Interview: Liz Asch
a smorgasbord of smut
an interview with Liz Asch
In Your Salt on My Lips: (Mostly) Queer Erotica, Liz Asch traverses through queer eroticism…
fantasy that varies from concrete, realistic experiences including the likes of an on-going threesome (of which the parts are sprinkled throughout the book), to day-dreamy imaginings, and even surreal fantasies of sex-driven beasts. All are exciting romps. All are visual stories that tingle through the body. All are fun.
Liz Asch knows the body very well. As an artist, acupuncturist, visualization super-star, and teacher, she understands not only pressure points of tension and release, but also pressure points of desire. Her playful writing in this collection is filled with hot imaginings from varying points of view, and although her voice is strong, she expertly moves around as narrator.
We had the pleasure of talking with her about her process and what it’s like to release an erotica-based collection of stories…
a conversation with
Liz Asch
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NAILED: Can you tell us how the development of this collection happened?
Liz Asch: This collection started as a personal challenge to myself when I was first dating again after the end of a marriage. I wanted to free up my desire and reclaim it, and to do so, I decided that I needed to check myself, because I, too, had taboos around sex. I didn’t want to, but I did. So, each time I felt my prohibition kick in, I jotted it down. I was taking writing classes around town and did a weekend workshop with Tom Spanbauer. That got me lit up to write fiction again. I was an English major in college, but I was mostly writing poetry and art criticism then, not fiction. Then I took a class with Lidia Yuknavitch called ‘Ecstatic States: Sex, Death, and Memoir’. I wrote “In the Lemon Tree” in that class, about a girl’s sensual awakening in a lemon tree. That was the seed of this book. My classmates were very encouraging that I should try my hand at erotica. I wrote the first “Bifurious” story and it was a hit in the class.
art by Liz Asch
It wasn’t meant to be an erotica class, I should say, but it was very inclusive, of course, of whatever the class inspired us to write. I returned to that list of taboos and challenged myself to write a story about each one of them to free me up. (Those early stories aren’t in Your Salt on My Lips because I published them in erotica collections and in BUST in the One-Handed Read section, and when we drew up a contract, we left all previously published work out.) It was exhilarating to publish smutty stories. I used a few different pseudonyms. Darsie Hemingway. Lizzie Goodnight. Whenever I got a wild idea for a sexy story, I’d write it down, and then I’d return to the list and make stories when I needed a break from writing essays and wanted to do something more light and easy.
Right before the pandemic I did an artist’s residency, and at the end of it I still had more juice left in me so I revisited the ungainly document fully of smutty ideas and story bits, which I’d started like ten years before. I worked on it for about six months, shaping the stories during the pandemic and, at the end of the summer, sent a query to Cleis Press. They took it.
N: Can you tell us about the collective essay that was published about "Shame in Publishing a Book?"
In my notes I have:
"The anticipation of the rejection of others."
"We carry anxiety and it is anticipatory of catastrophe" especially when a book is vulnerable.
LA: Jennifer Huang sent out a call on twitter to discuss the weird shame around publishing a book and I sent in a reply that opened up a dialogue between us. Once I accepted the offer from Cleis Press, I had to write 25,000 more words, which meant doubling the book (the parts we decided to keep). I loved the editor I got to work with there, Hannah Bennett. She was terrific. And I wanted to haul ass and write it fast. It was thrilling and felt great to focus so deeply on a project. I have always loved a deadline, I gotta say. I’m terrible at holding to them if it’s just for myself, but I am driven when someone else it waiting on me.
