Elva Maxine Beach’s first erotic kiss occurred at her neighborhood swimming pool when she was barely five years old. This innocent kiss transformed into an insatiable taste for boys and men, a craving she began chronicling in journals at the age of ten. She has been writing about her sexcapades ever since, and her first book of short stories and poems, Neurotica, is a result of this obsessive-compulsive need to fictionalize her most intimate experiences.
To fund her habit of seductive storytelling, Beach has worked as a car hop, waitress, usher, maid, janitor, dishwasher, secretary, scriptwriter, copywriter, technical writer, critic, videographer, producer, editor, tutor, proctor, teacher and professor. Beach pursued her Mistress of Fine Arts, Creative Writing at Louisiana State University where her mentor and party buddy, Andrei Codrescu told her to “stop working so hard and write some erotica.” “My work isn’t necessarily erotica,” Beach says. “It’s raw, yes, and there’s lots of fucking and sucking, but my work delves into the psyche. It’s psyche-sexual drama.” Originally from bebop groovy Kansas City, Beach has lived and loved in cool jazz town St. Louis, Cajun-crazy Baton Rouge and Austin, Texas and now she once again resides in St. Louis where she teaches writing, professes pleasure, and encourages mindful hedonism.
Check out the March 12, 2010 article “Reading Local Interview: Elva Maxine Beach” by Teresa Bergen.
Celestial Concubine
Born in the bosom of two mountains in Oregon and raised in a cult, Celestial Concubine ran away from home at age 18 to go to college. As she was failing her business courses at PSU someone asked her what she liked to do. “Write,” she said, “and read.” “Why don’t you get a degree in that?” they asked. Religious guilt no longer keeping books out of her hands, she wrote and read freely, for the first time in her life. Grateful for the resources and channels of her formal education, her poetry is less inspired by formal poetics and more by the journey of freedom and the support, nurturing, and love shown to her by the beautiful people that make up the Portland underground of poets, artists, musicians and mystics.
dan raphael
dan raphael is anxious for spring, as winter was harsh. Next month he’s reading on Vashon and Orcas Islands, and planning a tour for Eastern Oregon and Washington in the fall. Current poems appear in Pemmican, Radioactive Moat, New Mystics and Heavy Bear. Looks pretty certain that Impulse and Warp: Selected 20th Century Poems will be out before the year ends.
7 p.m., Three Friends Coffee House,
SE 12th and Ash, Portland, Oregon
Podcast: Download (Duration: 58:20 — 106.8MB)
