The Truth About Fiction

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

RM: What does it mean to be a visionary? Who are the literary visionaries who inform your work, your life?

MT: Right now I'm traveling on the Sex Workers' Art Show tour and the woman who puts this together -- it started out as an annual show in Olympia, Washington, and for the past four years it's been a national tour -- is this woman Annie Oakley. She's a writer and an artist. And she's completely a visionary because she saw that there was this huge gap in social consciousness, and in our culture, and in our art, this enormous gap where there are no sex workers telling truths about what it is like to be a sex worker. All of the imagery that we get about sex workers are people who are in really awful crisis situations that turn up on news shows or [are] these complete fictions and fantasies and fetishes about sex workers that are not written by people who have actually been part of the industry. So, you know, at tremendous risks to herself both financially and energetically, she really puts herself out into the world as somebody who's completely promoting this occupation that people really don't see as an occupation, that's illegal. [She] takes tremendous risks in every little direction you could take. Right now we're traveling with two vans full of people who work in the sex industry and every night we do a different show in a different city and get to talk to people who have maybe never seen, to their knowledge, a real live sex worker. And it's completely incredibly important and political and it really, really does change things. So she's a huge visionary.

RM: How do you stay inspired?

MT: I read all the time. I am surrounded by really amazing creative people. My boyfriend is [the hip-hop artist] Katastrophe. He makes awesome hip hop, and I can hear him working on his music all day long at home, and all of my friends are writers and artists that I completely admire. And I go out into the world. The world is inspiring. There are always things going on. There are books being constantly published that are really great. I just participate.

RM: Is there anything that you're reading right now that you would like to share?

MT: I am about to start reading a book called House of Thieves (Penguin 2005) by Kaui Hemmings. She is a Bay Area writer who I have been in readings with, so I have heard her read her work, and it is amazing. She is really good. I haven't started the book yet, but I've heard her read from it and I'm really excited to get into it.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print