About Polly

You may know me as the founder of Kinky Salon and Mission Control.

For decades, my work has existed in the liminal, ephemeral spaces of underground sex culture. Queers, perverts, sluts. Sex clubs, gay bars. I founded Mission Control, the San Francisco community space that became a non-profit, bought its own building, and is still going without me. I created Kinky Salon, which became a global art-sex movement with events in 16 cities worldwide. I have been somewhat of a matriarch of sex culture for a long time.

The pivot

I decided to fulfill a lifetime ambition to become a yoga teacher. What I thought could be a nourishing side-hustle flipped my life on its head. When you go through the teacher training, you spend most of it on philosophy, journaling, and looking at your own life through that lens. I looked. What I saw was that I'd been up all night for two decades, and I was ready for something different. I still wanted to bring cool, weird, creative people together. I still wanted to create safe spaces for self-expression. I just wanted to do it in a way that was easier on my nervous system.

Writing retreats showed up as the obvious next thing. The skill set was weirdly similar. The people were my people. People with extraordinary stories they haven't written yet. And I knew what it felt like to carry a book you couldn't finish.

The Hot Spring story

My memoir, Polly: Sex Culture Revolutionary, started as a Kickstarter. I raised nearly $50,000. People had pre-ordered their copies. The cover was designed. My editor had finished her work. The only thing missing was the final draft.

The problem was that I couldn't quite do it. My editor had pointed out something structurally hard: instead of three separate sections, I needed to weave the timelines together and hand the reader those connections. I could see she was right. I could see what the better book looked like. I just couldn't manage to do it. I tried multiple times. It was beyond my capability as a writer. Or so I thought.

I went to Harbin Hot Springs with my manuscript and ten days and nowhere else to be.

I cried into the water for three days. I felt like a failure. The deadline had passed. There was nothing I could do about it except do the thing.

And then, somewhere around day four, I started writing.

Write until I couldn't. Soak until I could again. Nothing else. No other obligations competing for my attention. Just the water and the words for seven days.

I finished it. The book was designed beyond my capability as a writer, and I wrote my way into it anyway.

That rhythm became the foundation of the Word Flow Method.

Who I am now

I live in Las Vegas. I'm a certified yoga teacher, an author, an artist, a performer, and a provocateur. I work with writers, poets, and storytellers from all walks of life but those from sexual, relationship, and romantic minorities: gender rebels, kinky sluts, queers, relationship pioneers, and the people who love them are the people who are drawn to me. The ones whose stories don't fit the mainstream containers. Those stories are essential. They deserve to be told.

I navigate my life with neurospice, chronic pain, and sleep disorders. I know what it means to sit down to write and have your body or your brain refuse to cooperate. That's not a character flaw. That's why the method is body-based.

I hold a BA in Fine Arts. I've spent my entire adult life studying embodied practice, ritual, and what it takes to birth a creative project.

I'm not a traditional writing coach. I'm a peer who has been through it, has the training to hold space for it, and has made it her personal mission to make sure you don't abandon your book.

Come spend some time with me.

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