Ian Philips

I don't use a pseudonym. But I also don't use the name I was born with: Wayne Robert Goble, III. So White Trash Dynastic, don't you think? After 20-some years, I'd had my fill of being named after Wayne I and Wayne II, and I changed it. Legally. Kept the "Robert" and tossed the rest. Took my mother's maiden name, got faggy and removed an "l"for symmetry's sakea move I've regretted ever since as it's always misspelled. And, last but not least, I settled on the "temporary" name of Ian until I could think of a better one.

I still haven't found one I like better. And so, dear reader, our hero was born Robert Ian Philips 25 years after he left the womb and remains so to this day.

Hip, hip, huzzah.

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Question: What's your birthday? Where were you born? Are you really a man? Why do you call yourself a Sodomite? Don't you know how hurtful that was to those of us called "Sodomites" as children? Is this disregard for decency and the feelings of others why you live in San Francisco?

My, my, my. So many questions; so many opinions. Please go here and allwell, enough-will be revealed.

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Question: I just moved to San Francisco. Are you single?

No. But bless you, child, for asking. And as for my partner in thought and so many other crimes against nature, he's quite the one-man mogul of alt lit and queer publishing. So, I'll let his good looks and good works speak for themselves. May I introduce you to my Edith.

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Question: Is your boyfriend single?

No. We're being willfully perverse sex radicals for San Francisco and keeping the barndoor closed.

Actually, I'm all fine and dandy with open relationships in theory and other people's practice. It's just when it comes to my own I have a jealous streak comparable to Maria Callas playing Medea.

But again, thanks for asking.

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Question: How can I buy your book(s)?

Oh, bless you once more! Why come right this way.

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Question: I've bought your book and even read some of it. Now I want to know, why do you write?

For pithy's sake, I'll answer succinctlyfor once: Because I must.

(Ed. Note: If pithy's what you came for, I'd skip the rest of this answer. It's longwinded and gets very Northern Californian by journey's end.)

Not because it's all I know how to do or the only thing I do well. It's not the only thing I can do and it may not be the creative act I'm best at. (But I will keep practicing.)

No, it's honestly because I must. Without the act of writing, without the constant presence of writingalways hovering just beyond the edges of my peripheral vision, always clinging to my shadow's backI would unravel.

I have to do something with all the voices inside my head. Not just the voices of characters that have been and will be. But also those voices that I call The Furies. Strong, hoarse whispers and softly cackled sweet nothings that command me to write for them. In their honor. At their behest.

And you don't refuse The Furies and get away unscathed. I tried for a while and spun into my worst depression yet. Yes, dear reader, due to childhood's often and highly conditional love and my own faulty brain chemistry, I am predisposed to melancholy. Heavy-duty melancholy.

But writingand therapy and mounds of anti-depressants and the love of amazing friends and animals and now one Beast in particularhave helped me siphon off a bit of the excess black bile I have been lugging about.

And the act of writing, and certainly the act of publishing, are also slowly transforming me from the shy and lonely child into the sassy and never-alone writerfor I always have the voices. And now, I have the strength and insight to better tell which to listen to and which to tell to get bent.

And The Furies are happy that I crank out curiouser and curiouser stories. And I am happy to do so. And, I hope, you are happy with them.

Why, it's win-win for divine freaks all around.

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Question: That's all well and good. But why do you write the way you do? Who are your influences?

In a bookcase: Douglas Adams, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Aristophanes, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, the Bible (King James edition), William Blake, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pat & Patrick Califia, Italo Calvino, Albert Camus, Angela Carter, Mary Baker Eddy, Gustave Flaubert, Janet Frame, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, André Gide, Nikolai Gogol, Robert Graves, Shirley Jackson, Erica Jong, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Carson McCullers, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Flannery O'Connor, Plato (for better or worse), Edgar Allan Poe, James Purdy, Mary Renault, Salman Rushdie, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Saki, the Sedarises (Amy and David), Will Self, Anne Sexton, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Virgil, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Oscar Wilde, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf.

Quite the stew, eh?

And not every author listed here is a big chunk of meat or vegetable in it. Many are in the stock or added seasonings. And as for the stew itself, it's still simmering as my style isn't quite settled yet. There's still so many other authors, other influences, to discover.

And, I'll confess, because you are kind enough to wade through all those names, that much of it is window-dressing. I may have read those authors, but read does not, alas, imply understand. And I am trying to hide the fact that the two single-most influential authors/books on my style have been The King James Bible and Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health: With Key to the Scriptures. That's because I was raised as Christian Scientist, and these are the two books you spend your week and weekends reading if you're a good little boy.

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Question: How can I break into publishing? Who did you sleep with to do it?

Actually, I only started sleeping with publishers after I was published. So I can't recommend that pathat least from experience's sake.

