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Smart is Sexy

Writing to arouse your mind and your libido



Welcome to my web site! Here you can find out more about my work, both literary and erotic, get an illustrated glimpse into my past, and listen in on some recorded interviews and podcasts.

 Occasionally I’m asked why I write erotica, when I could write “real” literature.  For me, the erotic experience is one of the most challenging and important parts of human existence to capture in prose.  I truly 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 story at a time.

 Here on my site, you can read more about my erotic novel, Amorous Woman, which will be offered as an ebook soon. You can also learn about my other publications in print and online—over one hundred stories and essays that have appeared in journals from The Gettysburg Review to Best American Erotica. 

My “Aural Pleasures” page includes several radio interviews from the literary to the steamy and my reading of my essay “Thirteen Views of Grief” on KQED’s “Writer’s Block,” which is part of a library of readings by such literary luminaries Paul Auster, Junot Diaz and George Saunders.

For a visual treat, check out my gorgeous book trailer for Amorous Woman, “An Erotic Trip to Japan.”


If you’re getting a little hungry, you can feast on my monthly column, “Cooking up a Storey,” about my favorite topics—delicious sex, well-crafted food, and mind-blowing writing—at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. If you’re a published author yourself, you might want to take a look at my archived 2009 series of columns called “Shameless Self-Promotion” in which I share all the things I’ve learned in my dogged, but often rewarding, quest to promote my work.

You’ll discover more about me and my writing in an interview in the East Bay Monthly, and don’t miss this classic from the vault: Susie Bright interviews me on the topics of geisha, eroticism, and Japan in “Memoir from the Floating World.”

For the latest news, check out my blog “Sex, Food, and Writing”

Amorous Woman

“And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. In autumn, he’d see the persimmons glowing like huge, orange jewels on their bare branches, then winter’s dusting of snow on blue tile roofs. He’d learn why the old erotic pictures are called “spring prints” — because in that season the air is as soft as a lover’s whisper––and he’d sigh at the perfect coolness of iced barley tea slipping down his throat on a wilting summer afternoon. As the year passed, he would become part of it. The neighbors would stop staring and start to nod a greeting, and one day the tiny old lady in the gray kimono at the snack stand would wrap up his regular order of red-bean-and-rice balls before a word was spoken, and she’d flash him that first gold-toothed smile, and he’d be happy all day. It’s like someone’s given you a whole other life, I told him, an extra life, to live for a while.”