[ fiction ]

Hot & Conscious: Exploring Eros in Fiction, with Ally Sass

Sex Writing Workshop Instructor

  • 4 weeks long = $320 total / person

  • meets tuesdays from 7-9pm eastern time

  • virtual (Zoom + Google Docs)

Most sex scenes are unsuccessful because they only concentrate on the sex. This online workshop will explore the questions that arise when authors treat eros more generally, approaching the potentially narrow realm of “sex writing” from dynamic and unexpected angles. How do you write desire into a scene without being blandly explicit? Can a scene of someone eating a piece of bread be sexual? At what point do physical sensations take on spiritual significance? How can communion with the other facilitate inward communion with the self? By releasing sensuality from its confinement to the sexual act, participants will learn to discover smut in the most unexpected places – and to write it into scenes that enhance the literary quality of their work.

This workshop will welcome guest visual artist Alexandra Neuman, whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Sex, among other places. Read more about Alexandra below.

  • Ally Sass is a screenwriter, playwright and educator based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in Playwriting from Boston University in 2021. There, she taught screenwriting and playwriting to undergraduates, along with general dialogue writing. Her plays have been produced in New York, Boston, and internationally. She was a semifinalist for the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and a two-time finalist for the Kennedy Center's John Cauble Short Play award. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Playwrights' Center, and Actors' Equity Association. She was born and raised in Cambridge, MA.

    From literary erotica to the romance novel she’s currently writing, much of Ally’s work has explored themes around sex and desire.

  • Alexandra Neuman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work focuses on reframing human 'being' as an ecological process rather than as an individual body or self. She received a BFA in Visual Arts and Anthropology from Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Visual Arts and Speculative Design at University of California, San Diego. Her films have been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image, and Museum of Sex. She recently published a tarot deck and guidebook 'radical becoming in the ongoing now' with Onomatopee Projects in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and is a practicing tarot reader at Chemistry NYC.