ANNE TOURNEY Interview

This article is an exclusive to THE S & M NEWS
from Sensuous Sadie
If you enjoy this interview, you can read more SCENEprofiles with BDSM personalities on Sadie's website at www.sensuoussadie.com

SCENEprofiles Interview with Anne Tourney, Erotica & BDSM Author
anne_tourney@hotmail.com

Anne Tourney has been writing erotic fiction for over ten years. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Erotic, Best Women's Erotica series, and Best New Erotica series, as well as Sacred Exchange, Zaftig: Well-Rounded Erotica, Embraces: Dark Erotica, The Unmade Bed, Clean Sheets, Scarlet Letters, and Slow Trains. She has published dark fantasy and horror in Dark Regions, Dark Testament, and Suspect Thoughts. Check the links at the end of this interview to read some of her stories.

SENSUOUS SADIE: Congratulations on publishing your first book! Please tell me about it.

ANNE TOURNEY: "Thank you - it's been a long time coming. I've been publishing erotic short stories for years, first on the internet back in the early days of rec.arts.erotica and alt.sex.stories, then gradually in small magazines and anthologies. But my dream has always been to write erotic novels. I like long erotic fiction because it allows you to portray a character's sexual development over time. I'm fascinated by the way people's personalities transform as they expand their sexuality, and novel-length fiction allows you to explore that.

"Hard Blue Midnight was published as part of the Black Lace series, under the pseudonym Alaine Hood. It's the story of a woman who is investigating the disappearance of her great-aunt, an erotic photographer who went to Paris in the 1930's. I majored in French Literature in college and was always intrigued by the creative, openly sensual atmosphere of pre-war Paris. I love fiction that mingles the past with the present, so I decided to take a contemporary heroine and see how her life would be changed through an investigation of her family history. Of course she has lots of erotic adventures along the way, including a brief relationship with a dominant man who turns out to have sinister motives.

"In the end, however, she finds a relationship that more realistically meets her needs. The novel is largely a fantasy, but I did try to get in a few true-to-life insights into the nature of a submissive woman, and the challenges that she faces in confronting that part of her sexuality and reconciling it with her day-to-day routine. While I wanted to make the BDSM scenes arousing, I also tried to convey some of the comedy and disillusionment that arise whenever a fantasy becomes reality. "

Sadie: I first discovered your writing in your story "Come for Me, Dark Man" in the book of spirituality oriented BDSM stories "Sacred Exchange." (link to this story below). How did you come to write this particular story? What do you see as the spiritual elements in it?

Anne: "Come for Me, Dark Man started out as a ghost story, with a contemporary heroine whose music teacher is seduced by the ghost of a blues guitarist. Later I decided that the dual storylines diluted the power of the central relationship, so I cut out the contemporary portion. Again, this is a story set in the 1920's-1930's, a period that I'm strongly drawn to, for some reason. I don't really believe in reincarnation, in a religious sense, but I do believe that people can somehow acquire strong 'memories' from periods of time before their birth.

"When I wrote Come for Me, Dark Man I was trying to evoke the raw sensuality of blues music, and to bring that into the life of a sexually repressed, middle-class widow. I've always loved freight trains, and the idea of riding on the rails, so I brought that into the story, too. But I think there are two central images that drove me to write that story: the image of a tall, dark, shabbily dressed man towering against the sun; and the image of a train rushing past the overgrown backyards of identical crackerbox houses. I'm not sure where those images come from, but they're very compelling to me. Sometimes I think that fiction writing is all about getting to the heart of those fleeting images, giving them substance and depth, and presenting them to other people. It's a way of making an essential kernel of yourself visible to others."

Sadie: You are a prolific writer of erotica, including some "BDSM-lite," as you call it. How would you characterizes your stories? What do you most enjoy writing?

Anne: "Although I don't really like the term 'literary erotica' (sounds so hoity-toity), I'd have to characterize my stories that way, because the balance between sex and story usually lies on the story side. If there's any theme that I've tried to pursue consistently in my writing, it's the theme of transformation. Often this transformation takes on a religious or spiritual dimension, because I believe that eroticism is the fleshly expression of spirituality. I wrote about this in Come for me Dark Man, but it's most clearly articulated in a story called The Book of Zanah, where I tried to fumble around with the idea that the flesh and the soul are one and the same thing. I'm not a philosopher, but one of the things I like to do in fiction is to bring the central concepts of philosophy into the lives of everyday people.

"When it comes to writing erotica, I'm really more interested in writing about sexuality than about sex, if that makes any sense. I like writing about ordinary people, and sexuality is a way that ordinary people can reach the extraordinary. Of course, most of us don't have the time or energy to have transcendent, exalted sex more than once or twice in a decade, but we all have imaginations, and desires, and explosive fantasies. We all have the potential for transformation into something glorious, even if it only happens in our own minds. Who knows? Maybe that's the best place for it to happen."

Sadie: Strangely enough for a sister writer, I find erotica somewhat dull to read (except yours of course!). I think you've found much of erotic fiction tedious as well. Considering that you write erotic fiction, that's pretty funny. What do you make of this?