Anyway, the point is, I was so confident and sexually charged when writing the book, and I had so much fun. I wrote 17 new stories and revised all the others through the Fall and Winter. We allowed an additional six months for revisions. We must have passed that book back and forth like 50 times. And we hired sensitivity readers, and, you know, the whole editing process. As the publication date drew near, I felt myself close up like a crab going into its shell. I felt self-conscious, stressed, sexually inhibited, shy. I knew part of me was proud I wrote this bawdy, beautiful, sex-positive book, but also a part of me was horrified by all the taboos I broke in naming all these sex acts, and in publishing such a thing. It was like the Wild side of me who is also an Educator, versus the Socialized side of me who is also a Daughter and Good Girl. You know? So, I had been thinking a lot about shame and how it was affecting me at a time when I wished I could feel very confident. I was also taking an in-depth certification in somatic techniques for treating trauma at the time, as a practitioner, and we were talking a lot about shame in the class. I do think when publishing, some of us writers anticipate disapproval and proactively adopt the internalized shame. This is similar to anxiety, when we assume and guess the worst, and then subscribe to our own bad news. It’s all invented, but our beliefs shape our everything. It’s a topic I’m endlessly fascinated by. The way our language/storytelling (positive, or negative, or whatever) affects our bodies and being.
art by Liz Asch
art by Liz Asch
N: So much of your writing is like reading a painting. Your descriptions are so vivid and lush. Can you tell us about how the way you visualize informs the way we can heal through art?
LA: As an acupuncturist, I noticed that the stories my patients were telling themselves really affected how they felt and how their energy moved. I was familiar with this concept because I received EMDR therapy in my twenties, and it saved my life. It, too, is based on storytelling, and revising the way we tell the stories of our traumas, so they we are included and respected, and in doing so, we restore our own dignity. It helps heal shame and our mental ill health. When our critical inner monologue is loud and relentless, we feel like shit. If it happens to stop, lucky us, we feel better. But we do not have to be victims to it. There is a lot we can do to quiet the critic and to bring about a sense of peace. We just have to take action. Being in the body is an antidote to being in the mind. When we are practicing embodiment, that takes precedence over the noise of the critical mind. We get in our bodies through deep observation, engagement with the senses, and cultivating awareness of the self and the natural world. We can also call that presence. We also hold the choice to replace the critic’s narrative with stories that enhance our sense of well-being: where we feel safe, an unquestionable sense of belonging, and a sense of reverence. This is medicine for the soul. We feel so much better when we can tune out the critic and attune to our wellbeing.
So, when I write, I emphasize the senses, creating an intimacy with the reader and writer, like we are hand in hand, or nose to nose, or seeing through the same lens. The more vivid the better, in my estimation. I think that is what art gives us—the ability to vicariously experience someone else’s stories. We love that feeling. That’s why we watch films and TV and read novels. Language takes us to etheric places we couldn’t get to otherwise.
N: You have represented a diverse point of view in your narrators in this collection. How did you come to that?
LA: I really wanted this book to span the spectrum of queerness, and to feature bodies of the global majority. It was intentional that, for most of the stories, I did not describe a body as a way to introduce a character or to heighten a sex scene, and that I never defaulted to the standard of the skinny white woman as what’s hot. I wrote sensuality, lust, and love, with characters who the reader can imagine however they want. I wanted it to be inclusive in that way, that the reader’s imagination shapes the way many of the characters look. Some stories I did differently, like the dildo rodeo story, which does describe sexualized bodies, because the whole point of that story (I was breaking the taboo!) was being a voyeur of public sex, so it was key that the narrator witness the bodies on display and describe them.
art by Liz Asch
I also wanted the range of queerness to vary and not exclude anyone. There are characters whose gender identity and sexuality are not named. There are characters who might be trans or might be intersex or might identify another way. Sometimes they name themselves and sometimes they don’t. Most characters in the book know exactly what they want and name it. Because that’s hot. Others stumble along with as they figure it out. Because that kind of authenticity and vulnerability is hot too. I wanted the characters to emphasize communication and consent, because that kind of empowered state is super hot, and it’s a part of the fantasy. I wish I could be that clear and confident! I tried to stretch my imagination to come up with all kinds of ways people could feel sexually emboldened or connected or curious. This collection is really eclectic. It’s a smorgasbord of smut.
