Amber Dawn's Sex Worker Underworld

• Sub Rosa
• Amber Dawn
• Arsenal Pulp Press (2010)

The theme of captivity is hot right now in Canadian fiction. Room by Irish-born Canadian Emma Donoghue, a novel based on the infamous Josef Fritzl case in Austria, has just been short listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Chevy Steven's bestselling thriller about an abducted realtor, Still Missing, has also been receiving considerable press.

Whereas both novels explore the experience of actual physical imprisonment imposed by others, a noteworthy debut novel by local author and filmmaker Amber Dawn depicts the descent into a complex psychological captivity that has brutal physical consequences.

Launched this past spring by local publisher, Arsenal Pulp Press, Sub Rosa tells the tale of a young runaway who becomes a member of an underground and fantastical community of sex workers.

As the novel begins, the main character, Little, has forgotten her real name. She has lived on the streets, begged for spare change, eaten food from dumpsters, squatted with other teenage runaways in a vacant house and shacked up with various older men for short periods in order to survive. But then, one night at the Legion pub, she is spotted by Arsen, a compelling and mysterious man who eventually becomes her pimp. Surrealism, fantasy and fairy tale blend with harrowing realism as the book details Little's gradual and inevitable emotional dependency on Arsen and her integration into the colourful community and culture of Sub Rosa as one of its sex workers, through to her eventual reconnection with her past life by the novel's conclusion.

Little's loss of virginity and the violent sexual assault she experiences during her initiation period in the terrifying realm referred to simply as "the Dark" are described with stark, unnerving lucidity. She survives these and other experiences through a surreal detachment. Once Little leaves the Dark (which parallels Dante's "Dark Wood") and enters the Oz-like world of Sub Rosa, she forges friendships and alliances with her colleagues. Over time, she musters the courage and masters the necessary magical abilities to risk returning to the Dark to help her community and ultimately find freedom for herself.

Sub Rosa integrates Dawn's diverse background in film, burlesque theatre, the sex trade and the polished writing of both poetry and prose. A well-known performance artist and community activist in Vancouver's gay and lesbian community, Dawn was named Xtra West's Queer Artist of the year in 2005 and voted Xtra West's Hero of the Year in 2008. She is the editor of the Lambda Award-nominated collection, Fist of the Spider Woman, and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn. Besides appearing in Canadian literary magazines, her work has been published in U.S. anthologies Best New Poets 2004 and Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About A Changing Industry. She has an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and is currently the director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

I first met Amber Dawn over 10 years ago in a poetry workshop led by local poet, Kate Braid. We were asked to introduce ourselves by showing and discussing a treasured object. Amber Dawn proudly placed a black lace corset on the table. The poems she produced over the succeeding months were as elegant, sensual and intricate as that corset. Recently I took the opportunity to ask Dawn a few questions about her first novel.

Here's what she had to say...

On when and how Sub Rosa germinated as a writing project:

"The first glimpse of Sub Rosa appeared while participating in the Three Day Novel Writing Contest over the Labour Day weekend of 2005. I was hitting the infamous wall of writers' doom: I had strayed from my novel writing contest work plan. Every sentence felt cheap and any cohesive plot was long gone. It was then that I started writing about the Dark -- the creepy portal place as seen in Sub Rosa -- and about the character Jellyfish.

"A year later I began a series of short stories about the Dark and various young girl characters that had gotten lost in the Dark. I was fortunate enough to be doing my MFA in Creative Writing at UBC at the time, and with some mentorial 'kicks in the pants' from professors and peers, I found myself writing that speculative fiction novel that had previously seemed out of my reach."

On how she sees her book fitting (or not fitting) into the genre of speculative fiction:

"As a speculative fiction reader, I lean more towards magic realism than pure science fiction. However I'll enthusiastically read anything "other worldly": folk tales, fantasy, hero's quests, children's stories, ghost stories, gothic fiction. Large sections of Sub Rosa were fuelled by reading the Eight Immortals of Chinese Mythology and by the magical realism found in the poetry of the Mexican Revolution. Social and personal politics have historically fuelled different incarnations of speculative literature. I hope I can consider myself part of this immense tradition. I hope that my views and vocation as a sex-worker activist and queer feminist have revealed themselves to readers in palpable ways within the magic of Sub Rosa.

"Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is one of those books I'll likely read a half dozen times throughout my life. Now there is a book that explores the politics and complexities of social and personal memory. In Nightwood, Barnes delves into the idea of how only an elite and small selection of moments become 'history,' whereas the shared stories of the people become folklore or legend. This rings so incredibly true for me as someone who largely lives well outside of the mainstream.

