Donna Storey
About Me
My first novel, Amorous Woman (Neon/Orion), about an American woman's steamy love affair with Japan, was released in the US in 2008. My short fiction and essays have been published in literary magazines like The Gettysburg Review and Prairie Schooner and sizzling erotica anthologies like Best American Erotica, Best Women's Erotica, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. I have my good girl side--a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Stanford and a busy schedule as a soccer mom--and my bad girl side, which you can read all about in my stories and my column "Cooking up a Storey" at the Erotic Readers and Writers Association.
Why do you write?
I believe we need more writers willing to acknowledge that the sexual urge and the erotic imagination are as worthy of a complex literary treatment as anger, jealousy, ambition or love in its PG-rated form. That’s what I try to do in my work, one dirty story at a time. I started writing in my thirties and the challenge of trying to translate my sensual experiences of the world into prose was like stepping from black-and-white Kansas into a technicolor land of magic, very Wizard of Oz. I love writing--even when I hate it--and I have the greatest respect for the gift of a reader's time and attention.
Any favorite authors? Books?
Ihara Saikaku's lusty The Life of an Amorous Woman that inspired my first novel, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, so much wittier and more experimental than the movie, Mary McCarthy's The Group which gives an honest glimpse into female sexuality in the 1930s, anything by Alice Munro or Virginia Woolf, D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel, which is terribly smart, sexy and dark, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's elegant tributes to old Japan like The Makioka Sisters
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Hi, Donna! So nice to see you here. I love what you say here about the erotic imagination being worthy of complex literary treatment! All warmest and best, H ;)