What A Love Letter
From one writer to another: Circles of Pleasure, Expanding
I planned to originally share the letter below from a different platform because I’m mostly disentangling long explanations of my work and offerings (the marketing stuff) from this creative space of Substack.
However, this letter is the raw material of artistic friendship.
In all times, but even these times where the news cycle (which isn’t an idea or a newspaper article but a real lived cycle for people) becomes more and more devastating, we don’t hear often enough about how artists influence and encourage one another. You know it’s happening out there. Always. Even right now. Art making never dies. Art making doesn’t happen isolated from the state of the world or separate from each other. We call it up from one another. Pablo Neruda told Isabelle Allende that she sucked as a journalist (I think in those exact words) and that comment launched her into fiction writing. He saw what she could not yet see in herself. When I was 25 years old, my friend Courtney and I stood under the scaffolding of a NYC coffee shop when she said, “Well, why wouldn’t you write a book?” and promptly folded me into circles of young believing writers. I may have never had the guts to try without her alongside me. I have been blessed to “art” both in receiving and giving with many peers. It lights my fire. This last week, I’ve been in co-creation mode with a new friend, Catherine Simone Gray. Our words met before we did. Now our bodies (through Zoom) and voices (we both seem to replace words with sounds) are jiving and we have delighted in the true buzz of co-creating a workshop. Sensory to the max!
Here’s Letter From Catherine.
It’s an art piece in itself.
SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM to watch a short video clip of us.
Dear People Connected to Molly,
I am Catherine Simone Gray. For years, I have been sitting where you are: reading and appreciating Molly’s emails, taking her classes, engaging with her prompt cycles. Seeing her flanked by snake plants and fiddle leaf fig on her Zoom screen, with that beautiful dancing-flame spiral behind her. Hearing her grounding, soothing voice as she invites us toward that good lil' stretch of activation.
I’ve been picking up details of Molly along the way, like the fact that she dislikes banana yellow and lives somewhere where she can see moose – so different from the alligators and cypress swamps of my Mississippi! I’ve been gratefully receiving her teachings and growing them into my own stories and circles.
Then a year ago, for the first time, I moved in the opposite direction. I reached toward her. I emailed Molly to ask if she would be open to reading my memoir that was going to be published, Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure. Would she, an author and human whose work I admired, consider writing a blurb?
It’s a big thing to ask. It takes a commitment of time, and I know how intentional Molly is with her attention and animal-body presence. But I couldn’t imagine not asking either; I felt our work was destined to be connected.
Molly’s memoir Body Full of Stars had come out in 2018, the year I gave birth to my second son, the year my vagina tore and became a window into an old, old wound. Ancient, intergenerational and shared, but also searingly personal. Not only was Molly’s story intimately relevant to my own, but the way she wrote her story made the way for mine.
How close to her organs she wrote, how close to the land. Not as separate from the culture and her lineage but as a piece of it, even as she challenged it and dared toward what else might be possible. Her words felt deliciously true. She was saying it all, not holding back.
–
To my surprise, some of what I needed to speak in early motherhood was about pleasure.
Reclaiming Pleasure – that’s the way it would appear in my subtitle, as suggested by my publisher.
Reclaiming pleasure as a survivor, after years of previous intimate partner violence.
Reclaiming pleasure postpartum with two kids under three, when my body had given and was still giving so much. Milk milk milk, muscles stretched, tissues torn, bladder dipping down, small fingers pinching my neck mole.
Reclaiming pleasure after growing up in a culture that teaches girls more about pleasing, how to acquiesce and oblige rather than how to know, define, drop into, and ask for pleasure that is ours.
Wait, hold up – was I reclaiming pleasure or simply claiming it? Had I ever known it as my own?
–
Pleasure is seeking me. Pleasure is seeking you.
I believe that now.
There is a story I know of pain, of hardship, of wound, of trauma. There is a story I know of myself as a Person of Trauma long before the word “trauma” was a hot-potato thing we could toss around the circle.
I see the pain of the world, but the pain also sees me. The pain finds me. Since I was a little girl, that has been an important part of who I am as a deeply feeling human: that I don’t look away. That I see you in your fullness and can look straight into the eye of your pain.
But there is another story that began coming through about six years ago, whispering alongside the pain, then singing alongside the pain. Yes, singing. A story of pleasure, of desire, of the erotic, of feeling alive and powerful, of feeling good.
It took me some time to trust the story of pleasure, but now I dare to believe it is just as true. And just as important.
–
Molly said yes to reading my book and then to blurbing my book. What a fulfillment of a dream. She welcomed me into her circle.
And now we open the circle wider, wider still, to invite you into the imagination of your erotic. The erotic as only you can know it. As only you can define it. As only you can let it through with this particular iteration of you, in this particular 2025 world.
What does your erotic look like, sound like, feel like, taste like, smell like?
It’s okay if you don’t know.
Let’s devote space to discovering together. Might we even play a little?
Your Erotic in Uncertain Times
A Sensory Writing Workshop with Molly Caro May and Catherine Simone Gray
Wednesday, May 28th at 8 am PT | 9am MT | 11 am ET
$35
(It’s a 90-minute workshop and a recording will go out afterward)
(10% of the proceeds go to Invisible Histories, preserving and sharing LGBTQ US Southern stories)