Neruda spoke to me.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.

Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day

I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps…

I wanted to be wanted like that.

I copied out a few of Pablo Neruda's poems, pasted the white sheets upon which they written against dark-colored construction paper, hung them in places where I could see them. Other people post motivational slogans on their walls; I posted poetry like talismans to keep me safe, or like road signs to remind me what I wanted.  Poetry was a comfort, but it also seemed to exemplify that which I could not have: the poet himself.

          When I was 38, I lost my job because I was on disability when the 2001 recession struck. It also happened to be the summer I left my husband; in September of that year, I discovered that I couldn’t get a job—anywhere, and I didn’t have anywhere to live.

          I have alluded to this part of my life in writings I've done about motherhood, and economic hard times. But I want to tell you about another means of making money that I discovered in my early 40's. 

          While I searched for a job, tried to find out who I was, and mothered my children, my creativity found inchoate ways to speak to me. I poured out my desires for how I wanted my life to be different, for how I wanted to form a partnership in my next relationship, and I sent these letters full of longing, lust, and loneliness to my closest male friend.

 Who saw in them a business opportunity. 

“You know,” he said, “you’re really good at writing this stuff. Did you ever think about making a business out of it?”

And so I did look into it. I queried the erotica book market, read through the submission guidelines for erotic magazines and websites, and discovered something unexpected. While erotica and porn are billion-dollar industries, it’s not the writers that are getting rich. Erotica anthologies or web sites offered pittances as recompense for writing, if they paid at all.

But I started brainstorming in response to this discovery. My friend told me that he found my desire on the page arousing. He assured me that others would find it this way, too. The problem was that I needed to find a way to make enough money at it to make a difference in my monthly struggle to put food on the table.

I had this skill. I wanted to maximize its financial benefits for me. What could I do? What about a private service, I thought? What if I wrote privately contracted, individual erotica for clients who were willing to pay?

I took courage from the courtesans of the Renaissance period I had studied as a grad student. Greatly educated and well-read women, they hosted salons where they entertained wealthy, educated men, who, ironically, were not content to sit home with the docile wives that these men themselves insisted they wanted to marry. Courtesans sometimes slept with their clients, but not always. They provided both intellectual and sexual company.

I began to think of myself as a literary courtesan, someone who could write with both down-and-dirty details, but also an intellectual/emotional background to the stories that I would be asked to tell. 

First things first. I did not want to put myself or my family at risk, so I needed to set myself up under a nom de plume. I had always wondered what I would call myself if I was to disguise my writing identity.

             I set up a payment account on one of the web sites that handles such things. This way, clients would pay the web site, and the web site would pay me. I wouldn’t have to worry about how to explain to the bank who this other person was.

But how to get the word out? And what kind of client did I want? In my imagination, I wanted the kind of client that bore some resemblance to the kind of man I thought I was seeking: intelligent, intellectual, funny—someone who wouldn’t necessarily think of himself as the average Joe. And, I also thought that the service I was going to offer would be perfect for those women who longed to say things to their lovers but felt too inhibited to do so. I could be their voice: write letters for them to their men. I would be doing them a service—a feminist service—as I saw it, because I would be empowering women to claim their sexuality.

Some of the magazines where it would have made sense to advertise were simply too expensive to consider. The free websites that listed services were not likely to be places where I was going to find people willing to pay the kinds of prices I figured I needed to be charging. And so, after doing some research, I hit upon advertising in a leftist political magazine with an intellectual clientele. 

The ad went in, and the same day that the magazine arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes, I received my first inquiry. One thing I had been thinking about was boundaries. How could I contract to do this specialized, intimate work while maintaining professional boundaries? I decided that each inquiry would get a response that addressed the specific request, but that the rest would be boilerplate. The boilerplate talked about my fees, my willingness to work with a client to make sure that the writing was what s/he wanted, and a sample piece of erotica to show the type of work that I did.

I say "I" but right from the start, the literary courtesan was a separate person whom I would frequently refer to as "she." . She was out in the world, acting the part. I invested her with those qualities I had loved in the Renaissance courtesans. When it came down to it, however, I would substitute my pen for my body.

I wanted the client to see that while the erotica was explicit, it was also literary. That is, that in keeping with the idea of the erotic versus the merely pornographic, context and emotion would be interwoven with whatever else might be going on with the sex.

The first thing I noticed about my potential clients is that they were exclusively male. So much for my idea that women would flock to this business. (Although I would hold on to the idea of offering a women-centered writing service for the duration of my tenure as an erotica writer, I never wrote for a woman.) But with rare exception (the guy who wanted me to write about bestiality—a gig I turned down, and which further honed my boundaries), the men who wrote to me were not looking to me to write things that made me feel “icky.” I had decided that “icky” would be my touchstone for deciding what I would be willing to write. It didn’t matter if I had never done the thing I was asked to write—it was important to me that I not write things that made my skin crawl. Some things were easy: I would not write rape scenes, nor would I write about children (and animals, after the guy who loved dogs—and not in a good way—showed up), but I was willing to write about bondage and spanking and other forms of light S&M, or homosexual sex, or, well. I decided I would see what happened.

One of the other things I promised to my clients was doctor-patient confidentiality. Not only did I not tell most of the people I knew what I was doing, even if people did know I was writing erotica I would not reveal to them any of the details of what I was writing. I felt a deep commitment to that: what my clients wanted me to write about was private.

And so, for several years, unbeknownst to most who knew me, I supplemented my income by writing dirty stories for smart men. And yet, that's not really what I did. 

I wrote tender, loving stories for men who had someone special in their lives and didn't know how to say it or show it. I worked with men who wanted me to woo their wives, their girlfriends, save their relationships, tell someone that they were loved. 

        I didn't see myself as helping these men cheat, or even being their sex counselors. I was in the business of romance. And, when my gift had been given to the person for whom it was intended, I would receive grateful letters of how my writing had helped matters in the intimate lives of the partners. 

      It was a privilege. 

      It was a business opportunity. 

     It was the power of believing that I could say something with my words that would make a difference in someone's life.