Sanmingzhi is pleased to invite Melissa Wan, a published writer and a practice research PhD from University of Leeds looks at the writing of sex and its intersection with disability, to have a workshop of Writing Sex and Intimacy in Fiction with us. Here is an excerpt of her fiction.
By Melissa Wan
It was Boxing Day when my husband came back.
My parents had sent the servant home with a shilling and his Christmas box, and it had grown quite dark in the front room without us realising. When at last I rose to light the candles, the flames revealed a figure on the other side of the room. It was my husband, standing beneath the bough of holly and wearing the coat which had a loose seam that I had patched at least twice before.
‘Peter,’ I said.
He turned his head a fraction but made no reply.
‘Won’t you take a seat?’
He moved to sit in the armchair by the fireplace. Though he did not appear to have aged a day beyond his 32 years, he did seem taller and somehow more learned, as though he had been cultivated by his years in death.
My parents were sitting side by side on the bench, a blanket pulled over their laps, and at their suggestion I took out the flagon of gin we had stored for Twelfth Night and poured us each a dram. I presented the first to Peter, steadying my hand in expectation that the mug would slide straight through his clasped fingers and smash onto the clay floor.
‘Thank you, Rose,’ he said, taking his drink without difficulty. I saw then that he was soaking wet, his pants tight against the legs, the sleeves of his jacket twisted and stiff. The weather this winter had been mild and dry, and I imagined him stepping out of a lake, perhaps having been funnelled into the Bridgewater Canal from the sea, rising from the water to find himself among the boats bringing unimaginable amounts of coal into Manchester. I saw him take the long road out of the city, walking until he reached Levenshulme and the familiar sight of The Blue Bell, crowded with people celebrating the season beneath its thatched roof, before approaching the house we used to share and spying another family through the window. I imagined him pursuing his intuition that I may have moved back in with my mother and father at the farmhouse and walking further into the countryside until, at last, he found me here.
I asked if he didn’t want to get out of his wet things first, but he said it made little difference to him.
I served my parents their gin, then settled on the end of the bench by my mother.
Peter lifted his mug and we three lifted ours in return.
‘A health to all,’ we said.
Peter tipped his gin back in one and I stood again to fetch the flagon. My father began to recount the story of the quake which had come upon us a couple of months before, and my mother nodded along with enthusiasm.
‘You could hear the bells of all the churches ringing out, we shook so fiercely!’ He almost sprang from his seat as he spoke. I wondered then if Peter might have come with the quake, and I stole a sidelong glance at him in the hope he might turn to meet my eyes. He merely sat and sipped at his second serving until it was empty, at which point he announced it was time for him to go to bed.
My parents wished him goodnight, and when he took the stairs, we listened as the floorboards of my bedroom began to creak.
‘Well,’ said my father, standing and pulling on his housecoat. ‘You’re lucky he came back.’
‘She is blessed,’ my mother agreed, folding away the blanket.
‘You don’t want to ask him too much about the other side,’ my father continued. ‘In case he remembers and finds he wants to go back.’
I kissed first my mother, then my father, and they took themselves to bed. I extinguished all candles but one then stepped out into the cold. Though the fire had been out, my ears were burning, no doubt due to the gin. The night was thick with mist but I counted 16 stars in the sky, one of which burned brightest, and which Mr Radcliffe had told me was not a star, but a planet: Jupiter. He had seen it through his telescope, a small thing made of brass. I had declined to sit on his lap and look when he had offered. It was thrilling to think of other planets, to consider stars as more than tapers strewn across a black sky, yet I worried my excitement might grow too fierce at the sight of these things brought close.
When I came back into the house, I fixed the lock on the door, and peered up the stairs where, yes, just as I anticipated, there was a dim light coming from beneath my bedroom door.
I found Peter sitting up in my small bed.
His wet clothes were folded over the chair in the corner, and he was wearing my gown of green silk, the one with foliage blooming on the sleeves, which Mr Radcliffe had had tailored for me at great expense and presented to me as a gift. Had I expected Peter’s return, I would have made sure to keep our bed, perhaps his nightgown and his slippers.
Although my hair was beginning to grey, I might have kept it long and away from my face, inthe style he had liked.
I hesitated on the threshold.
‘You moved out of Levy then,’ Peter said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had no choice.’
I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. When I asked if he was tired, I noticed my voice was quiet, almost as though I were talking to myself.
‘No,’ he answered.
‘But you’ve travelled very far,’ I said, and he shook his head.
‘Not too far.’
