The Seattle Erotic Art Festival is this weekend!

From April 27th-29th, in a year when artistic erotic expression is more important than ever, a curated selection of some of the finest erotic art the world has to offer will grace the floors of the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall.

During regular festival hours, visitors are invited to view the art and daily entertainments, from poetry readings to pantomime to acrobatic displays. The Festival art is intended to engage, titillate, make you think and start converations. There is also the Festival Store, where you can often find prints by the artists featured in the festival as well as other unique items and annual Seattle Erotic Art Festival merchandise. In the evenings, the vibe changes from a gallery to sexy art party. The Late Night Festival is a sexy, fun time with DJs, performers, bartenders at the ready, and a fantastically energetic crowds (Ages: 18+ during gallery hours, 21+ during evening hours).

For those of us who can’t make it to Seattle, photos and news from the event are available on the Festival’s website and Facebook— and the Literary Anthology is available, both online and in the Festival store, if you can make it to Seattle and want to take memories home with you.

The end of the world didn’t change much at first.

The Seattle Erotic Art Festival Literary Art Anthology 2018 includes my novella, The Summer After–the story of a self-described nearsighted, awkward, introvert, bisexual spinster and the nameless man who takes shelter with her at a rural house, with a thriving garden and a lot of reading material, after the end of the world.

For the past months I had been hiding. As if all the disasters would resolve themselves while I wasn’t looking. The cities rebuilt, the climate stabilized, the utilities and the law restored and better than ever. Now I’d begun preparing for the hard times to last. The time of tribulation was upon us. Tribulation, a word my parents taught me. I was almost an ungrateful enough daughter to hope they were experiencing this one to the fullest. There hadn’t been any word of a Rapture.

In between the plants and pages, there’s also some pretty intense sexual tension.

For so long my sex life had been very self-contained. Some would say nonexistent. For it to suddenly blow open—to explode open, to burst and cataract through not only my life but his and sweep us both away, ending up who knows where—it was too scary a thought to face alone.

“Look,” I said—probably out of the blue, at least from his perspective. But he took out his earbud, and I took out mine. “We don’t have to…do anything. The expectation that just because we’re a man and a woman together, alone, and we get along pretty well, so obviously we have to enjoy sex with each other… It’s pretty, well, heteronormative actually.”

Not that I wouldn’t enjoy sex with him. And—my filters had improved enough that I didn’t say these parts aloud—I’d enjoy it just as much if he were a woman.

…He faced me straight-on now. “But do you want to?”

It’s also about revelations, though not the Book of, necessarily. About what keeps mattering and what parts of the past get left in the past; about the choices people make and security and vulnerability and creativity when the story isn’t quite over.

You can read more about The Summer After and the SEA Literary Art Anthology here.