Prose & Lore Collected Issues 1-5

Prose and Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work #1-5

by Audacia Ray (Editor), Jade (Contributor), Cyd Nova (Contributor)

Prose & Lore is the Red Umbrella Project’s literary journal, which collects memoir stories about sex work in two issues per year (Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer). The stories are original to Prose & Lore, and about 75% of the authors in each issue are previously unpublished. Many of the contributors participate in our memoir workshops and drop-in writing sessions.

Genres: Sex Work, Memoir

Paperback

First published January 31, 2015

About the author

Audacia Ray (they/them) is a writer and advocate who has thrown in their lot with queers, survivors, nature weirdos, and readers. Dacia has supported community safety planning efforts at Drag Story Hour events since 2021, bikes the Nonbinarian Book Bike around Brooklyn to give away free queer books, has worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project for the past seven years and is an aspiring naturalist.

A longtime memoir and nonfiction writer, Audacia shifted their writing practice to fiction in 2021.They are a Tin House Winter Workshop alumn with short stories published in The Hopper, Necessary Fiction, Litro Magazine, Superstition Review, and Stone Canoe, and they are at work on a queer, intergenerational novel.

As a sex worker rights advocate Dacia was known for leading sex worker rights campaigns as founding director of the Red Umbrella Project, being an editor of $pread magazine, and hosting the monthly storytelling series the Red Umbrella Diaries (as well as appearing in and executive producing a feature documentary of the same name). Their first book, Naked on the Internet, was published by Seal Press in 2007 and in that same year they won a Feminist Porn Award for Best Bisexual Scene with their directorial debut The Bi Apple.

Reviews

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

When thinking of how I would write this review, I was tempted to use something like the phrase "the quality varies," but that just isn't true. The quality really is exceptionally high, but there are just so many voices and so many stories that one is going to connect with some and some, inevitably, one cannot. The level of emotional weight being lifted here is a bit staggering, a bit overwhelming. It might have been easier to digest in the individual volumes rather than 400 pages all at once.

Of note - there are lots of excess line breaks and other little formatting problems that tend to really bug a person like me, but eventually that all fades into the background of what is being accomplished as the collection moves on.

About 99% of what is collected here would probably fall into the "creative nonfiction" category, but there are a few poems.

[Chanel Hardy · Rating 5 out of 5]

*This collection has issues 1-5, but 1-4 have their own individual books, which I've already read. Issue #5 is the only one without it's own book, which is why I purchased this collection.*

As usual, the stories were great. I am addicted to sex worker literature whether it be in the form of essays or poetry. The lives of these people are so intriguing and educational. Highly recommended all 5. I should also add that 1-3 are available on Kindle as well as paperback, but #4 is only available as a paperback. So I would recommend buying this collection to have them all at once.

[Emily Warfield]

I can't rate books by people I know!!