I found $pread magazine at a time in my life when I had been...
I found $pread magazine at a time in my life when I had been doing sex work a while and was really isolated - I had one real life friend who also worked, and I had started blogging about the work so I could have some damn conversations about this weird secret world I found myself immersed in. I had the compulsion to share my experiences, but I had no idea what it would look like if I did that alongside other people who traded sex. And then I saw a call for submissions to $pread. And I wrote to them. And then I started showing up to things, kinda this awkward, slightly desperate, shy girl. I remember the first couple of meetings I went to, and they were all serious and talking about the magazine, and I really wanted to derail it and talk about WTF I was going through with sex work, and I was so amazed that these people were sex workers - I mean, they were nice! They were doing a cool thing! They didn’t look like the kind of people who would be sex workers! (I had a fucked up opinion of myself at the time and just hadn’t met any other sex workers).
$pread is the project that made me obsessed with storytelling and the power that it has for us individually and as a community. We need more stories about our experiences in the sex trades - stories that conflict with each other, stories that represent individual perspectives and aren’t generalized caricatures, stories that are real and complex and carry trauma in them and have the power to heal (or not). I really do believe that storytelling is the building block of social change, and that’s been a major impetus for the development of the Red Umbrella Project and our programs over the last few years.
Which is all a long way of saying that I’m really excited to be presenting the book pictured above: Pros(e). It’s a literary journal, with sixteen true stories written by eleven people who participated in RedUP’s first eight-week long Becoming Writers Workshop in NYC this fall. Melissa Petro taught the class and edited the book, and we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to do two semesters of the class each year, with two issues of the journal alongside it (all, of course, dependent on funding).
The book officially comes out next Thursday, December 6th at the Red Umbrella Diaries in NYC. But you can pre-order print copies of it here, and ebooks will be available soon, too.
Related: anyone interested in reviewing Pros(e) on your tumblr, amazon, goodreads, or an internet place of your choosing? Inbox me if you are, and I can get you a PDF ASAP or mail a hardcopy at the end of next week.
