Do you even realize how important your voice is?
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 kink 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.
Then, 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 authentic to the me I am now, not the me I was 25 years ago.
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.
Write until I couldn't. Soak until I could again. Nothing else.
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.
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.
Anti-racism is a core value here. Not a policy. Not a statement. A practice.
Read where I stand
I live in Las Vegas. I'm a yoga teacher, an author, and an artist. I work with writers, poets, and storytellers from all walks of life.
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'm not a traditional writing coach. I'm a peer who has been through it, with the training to hold space for it, and a personal mission to make sure you don't abandon your book.
Come spend some time with me.
Got a question? A weird idea? Just want to say hi? We're here.
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