I'll Show You Mine: A Sex-Writing Symposium

During my time as an MA student at the University of East Anglia, I organised a conference with a fellow student, James Smart, on the subject of writing sex in literature.

'I'll Show You Mine: A Sex-Writing Symposium' came from a desire to interrogate the culture for writing sex in contemporary literature. Do we do it and how? As students of creative writing, we were particularly interested in the technicalities
of writing sex – which words to use, point of view, the use of metaphor, and so on.

The symposium took place at the National Centre for Writing's Dragon Hall in Norwich on Thursday 6 June, 2019.

The speakers included students within the Literature, Drama and Creative Writing department at UEA, alongside contemporary writers engaged with the writing of sex - across literary fiction, poetry, memoir and the romance genre. Speakers included Monique Roffey, Sarah Hall, Pippa Roscoe, Rachel Connor, V.C. Lancaster, Lucy-Anne Holmes and Rachel Long, some of whom also led creative writing seminars on the day.

The day's discussions are available to listen to here, and you can visit our Twitter page here.

The conference was supported by the department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, the National Centre for Writing and we raised money to pay our speakers via ticket sales on our Crowdfunder.