Apples & Oranges ─ My Journey Through Sexual Identity

Both an intimate memoir and an intellectual musing on sex, gender, and relationships, Apples & Oranges allows writer and academic Jan Clausen to use her own life story as a model for new ways of thinking through sexual categories. Born into a stifling family where neither sex talk nor the slightest profanity was tolerated, Clausen underwent an intellectual and sexual awakening, first at Reed College, and later on the streets of New York City, where she discovered her passions for both the life of the mind and other women. Fast-forward a number of years, and, bored with a life that had become predictable, she moved herself to Nicaragua, where she discovered a newfound freedom -- including the freedom to fall in love with a man.

With unflinching clarity and a willingness to treat her own life as case study, Clausen asks to us to reconsider the inherited scripts and categories that have informed our notions of gender, sex, and intimacy. In discovering a space outside of any pre-conceived identity, she finds and offers us the freedom of true self-determination, the power to explore our own inclinations and desires, unburdened by the expectations of the outer world, uncluttered by the baggage so many of us carry within.

JAN CLAUSEN is the author of a dozen books in a range of genres, includingVeiled Spill: A Sequence, from GenPop Books (2014). Other recent poetry collections areFrom a Glass House?and?If You Like Difficulty. Prose titles include the story collectionMother, Sister, Daughter, Lover?and the novels?Sinking,?Stealing?and?The Prosperine Papers. Clausen's poetry and creative prose are widely published in journals and anthologies; her book reviews and literary journalism have appeared in?Boston Review,Ms.,?The Nation,?Poets & Writers, and?The Women's Review of Books. A resident of Brooklyn since the 1970s, she maintains close ties to the Pacific Northwest, where she was born and raised. The recipient of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she taught for many years in the undergraduate creative writing program at Eugene Lang College, the New School. Currently she teaches in the Goddard College MFA in Writing Program and at New York University.