I stepped toward the bed and when Peter turned his face to me, I realised he was not wet as I had first thought; rather, he had the appearance of a body under water, the translucent quality of skin, his hair clumped in long dark strands that seemed to float from his head. He had never been handsome, something which had troubled him more than he’d liked to admit, but now his face was striking, a difference which I believed was down to expression, not to a change in features: it was the same face, held differently.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said again.
I took off my slippers one by one then climbed into bed beside him, lifting the sheet to my chin, for I knew I would tremble without it.
After a while he said, ‘You have another husband now.’
I shook my head. Peter said I must have, that it was to be expected; after all, it had been a long time. His comment implied that he too was aware, on some level, of the time that had passed.
‘Then you know the year?’ I said, to which he replied that it made no difference to him. ‘It is 1778,’ I said, ‘a(chǎn)nd you have been gone 20 years.’
I looked at the familiar contours of Peter’s face, the prominent cheekbones, his nose bent at the tip, and I was reminded in a giddy second that this was the first face I had ever known so closely. Here he was again, the same after all this time, and now, to me, a mere boy.
I said, ‘There is someone who has expressed interest, but I don’t think he intends to marry.’ I told him about Mr Radcliffe, all the while keeping my eyes on his face to see if it would betray an emotion I recognised. I told him that this man – a few years my senior – was a manufacturer who lived a mile away in Stockport, that he worked in cotton, and that he too had been married once before. His wife had also died. She was 27. At Peter’s request I described Mr Radcliffe’s countenance, telling him of his intense dark eyebrows and the way he liked to gesture with his fingers, which were lithe and elegant, somewhat like a woman’s.
‘It is very much as though he holds the world between his hands,’ I said, and then I felt myself flush. I added, as though to point out a defect, that one of Mr Radcliffe’s legs was weak and slightly withered, though this only made me blush further and I hastily added that with a crutch he could still stand tall.
‘I see what it is,’ Peter said, touching the corner of my mouth with his forefinger.
‘Lust.’
I covered my mouth with the sheet.
‘Well, even if he is your interest now,’ Peter continued, ‘you wouldn’t miss him very much if you lost him or changed him for someone else. Me, for instance. After all, I am still your husband in the eyes of the law.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But Mr Radcliffe holds one great advantage over you: he is alive.’
Peter smirked at this. ‘If the man’s only advantage is being alive, then I won’t lose heart.’
Later that night, Peter asked if I would bring him something to eat. He said that he was curious to taste more than gin, that he wondered, especially, about salt. I sliced for him two generous hunks of bread which I slathered with thick yellow butter, and I brought them upstairs with a mug filled with brown ale. He said nothing, not even thank you, simply bit heartily into the crust and ate with single-minded concentration. I lit the small stove in the corner and in its light Peter’s lips gleamed slick with grease.
‘Is it good?’ I asked.
He smiled faintly, his jaw working.
‘You seem satisfied,’ I said.
He swallowed. ‘I don’t know if satisfaction is the word,’ he said. ‘Can a person with no needs and no desires ever be dissatisfied?’
‘Is that what it means to be dead?’ I asked. I wondered if he would start at the word,
but he simply shrugged and licked a smear of butter from the side of his hand.
‘It sounds like Heaven,’ I said, wary of being blasphemous, then considered if living without desire was really a kind of Hell.
‘Who’s to say death is the same for everyone?’
Peter took a deep mouthful of ale, dark and muddy and in such contrast to the pale transparency of his skin that I thought I might witness its descent down his gullet.
With his plate cleared and his mug empty, we sat and looked at one another. I anticipated his next request – had awaited it since his return – and my arms complied in much the same way they always had when he asked me to undress. He watched as I pulled my shift over my head, loosened my skirt, shed for him my blouse, my socks, letting them pool onto the floor until I was standing before him in nothing but my woollen vest and cotton drawers, and then I removed them too. The difference now: I was not afraid and my body was no longer the object it had been when I was a young woman. I watched as Peter’s eyes moved from my mouth to my throat, down over the curves of my heavy breasts and the belly which had borne three children, none of whom had lived beyond infancy, and to the patch of coarse hair at my crotch, at which he looked in much the same way as anywhere else; it was a gaze seemingly without desire.
He told me I hadn’t changed, at which I couldn’t help but laugh, and then he saidthat perhaps I did hold myself differently.
I sat on the edge of the bed and lifted Peter’s hand to my breast. He didn’t squeeze it or pull at the nipple as he might have done before, he simply cupped it and held its weight.
