James Jenkins, of Valancourt Books, talks with Lambda Literary about publishing lost gay classics, Victorian gay porn novels, and what's forthcoming from his small independent press. Read More
"The premise of the novel is supposed to be provocative. It’s supposed to ignite feelings of 'Oooh that’s problematic.'" Read More
"I'm also not big on motive. I write one sentence at a time, then the next, and allow my creative juices to flow, take the story where it goes. I never have an ending in mind. That happens as I write." Read More
"There’s a fine line between privacy and shame..." Read More
"We’re not always in the best place to judge our own work. There’s a lot to be said for just making the book as good as you can, sending it out into the world and not worrying about it." Read More
"...I think the characters I write are freaks, but that does not mean I don’t completely and voraciously respect and love them. The word itself denotes something on display, as in a carnival or sideshow freak, so I think the way I see 'freaks' in what I do is that they somehow cannot hide their aberrations—they have to exist in a world that gawks at them, tries to fix or hide them." Read More
"I'm not buying into 'we were all heroes' and 'we changed the world' and all that stuff. That's just too rah-rah and simplistic; we deserve a more nuanced understanding of those times and how it affected us, what motivated us then and what the outcomes are today." Read More
"We’re writing about new areas of our lives. We have so much more to write about. The first wave was our coming out stories and now we are writing about so many other things. Ours are the only untold stories–it was true then, it’s true now. We’ve invented our lives. It’s just exciting to me, the books yet to be written.” Read More
"I like writing about sex, and in particular, writing about real sexual and sensual experiences. Partly because I think the reality of sexual experiences is often elided in writing into something less ambiguous or ambivalent than sexual experiences often feel." Read More
"I’d suggest building a base in social media before you start planning on self-publishing a book. Then do your homework. There’s a lot to learn about book production and marketing, and there are plenty of self-published authors who have been there, done that, and are willing to share their experience." Read More