Anne: "A lot of writers begin writing because they can't find the kind of fiction they want to read, and that's how it started for me with erotica. When I was in my early twenties, I wanted to read three-dimensional fiction that was sensual and arousing, not just because of its physical descriptions, but because of its language, its imagery, and it's narrative depth. Nowadays there are many wise, inventive authors who are publishing the kinds of stories that I would have loved to read back then. At the time, however, I couldn't find much contemporary erotic fiction that reflected my own life.

"My first encounter with that kind of fiction was an anthology of fiction and poetry published by Yellow Silk. For the first time I was reading musical, powerful, creative erotica about people I might meet in the grocery store or at the library, and I loved it. I read and re-read that book until the covers fell off. One of the stories from that anthology, Susan St. Aubin's Cynthia, is probably what got me started writing erotica in the first place. It's a beautiful, lyrical story about a young woman who makes love to the ghost of a woman who died of breast cancer. I had never thought that erotica could blend so many diverse elements, with such grace and simplicity. When I read that story, I thought, This is what I want to do. This is how I could make a difference."

Sadie: You approach BDSM as "a fundamentally private, personal, and spiritual experience," saying that "I've gone through periods of being fascinated by the drama, fashions, and visual intensity of the scene, but in my heart it's always something intangible and transcendent that I'm looking for." Can you expand on this?

Anne: "I'm a very private person in all respects, so I suppose my interest in BDSM is another manifestation of this. I think that anyone who's getting into the 'scene' for the first time and trying to make it more than a fantasy has to pass through the flash and color and drama first. You can't help it; that's the most visible public expression of dominance and submission. But I believe that the desire to experience sexual submission really begins deep in the psyche, in childhood experiences, in very old fantasies and memories. You have to rediscover that somehow, if you want to find the truest expression of your own desires.

"I've spent much more time trying to rediscover those impulses through fiction than I have through real-life experience. I've written very explicit fiction describing sadomasochistic sexuality, but I've never done much of it personally, especially not in public. I'd probably be too embarrassed and intimidated. I'm the classic example of the writer who doesn't experience a fraction of the things that she imagines—and doesn't necessarily want to. One thing I do want to experience, however, is a profound emotional connection with someone who understands the spiritual side of power exchange. I hope that I've been able to do that by publishing some of my stories."

Sadie: What kind of advice would you give to someone who wants to bring a sense of the spiritual into their sexuality?

Anne: "Having the desire to bring a sense of the spiritual into your sex life means that you're already on your way. I think that desire—the sense of longing, of reaching for transcendence—is the essence of both spirituality and sexuality. You find tidal waves of that longing in any spiritual tradition. I grew up with Christianity, and the context for my spiritual experience of the erotic has always been Christian mysticism. In books like The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous 14^th-century mystic, you feel the immense power of the author's desire for God, and that desire is so strong that it reverberates through your own body. That reverberation becomes even more powerful when you realize that the desire runs both ways—God longs for the human spirit as much as the human spirit longs for God. That longing can be harsh and rigorous and demanding, but it can also be tender and joyful. I think that the sexual practice of dominance and submission is a reflection of this spiritual exchange of power: the submission of the soul to something greater, the loss of the individual self in something vast.

"For a lot of people, myself included, bringing together the body and spirit is a process of reconciliation, of self-acceptance. It's taken me a long time to feel that I had a right to think of myself as a 'spiritual' or 'religious' person, because I couldn't find a place for my sexuality within my religious beliefs. Eventually, I built that place through my writing. I believe that religious practice and erotic experience should be part of a continuum, but unfortunately, they're often considered mutually exclusive. To a large degree, I believe that this breach between sexuality and spirituality was caused by misinterpretations (often deliberate) of original sources. If you go to the source materials of any religious tradition, if you read the early scriptures and look for the core of truth at the heart of those writings, you always get back to that sense of yearning, that desire to touch the eternal. That's what's important; that's what radiates."

Sadie: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers?

Anne: "Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about sexuality and spirituality. It's important to have a place where you can feel safe discussing who you are. Fundamentally, I'm most myself in my fiction, but you've given me the chance to let my hair down in public.

Thank you very much!"

Sadie: Thank you!

Read some of Anne's Fiction
Come For Me, Dark Man (*Sadie's Favorite, from Sacred Exchange)
http://sensuoussadie.com/fiction/annetourneycomeforme.htm

How to Come on a Bus (*also very entertaining)
http://www.fishnetmag.com/fiction/1997/05-02/how_to_come.html

The Blood Virgin
http://www.suspectthoughts.com/virgin.html
Pink Oleander
http://www.slowtrains.com/issue3/tourneyissue3.html

Sacred Exchange: Stories of Spirituality and Transcendence in Dominance and Submission
Edited by Lisabet Sarai & S. F. Mayfair
Available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/

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If you enjoyed this interview, read more SCENEprofiles with BDSM personalities on Sadie's website at www.sensuoussadie.com

Sensuous Sadie is the author of It's Not About the Whip: Love, Sex, and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene. Read an excerpt at http://www.trafford.com/robots/03-0551.html. She is the founder and leader (1999 - 2001) of Rose & Thorn, Vermont's first BDSM group. Comments, compliments and complaints, as well as requests for reprinting can be addressed to her at SensuousSadie@aol.com or visit her website at www.sensuoussadie.com . Sadie believes the universe is abundant, and that sharing information freely is part of this abundance, so she allows reprints of her writing in most venues.

Copyright 2004 Sadie Sez Publications