A Birthday Funeral, Making the Most of Autumn in New York, And Erotic Shadow Work — Writer Diary
Carly Pifer is the creator of Read Aurore, a space for confessional erotic stories. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Refinery29, Vice, and Vogue. She hosts erotic writing workshops and a monthly writing group.
This week, Carly attempts to ease herself into autumn, preps for writing workshops, and starts seriously thinking about Halloween (it’s never too early to think about Halloween.) Between meals shared with friends and cultural outings in the city, she finds moments to reflect and appreciate it all.
Monday, September 15
9:00 am - Mondays in September are brutal. Everyone feels like the first Monday back after vacation, a series of blows to my summer psyche.
August was especially eventful for me, and I’m still riding a high (and recovering) from my 40th birthday party, a funeral-themed “memorial to my youth.” Friends from near and far gathered, and I requested my oldest and dearest to write eulogies for me. As a writer, it was extra special to get non-writer friends to put pen to paper in my honor. I highly recommend this type of “living funeral” for a milestone birthday.
12:00 pm - Three cups of coffee have not cured my distraction, and I need to edit 5 erotic stories today for Read Aurore, so I take myself out of my home office (which is a musical chairs of my bed, couch, and small desk) and walk to Acre, a Japanese lunch spot in my neighborhood that does not have Wifi. It’s amazing how I can blow through so many edits in an hour and a half when not distracted by my other open tabs and the endless possibilities of the Internet.
2:15 pm - The weather is perfect for my Japanese tea of choice: not matcha— Hojicha tea, a roasted green, wonderfully nutty and mild. On ice, it is incredibly refreshing while still comforting. I sip it on my walk home, knowing that the days for iced drinks are numbered.
Tuesday September 16
9:00 am - Two cups of coffee, black.
10:00 am - I have my Write or Die workshop tonight, Your Inner Anais: Write Erotica Like A Sex Goddess. I am putting the finishing touches on my slides, finding quotes that truly hit. My erotic writing workshops are always a mix of actual erotic writing AND a lot of introspection, encouraging writers to find the pleasure in their every day, and live a more erotically charged life, which of course leads to better erotic writing. I land on this quote from her diary I’m re-reading for the first time since my university days—
“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
Anais Nin was a genius at romanticizing her life, and I decide this will inspire the first writing prompt of the evening.
7:20 pm: The workshop is off to a strong start—there is something charged when a group of people come together to write erotically. I’m perpetually astounded by the talent and creativity people bring to these groups. I ask everyone to romanticize a daily task and write about it, and people write about things from applying chapstick to washing their hands to preparing their morning coffee. It’s lovely and I hope this prompt lingers as they go about their future days.
Wednesday September 17
9:00 am - My boyfriend brings me a cold brew (black) from my favorite coffee shop. Coffee from a cafe hits different than home coffee. I swear, sometimes I’m immune to what I typically brew.
12: 59 pm - One workshop wraps and I begin to prepare for my next one! I host a monthly writing group called the Slutty Writer’s Society for Read Aurore. Last year in October we wrote about our erotic shadow self, ie. the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to hide or be ashamed of. I asked attendees to write about using their erotic shadow to seduce, how it could represent untapped power, and the beauty of laying bare our desires.
I know I want to build on this concept, so I start brainstorming around creating the erotic shadow persona—we’ve also been doing a lot of writing with personas, in one society session a professional dominatrix joined us to help us tap into our inner dom, and in another, we wrote about burlesque routines we would perform to challenge the status quo. This writing group is so much fun.
8:13 pm - I’m fully in the Halloween spirit now and I’ve recently signed up for Criterion so I decide to watch Ms .45, a 1981 feminist revenge horror film. I am OBSESSED with the main character’s costumes and now I know what I’ll be dressing up as for Halloween.
Thursday September 18
3:00 pm - I’m originally from Los Angeles, and since the pandemic, I have officially been bicoastal, spending winters in LA, and the rest of the year in New York. Many people consider this the dream, and while I absolutely will not complain about missing New York winters, I always get a little anxiety in the fall that I have to truly appreciate New York before I leave for LA.
Luckily fall in New York is incredibly cinematic, less chaotic than summer, and also an exceedingly tolerable temperature—I want to be out and about anyway. I finally got tickets to visit the Donald Judd Foundation, his former home and studio in SoHo, immortalized as he left it, full of his own work, furniture, and work by his artist friends.
I’m a big fan of seeing art outside of traditional gallery and museum settings (one of my favorite places ever is The Barnes Foundation in Philly) and Donald Judd wanted exactly that: to give his pieces a space that was permanent, the art and the environment speak to each other and inform the viewing.
Moment to moment as the sky changed, the light in the space changed, and so did the art. Every gaze was ephemeral. This afternoon was such a strong reminder of why we create art—to stir emotions, to capture beauty, to communicate through other mediums. As well as the importance of taking time away from your desk, your writing, your work to be inspired.
7:00 pm - I meet friends at Kisa, a new-ish Korean restaurant downtown that serves an admirable spread of banchan. I taught English in Seoul and fell in love with Korean food so I’m very happy that New York has been opening up lots of new Korean spots lately, including out of K-town which means I don’t have to brave midtown for my kimchi fix. The food at Kisa is great but surprisingly, the best part is a tiny paper cup black bean latte that I grab from the vending machine on the way out the door.
Friday September 19
10:00 am - New erotic stories go live on Read Aurore every Friday, so I wake up, give this week’s story a final look, and hit publish, then send an email to the writer to let them know their story is live. Connecting with writers has been one of the unexpected pleasures of this work—sharing your most intimate moments develops a quick rapport and I’ve been incredibly lucky to meet up with my writers in New York and LA and now call them friends.
7:00 pm - Tonight I have tickets to see Art on Broadway, the revival of Yasmina Reza’s Tony-award winning play from 1998, starring Bobby Canavale, Neil Patrick Harris, and James Corden. Just as reviews said, James Corden totally stole the show with his hilarious performance—but as the play ends, I can’t help but remember that James Corden has been 86’d from Balthazar for treating servers poorly. Yes, I read literature AND gossip!
Saturday September 20
2:00 pm - My friend is having her birthday at Win Son, a Taiwanese spot in Brooklyn. They just began serving brunch, featuring pancakes with syrup studded with Boba pearls—naturally we order everything on the menu as well as two gigantic pancakes for the table. The hype is merited.
4:00 pm - Saturdays I post questions on Instagram related to the erotic story of the week, asking my community to share their experiences and advice on a range of spicy topics. This week’s main Q is especially salacious—the responses are streaming in with ferocity.
I’m always so touched at the wisdom and care in the Aurore community—it reminds me how important this space is, how necessary it is to allow people to express themselves without shame and to see their experiences reflected in narratives around sex, romance, and relationships.
Writers become friends, Internet strangers become confidantes, we’re all trading stories, recommendations, lessons learned.
