the right word be curious to know what you all think about that but it's like I am Nina like queen of the darkness and nobody has sex with anyone unless it's me you know it's so funny and it's so literary and it's so like meta it you know I guess aside from Kathy Acker you know as a first writer that I read that was really like a subject matter you know I feel like that was really important for at least my generation of poets coming up in the Bay Area and this book is like you know Kathy's like the direct air the antecedent of this this book would never have existed or even thought to exist without her so so yeah any connection there is not accidental I have a letter question which is so what percentage of the letters were actually sent originally all the letters were set but then when the final version some of the characters were consolidated and everything was never received a letter in real life but you know but every letter was sent even though more to somebody and often I would like I was talking about this before I would quote the letter would also be somehow a response to whoever received its writing there would be passages and I would and then that has been taken away so like there's a letter to Gail Scott in the book but Gail Scott's writing is still in there so there's these traces but they're more like ghost traces now but yeah that edge of actually sending the letters was like did create kind of this panicky erotic feeling and it was very hard when I finished it because I go I just can't do the letter as my thing forever and trying to write something that did not have a specific one person audience to create that charge was difficult and you know kind of Mina talks about that too as she talks about everything that kind of writing to the void as opposed to writing to one person you know I was going to I had a pre-theory before you answer the question because I just assumed that some were sent and some were not sent and I was going to say will the unsent letters are fiction and so then it becomes fictional but that's not true but then when I think about the fact that most of the letters are to writers so that this kind of performative quality where you're sort of showing off and playing with the other writer to write to a writer than it is to write to somebody who's not a writer they're watching you and so you're watching them watch you so it really puts this element of performance into the act of letter writing which seems special to me and I also just as a detail I've been reading, are you a Bruno Schultz fan he's a Polish fiction writer and also just his fiction began in letter writing with he was a very shy art teacher and he wrote these incredible letters that became totally fantastic but it was it was letter writing so this is just a strange history but it's that's also one of the origins of the bourgeois novel it came from like the collections of often fake but supposedly real letters that were published but it is a we could we all could thank it the letter I'd like to comment on just the divide between the sort of eye of Nina and the eye of Doty and in rereading this in rereading Nina I've been thinking about it as sort of like emotional code switching almost and how absolutely freeing and like ahead of its time it is and once again Nina is going to work really well with Gen Z folks so I think we hold a lot of space for the fact that we have different selves and how important and healthy it is to have different selves but what I think Nina does really well is giving writers and just Doty and Nina as characters sort of like the space to fully embody the roles that they decide Nina is fully Nina on the page and all of her I would say it's camp her operatic campus and Doty is sort of fully free to be fighting for space and I think also being willing to language uncomfortability and I think holding space for the uncomfortable aspects of connection and just living and just being fully embodied in that and also being fully embodied in your like a badass goddessness is absolutely something that I'm going to be taking with me in my personal life and my writing that's wonderful thank you so much I think that is a really perfect place to wrap up on I think unless anyone has final thoughts that they would like to share but it seems like it's a good time to close out I just want to acknowledge how funny this book is and bring into like a really great quote from KK that's in the book where he's like rubbing against her ass and he says I'm overdue like a library book since we're at a library event love it thank you so much for that okay well great I think we'll go ahead and wrap up here thank you so much everyone to all of the panelists for being here and sharing your insights thank you so much to Doty for this remarkable extraordinary book and thank you to Anisa and SFPL once again for being our fantastic hosts absolutely and thank you all too as well and library community absolutely thank you and that was a beautiful quote for sure library love is apparent alright friends thank you sleep well have a wonderful night library community come back again