N: “In The Lemon Tree” is one of my favorites. Feeling erotic in and with nature is one of the most beautiful experiences, yet it seems to me less explored than human to human eroticism, at least in writing.
Was it a conscious effort to write this piece or have you always naturally had this experience with nature?
What do you think we can learn from these experiences?
LA: I really did have a sensual awakening in a lemon tree as a kid. It wasn’t like the story. It was like one minute of pleasure and revelation. I wish it went as deep as in the story! But that’s why I wrote the story, to slow down and amplify that idea, and really explore it, and see if I could get the language to caretake that extreme outside-of-time experience. The lemon tree is like a chrysalis in that story, which is a concept I play with later in the book too, when sexuality erupts within us as if we are hatching into a new being. The Adam and Eve story is also an awakening in nature. I wanted to rewrite that trope, of Adam being the first (implied best), and Eve second (and secondary). She may have been born second, but she figures everything out first. I wanted the Garden of Eden story to be about eros, not morality, because I think that’s really what the story is meant to be about.
N: I want to know more about the dildo rodeo. Where is this and when can we go?
LA: [Laughing]. I wish it were real. It was, like all the stories in the book, a fantasy. It was fun to play the role of the voyeur as the narrator, who is a bit of an innocent, but also, you can tell, has a racy side she has only just begun to explore. I came of age in New York and definitely lost my innocence there. Nothing as exciting as “Girls on Top”! I went to clubs and bars and raves, watched go-go dancers strut, and strangers make out on the dance floor. Sometimes there were half-naked people in cages, but I never saw a public sex show like in the story. Maybe I went to the wrong clubs!
Back then I lived with roommates, or sometimes on my own, and occasionally brought someone home. I was pretty timid in public, but pretty confident in bed back then. The fantasy was that you could walk into a club on Christopher Street and have a queer Alice in Wonderland experience like that, where sexual prowess is the commodity, and tons of people had it and owned the night. I admired (and envied) the cultured gay men older than me who were part of the ball scene. In Poughkeepsie, there was this amazing gay bar downtown behind an unmarked door called The Congress, and it was kind of a queer nirvana like that. All kinds of queers, young and old, gathered there to drink, play pool, drop coins into the jukebox. There wasn’t much dancing as I recall. It was more of a flirt across the room type place. In my memory it’s like a fairytale because it was so special. I had some magical nights at The Congress. So that place informs some of the stories.
The name of the dildo rodeo story comes from the time I went to visit my sister in England where she was studying abroad, and I had read about a dyke bar called Girls on Top (named so because it was on the second story of a building), and so I remember asking my sister, awkwardly, if I could borrow her ID, and it was thrilling to take the tube and show my ID and get in. I loved sipping my drink and people watching, wanting to flirt, but knowing I was just there as an observer for the night, checking out cute British girls, noticing how they dressed and wore their hair, drooling over a few, giving some quick glances. I remember skipping back to my sister’s dorm across late-night London, so happy that I’d found it and gotten to go.
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Liz Asch is the author of Your Salt on My Lips, a collection of mostly queer, taboo-busting literary erotica in shorts and tableaus, that aims to overcome societal misconceptions about sexuality by presenting embodied, inclusive stories of lust and love. Her essays, stories, poems, interviews, and book reviews can be found in journals including The Rumpus, Sinister Wisdom, Phoebe, Brain Mill Press, So To Speak, Entropy, BUST Magazine, and various anthologies and collections listed at www.lizasch.com. Liz holds a BA from Vassar College where she studied poetry, art, and filmmaking, and an MFA from Eastern Oregon University in Creative Nonfiction. Liz practices hands-on medicine as an acupuncturist in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches classes on creativity and embodiment and works with artists and creative groups as a guide for accessing flow and inspiration from the body.
Learn more at lizasch.com