Instead it was a combination of submitting to various calls and getting published in those anthologies (I'm especially fond of Cleis Press' Best Gay series edited by the incomparable Richard Labonté or anything by Greg Wharton at Suspect Thoughts Press) and meeting and becoming friends with other writers who were also published in those anthologies and, in time, their editors.

As for good places to go and learn about the latest calls for submissions, I recommend you subscribe to Tristan Taormino's Double-T newsletter or check out the calls at the publishers' websites on my links page.

So, submit and network. Network and submit. Once you're published in a few anthologies and at a few online journals, you will find it easier and easier to get asked to write for various projects. There's still no guarantee you'll get chosen each new time. But you do get invited to the party.

And as for getting a book published, well, that's again more of the same. A lot more. Network and submit. Submit and network.

And write, write, write.

I apologize if this all sounds too breezy. But, in all truth, I'm still learning this as I go. I recommend you check out some of the sites of the true professionals like:

Patrick Califia, M.Christian, Susie Bright, Carol Queen

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Question: Can I send you my writing and have you pass it along? Or, at least, tell me what I'm doing right and wrong?

Alas, due to legal reasons (mainly a dread of courts and lawyers and imagined accusations of intellectual property theft or worse) and my inability to bend the rules of time (and time management) and space to my will, I cannot and will not.

But there are writers out there who can and who will. Some as teachers. Others as peers. And the best way to meet them is in local writing groups or local and national writers' conferences.

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Question: Do you call your writing "literotica" because you feel it is superior to pornography? Do you fear being labeled a pornographer?

No, not at all. Though we all compensate for something. And my calling my writings "literotica" stems from a self-perception that my work just isn't quite as hot as traditional pornography. And that is most likely because I seem hellbent to violate every rule I've heard elaborated for what good porn should do.

(Well, until I read Pat Califia's Macho Sluts and the scales fell from my eyesand loins. This seminal work also contains one of the best essays I've ever read on writing pornography as well as the most cogent (and witty) assessment of what really gives with the eternal border dispute between "pornography" and "erotica.")

I use the term "literotica" to warn people away. People, imagined and real, who haven't cared one whit for my use of Whitman in a story. Porn is no place for poetry, they've said. And yet, to me, porn and poetry have so much in common. Both have so many rules about what they are and are not. Everyone has an opinion about bothand if they've ever read either they have strict rules for what does and does not make good poetry or good porn. And they will tell you in a heartbeat when you fail to hit the mark.

I'd love to claim the wet badge of courage that is the term "pornography". I'm always flattered by those who call my work that in praise or in protestation. But, for now, I'll keep using "literotica." It seems to attract as many people as it warns away. And it is for these persistent, perverted readersthe divine freaksthat I write in the first place.

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Question: You've written several stories about The Devil. And many others refer to gods and goddesses. Why? Is this because you're a devil worshipper?

Only in bed, my dear, and that's a very particular flesh-and-blood devil.

Otherwise, no I am not a devil worshipper. As long as the devil has the Republican Party to do his bidding, he certainly has no need of my paltry powers. And it's not like I would offer them to him if he asked.

Actually, though I believe in the existence of evil, I don't believe in The Devil or any all-powerful evil entity running the show. And, truth be told, the same goes for an all-powerful beneficent deity.

I don't think any deity's got all the power. (What can you expect when the All-That-Is creates free will?!) And that would explain the mess down here. Well, it does for me.

Yes, Virginia, the cosmos is a lot like Afghanistan when you think about it:

All these entitiesoften at cross-purposes by the very nature of their being in so-and-so's tribe rather than such-and- such'sthrown together in this vast badlands of dark matter and empty space with now and then an oasis of light.

That said, I'm a pagan of my own making: worshipping the various light-giving and semi-shadowed deities of many different traditions and out of that worship creating a cosmology or a working myth, if you will, that works for me. And so, my stories, like my faithful myth, are peppered with quite a collection of gods and goddesses.

As for the devil, well, he makes a great existential whipping boy.

But I prefer to whip my boys in the flesh. So now we've come full circle and are back to that particular devil whom I worship in my bed.

My, my, my. Such circular logic. Well, circumlocution. I really missed my calling as a medieval theologian.

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Question: You mentioned earlier that you were a Christian Scientist. Are you still? If not, why do you never poke it with your sharpened stick? Will you ever write about it?

No, I'm no longer a Christian Scientist. However, you can take the boy out of the church...

I took a long and loopy path and ended up worshipping in a temple at the opposite end of the block from The Church of Christ, Scientist. Now I'm an eclectic neo-pagan, a kitchen witch with a sharp sacred knife. Matter is no longer "unreal and temporal," it is alive and blessed. It is what makes this realm pleasurable as well as painful. My human body is no longer a dreamy misapprehension of divine truth but a gift, a miracle, that I can share with another.

