Anna Pulley
I started writing haiku to get over my fiancee dumping me because she wanted to date men. After that happened, I could barely string two sentences together without cryin, but told myself that anyone could write 17 syllables.
Soon I had dozens and started a series called Haiku for Adulthood, where I made fun of the fact that I was almost 30 and an intern making $6 an hour in the most expensive city in the US and basically failing at everything. People seemed to really like the haiku, and they even inspired some copycats, which I was flattered by.
I probably would have stopped after a few months, but then I fell in love with this girl who was mostly straight and married and lived 2,000 miles away, and I thought, “That’s the girl for me!” We wrote hundreds of incredibly gay haikus to each other, in a desperate, Russian-novel-romance kind of way, but it really fueled my writing. I still consider her my muse, even though we don’t really haiku-serenade each other anymore.
Eventually, while stumbling back in the dating arena, I turned my focus to lesbian sex and dating, because I noticed how political and weird and humorous it was, the ways we court one another. For instance, I went on Craigslist and saw that 80 percent of the “looking for sex” ads were for political causes (seriously, a woman was looking for a date to a “Save the Whales” rally) and vague vendettas against their ex-girlfriends. So I decided to write haikus about that, and on and on.
Also, as an advice columnist, people (men) often would ask me how lesbian sex works, as if this was the greatest puzzle in the universe. So I eventually broke down and answered this query by making fun of it in haiku form on my blog.
The cat component of the book came about because my girlfriend Kelsey Beyer started drawing cat birthday cards for a few of her friends that I thought were hilarious. We didn’t think of illustrating the book that way until I showed Kelsey videos of Maru the famous internet cat, and she got very inspired. We thought, what’s more lesbian than cats? Nothing. So Kelsey made all the illustrations cat-related.
Soon I had dozens and started a series called Haiku for Adulthood, where I made fun of the fact that I was almost 30 and an intern making $6 an hour in the most expensive city in the US and basically failing at everything. People seemed to really like the haiku, and they even inspired some copycats, which I was flattered by.
I probably would have stopped after a few months, but then I fell in love with this girl who was mostly straight and married and lived 2,000 miles away, and I thought, “That’s the girl for me!” We wrote hundreds of incredibly gay haikus to each other, in a desperate, Russian-novel-romance kind of way, but it really fueled my writing. I still consider her my muse, even though we don’t really haiku-serenade each other anymore.
Eventually, while stumbling back in the dating arena, I turned my focus to lesbian sex and dating, because I noticed how political and weird and humorous it was, the ways we court one another. For instance, I went on Craigslist and saw that 80 percent of the “looking for sex” ads were for political causes (seriously, a woman was looking for a date to a “Save the Whales” rally) and vague vendettas against their ex-girlfriends. So I decided to write haikus about that, and on and on.
Also, as an advice columnist, people (men) often would ask me how lesbian sex works, as if this was the greatest puzzle in the universe. So I eventually broke down and answered this query by making fun of it in haiku form on my blog.
The cat component of the book came about because my girlfriend Kelsey Beyer started drawing cat birthday cards for a few of her friends that I thought were hilarious. We didn’t think of illustrating the book that way until I showed Kelsey videos of Maru the famous internet cat, and she got very inspired. We thought, what’s more lesbian than cats? Nothing. So Kelsey made all the illustrations cat-related.
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