"Sex workers have tons of illustrious and harrowing stories that are mainly shared via word-of-mouth. The stories that reflect who I am in the world are never captured in authoritative or factual historic text. And since I'm already operating outside of what the mainstream is interested in as history or fact, well then, I suppose I ought to really go for it in regards to enriching these marginal stories with magic and legendary qualities. Speculative fiction seemed to be an apt genre for the stories of runaway girls and street workers."

On how the work of Vancouver's Evelyn Lau, who has written both fiction and non-fiction about sex work, relates to Sub Rosa:

"I think Evelyn Lau changed the world. Or at least she changed my world. I was fortunate enough to have her Runaway included in my first year college reading list. I skipped three classes that semester because I couldn't bear the classroom discussions about Lau's book; it just cut too close to the nerve for me. But privately I held that book up as a mirror. It was 276 pages of recognition and grief and hope.

"I couldn't possibly boast any comparisons between my writing and that of Evelyn Lau. What I can say is Lau inspired me to 'come out' as a sex worker in my writing and in my artist's biography. Who knows if this personal disclosure will help or hurt my literary career. One thing that I am sure of is that my most cherished and esteemed reading I've done with Sub Rosa was for a small group of young women trying to exit the sex trade. They were part of a peer-driven, art therapy based support group. Their group leader read about Sub Rosa in a review in The Georgia Straight and invited me to join them for a reading and creative writing workshop. If no other audience reads Sub Rosa or anything else I write, it's these girls whom I want to reach."

On how she intends her novel to affect her readers:

"I'd like my readers to feel full permission to be disturbed, titillated, or whatever reaction they have. If am I so lucky, those who read Sub Rosa will become invested in or moved by the story and characters, like any good book, but also to ponder how this book touches on some truths about the dire lack of support and options there are for vulnerable young women, and how the women in Sub Rosa desperately need more than imagination as a refuge from their rather oppressed lives. These characters are reflections of the estimated 20,000 or so girls who are sexually exploited in North America. My novel gives these girls power."

THE DARK: AN EXCERPT FROM SUB ROSA:

The darkness was so dark it breathed, an ongoing loop of asthmatic gasp and cough. There was the sound of rainwater emptying into a sewer and of winter wind blowing through metal pipes. But there was no rain and no wind.

I discovered the weight of the Dark after taking my first step. It bore down on top of my head and shoulders. I strained to walk, as if I had to drag the darkness behind me. Slowly and instinctually, I moved toward the direction we drove in from, toward the beauty. I figured that course would take me back to where I had come from. Every dozen or so steps I felt the curb brush up against my foot, even though I thought I was walking a perfectly straight line. I righted myself again and again. I started counting my steps (if they could be called steps, since my feet barely lifted from the pavement) but the numbers kept switching around on me: eighty-four became forty-eight. I never reached one hundred.

I still don't know how much of the night I spent just learning how to walk through the Dark. Eventually, I could take on what felt like twenty yards at a time before losing my balance or my breath. Then I got so I could sprint short distances, twisting my ankles each time I ran in my heeled boots. No matter how much ground I covered the darkness didn't let up.

When delirium offered to lead the way, I was too exhausted to decline. I teetered and tripped along and quickly found myself, nose to an unseen wall, swearing and laughing hysterically. The laughter felt like it was being sucked out of me. The night was a finger in my throat, gagging out more and more laughter. My cheeks grew hot, my tongue dried up. I didn't think I'd be able to stop. I slapped myself in the face and it only made me laugh harder. I had to wrestle my possessed head, one arm braced under my chin, my other yanked my hair downward, in order to force my mouth shut. And still there was my laugh, puffing my cheeks out, slipping through my clamped teeth.

When it was done I was slumped against a wall; it was cold and hard like corrugated metal. Around a corner, there was a weak bluish light, the only light. I made my way, quietly and deliberately, toward it. The closer I got the more my eyes adjusted, and I could make out the barn-like building I had walked beside, ghosts of steam rising out of high windows, rust patches on the steel. I got closer still, and the sidewalk glittered under the blue light. I was encouraged by this until I realized that I was walking on tiny shards of broken glass. The blue light was a halogen bulb in a wire frame cage, plastered with dingy feathers and dead flies, and hung in an alcove that had been used as a urinal more than once. I stared into the light for a good while, until I could make out the delicate opalescent wings stuck to the bulb. I wasn't so bad off. At least I wasn't one of the fried black flies that flew too close to the light.

Copyright 2010 Amber Dawn. Reprinted with permission of the author and Arsenal Pulp Press.