And even now as I write this, I know that only another Christian Scientist will get how truly blasphemous this is. Actually blasphemy is too extreme. Christian Science is a religion for mystic Vulcans. (An odd combo and yet it mixes the metaphors of science and faith freely and without shame, just as Mrs. Eddy often did).

But such a strong word as "blasphemy" is inappropriate for a people who worship Divine Principle as their Father-Mother God. I would not be blaspheming in their eyes. Merely making an unseemly error. And error is the name for mortal mind, for the serpent thought that told "man" he was separate from God, the closest concept to "the devil" for a faith that does not believe in hell. There is only heaven. "[F]or God is All-in-all."

But, honestly, I didn't become a witch (or a writer) to tweak the nose of Mrs. Eddy and her followers. I was called by the Furies and now I happily serve them and a worldview that allows there to be Furies.

I have no desire to satirize Christian Science or deconstruct it or even idly comment on it more than I have here, if for no other reason than the fact that one of the chief torments of my childhood was always having to explain this religion which no one outside of and often inside the faith understands.

Yes, it's the religion where you don't go to doctors. But what if you get X, Y, or Z? You pray. And I've seen people healed by prayer. I don't doubt this. It can happen. Thought has an amazingly complex relationship with reality. Even if you're calling thought observation and performing an experiment say with subatomic particles.

My biggest obstacle was with the premises the prayers were based upon: the Pauline taint that got amplified throughout Christianity's history. A taint that was wonderfully dressed up in Victorian clothing, and language, in Christian Science.

So, I still pray. And yes, I go to doctors now. Next question.

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Question: You seem to delight in savaging the Academy and queer theory and grad students. Why? Don't they have it hard enough?

Like I said somewhere in the thicket of words above, we all compensate for something. I, myself, for more than just one thing.

In this case, I have yet to recover from being told by a key professor in my undergraduate programa professor whose blessing I sorely needed in order to apply for a graduate program in Englishthat I had "nothing to offer" them or any other English program.

No blessing. No recommendation. And no graduate school.

In other words, this little angel got thrown out of heaven. Unlike or maybe just like Lucifer, it was, in the end, for the best. But I still look homeward and spend my long hours of exile mocking those who mocked me. And, once again, this may also be for the best.

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Question: What gives with the Aloha shirt theme? You're not a Pacific Islander. Is this some marketing ploy?

Yes, you've been branded. Your consciousness is forever marked. Ian Philips is to Aloha shirts as Tristan Taormino is to butt plugs. (Check out "The Tristan" at Good Vibrations.)

All very insidious. So fiendish. So fat cat capitalist savvy.

Rush out an buy my brand of Aloha shirts now.

And yet, I don't sell any such item.

So, the real deal is that I just like them. Since I can't dress like some Jacobean dandy and not get beaten to death I'm quite happy in the getup of a 60-something white straight guy on vacation. That or overallsthe urban mumu. (I used to call them Germaine Greer-ware but only a finger or two in a handful know who Germaine Greer is.)

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Question: You refer to the divine freak as your ideal. What do you mean by this term?

Dazzling answer under construction.

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Question: You call yourself a magic satirist. What the hell's that? Why can't you just call yourself a gay writer or a writer who happens to be gay and be done with it?

Be done with it? My dear, we're never done with the label game. Branding is an American obsession. Where else can you find 45 dish detergents mixed from the exact same chemicals and yet each one is uniquely different. Ah, America. Such the almighty alchemical nation. A nation so great it doesn't even waste the time of transmuting the dross into gold. Just markets it as a done deal. And as it is marketed so shall it be.

But I digress. We were talking about why I call myself a magic satirist.

Dazzling answer under construction

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Question: When are you going to add something new to this FAQ? I've read it three times already! And where's your new book, by the way. You know which one I'm talking about the one you always mention you're working on: The Novel?!

Well, well, well. Three times. You are longsuffering. Might I give you my copy of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and you can know the real agony of wandering for 40 days and 40 nights in a harsh and forbidding wilderness of words?

But I jestexcept for the part about Gender Trouble.

I'm flattered you always want to read something new of mine. If you haven't checked out the wrap sheet of my recent indecencies, here they are. And I'm sure you already know about my priors.

Now as for there never being muchokay, anythingnew here, I'm going to let you in on a dirty secret about publishing books. You have to promote what you write in order to keep writing and hopefully even publish said new writing. But you cannot promote and write at the same time.

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Question: What pearl-esque nugget of wisdom would you like readers to take away after they close your book or leave your site?

In a handy tote-size sound bite: Thank the deities for the queerin all the many nuances of this word.

Without it, the cosmos would be as flat as unleavened bread. (And unleavened bread, as Moses & Co. will tell you, is the food of a people on the run. It is high time for us to settle down and let the divine freak flourish within each and every one of us.)

Now, go and be fruitful, my freakish ones.

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