When he began to move his palm against it in slow and dreamy circles, I found my mind drift to Mr Radcliffe and to his hands adjusting the lens on his telescope, his fingers gesturing to me to come and look.
Peter removed his hands and sat back against the headboard, saying that it had been so long he was sure he had forgotten.
I ventured that this could only be a good thing.
When I asked if he was ready, he said he didn’t know. I pulled aside the bedsheet and peeled open the gown to reveal his figure, which was exactly as I remembered: slender with a little rounded pouch and smatterings of dark hair around the small brown nipples. His thing was soft. It seemed delicate, though I knew delicate was not the right word for a thing which would stiffen and grow, which could cause as much pain as pleasure.
Melissa Wan
Melissa Wan is the author of This Must Be Earth, published by Nightjar Press. Her short fiction has been published by independent presses, including Bluemoose Books, Dead Ink Books, Salt and Cōnfingō Publishing. She was awarded the Crowdfunded Writers’ Scholarship to study Creative Writing at UEA, and her practice research PhD at the University of Leeds looks at the writing of sex and its intersection with disability.
- MA Creative Writing: Prose Fiction, University of East Anglia (2018 – 19), Distinction
- MA Paris Studies, University of London Institute in Paris (2012 – 13), Distinction
- BA (Hons) Social Sciences, University of Manchester (2009 – 12), First Class
Melissa develops her interest in researching writing sex in fiction since her study in UEA, where she held a symposium named “I’ll Show You Mine” to explore this difficult but important subject. She explainedWhy Sex Writing?
Why Sex Writing?
Sex is not something easily written about in fiction. Very often the act is reduced to a paragraph break or so dressed up in elaborate metaphor that you can barely find it. And in our internet age, sex has become permeated by the language of pornography or drenched in cliché which does little to get us any closer to what it's all about.
We believe the task of literature is to break down clichés and reveal something new about the world in which we live. So how can we, as writers, write sex in a way that reveals something true? How do ideas of shame, normalcy and representation affect our reading of sex-writing? What can we, as readers, writers and thinkers do to create a more sex-positive environment in literature? How does one technically approach the writing of sex, particularly outside of mainstream representations and traditional publishing?
Writing Sex and Intimacy
In these three writing workshops we will unpick the writing of sex and intimacy in fiction, thinking not only about language and form but also about the politics of bringing sex to the page. Some of the themes we will cover include desire and domesticity, fantasy and pornography, writing sex from lived experience and linear narratives of orgasm. Workshops will be split into two; the first half will involve close reading and discussion of novel extracts or short stories which write sex, including work by the workshop tutor, and in the second half we will focus on writing exercises, generating writing and thinking about the techniques of craft.
Syllabus
Workshop 1
The language of writing sex in English-language fiction: use of dialogue, interior monologue, implicit and explicit language, the use of metaphor or abstraction
Time：Apr 5th (Saturday) 20:00-22:00 (Beijing Time)
Workshop 2
Playing with perspective: what difference does it make when writing sex in first, third – close third v omniscient – or second person?
Time: Apr 12th (Saturday) 20:00-22:00 (Beijing Time)
Workshop 3
Writing from life – how to mine personal experience when writing sex, how to protect oneself and others, the politics of writing sex
Time: Apr 19th (Saturday) 20:00-22:00 (Beijing Time)
Breakdown of each workshop
20:00 – 20:40 – Introduction and Close reading
20:40 – 20:50 – BREAK
20:50 – 21:30 – Writing Exercises
21:30 – 21:40 – BREAK
21:40 – 22:00 – Editing and Close
This is an online course conducted in English withZoom.
Every workshop will assign creative writing homework, which in the end of the workshop will come into a full essay of 1,000 to 1,500 words.
Fees:￥1,599
No refund available after the first class begins.
虛構(gòu) Fiction
（第一期 3.6-20，之后每月開展）
（English）（每月）
大師工作坊
（中/英 upcoming 2025/07)
（English, upcoming 2025/05）
類型小說
（upcoming 2025/03）
Feminism/Sex in Fiction Writing （English, upcoming 2025/04）
非虛構(gòu) Non-Fiction
（每月16-30號(hào)）
（English，每月)
(English, Mar- Jun/ 2025)
劇本 ScriptWriting
（首期結(jié)課于 2025/01，upcoming 2025/09）
詩(shī)歌 Poetry
里所詩(shī)歌工作坊（upcoming，2025/05）
（2023）
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