There is a book out there filled with sexual anecdotes and stories that in some cases are so embarrassing, frightening, or… well, ordinary, that they make for pretty entertaining reading. “Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix” was published by Orlando’s Beating Windward Press in 2018, and all the proceeds from its sales go to Planned Parenthood. In this episode, the book’s coeditors, Jennie Jarvis and Leslie Salas, talk about the experience of putting it together.
“You have your classics, and then you have your new hotness. And there’s a lot of new hotness coming up. Florida is having a renaissance, and there’s so much awesome, wonderful, amazing literature about this incredibly diverse place.”
Leslie Salas
Further Reading
Episode Transcript
Christopher Nank: We probably have all dreamed having sex like Sharon Stone’s and Michael Douglas’s characters in “Basic Instinct,” or like the epic lovemaking sessions in romance novels and daytime soaps, or the sensual bliss achieved in classic erotica. But probably very few of us have dreamt of discovering we have a latex allergy while losing our virginity, or of a vomiting on someone while performing oral sex, or of wearing a condom so dried out it rips up your partner’s sensitive parts. But these are the kinds of more earthy and embarrassing sexual situations chronicled in the 2018 anthology “Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix,” published by Orlando-based press Beating Windward. I’ll be joined today by the co-editors of that book, Leslie Salas and Jennie Jarvis. Leslie is instructor of humanities and communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Jennie is director of the Full Sail Writing Conference at Full Sail University, where she teaches. We’ll discuss what it was like to compile and edit the book, how they were inspired to come up with this idea, and what it’s like being an editor based in Central Florida. This is Florida Book Club. And I’m your host, Christopher Nank.
CN: I’m here with Leslie Salas and Jennie Jarvis, co-editors of the 2018 anthology “Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix,” published by Orlando’s Beating Windward Press. The book is a collection of essays, poetry, and fiction detailing sexual experiences that don’t quite live up to the lofty, earthshaking standards of the lovemaking depicted in soap operas, romance novels, and classic erotica. And there’s some illustrations in there, too. So yeah, you’ve got that. So welcome, you guys! So, you know, I read the intro and the first essay, which is kind of like an extended intro, but I’m curious where the idea for this came from, like the specific genesis of it. Because I mean, I’ve also noted that sex scenes and like soaps and a lot of novels and stuff like don’t really, you know, they’re more idealistic and melodrama-laden, but I didn’t get the idea for a book. So, I’m kind of curious where that came from.
Jennie Jarvis: I think it was really kind of a collaboration between Leslie and I overall. It’s funny, because I know in the introduction, I think it says that I approached Leslie, but my memory is Leslie approached me. So I think it was really just, you know, Leslie and I were friends and we had worked together on a writing conference in the past, and I think that more than anything, just through our different conversations, we kind of came up with, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was this anthology that looked at sex from a real way and had the funny bits and had the awkward bits and wasn’t just the hyper-romantic kind of things?” And then together, we went to the owner of Beating Windward Press, Matt Peters. And we were like, “Hey, we got this idea.” And then we just kind of roped him in.
Leslie Salas: It was amazing, because I remember Jennie coming up to me and being like, “Leslie, I have this great idea.” And I was like, “What?” And she was like, “What if we put together this book of like awkward sex?” And I was like, “Oh my gosh. Yes.” So when we approached Matt, he was like, “Oh, you mean like when condoms and hot tubs don’t mix?” And we both were like, “What on earth do you mean by this?” And he told us the story, which is in the book and that’s how the book got its title. Because the publisher, it’s a hundred percent his true story that we found hilarious and immediately decided that would be the title of the book.
JJ: Hilarious and uncomfortable because it’s not what you think, what you think is not what you think is for that story of why condoms and hot tubs don’t mix.
CN: Yeah. You preempted one of my questions, which was going to be about the title. It’s a lengthy title, but it sounds like there was some kismet or a eureka moment.
LS: It was just like the right turn of phrase that had just the right amount of “Wuuuuuut? We need to know the story behind this.” And that’s why it functions as like the second introduction to the collection before we have like the rest of the pieces.
JJ: Yeah. Cause we knew, we knew the idea of what we wanted. Like I think we were kind of floating the idea of just calling it like “Awkward Sexcapades” or something, which is part of the subtitle. But as soon as Matt said that we were like “Title!” But then we had to talk him into actually explaining it and doing the essay around it, to explain the title.
CN: Yeah. Because the intro itself, the one that you guys co-wrote, is a little bit more, it doesn’t go too much into the nuts and bolts, like you’re explaining, of how the book actually came to be. It was full of really quirky and funny phrases that seemed culled from some of these other sources.
LS: We tried to write the worst, most stereotypical, awful romance novel sex scene possible. We found every single terrible thing that we didn’t like. And we tried to cram it all in there, and it was actually longer. And we ended up condensing it a little bit more because we wanted to make sure that the interruption was before the page turn so that our readers could know that we were not actually being serious and we were just going to poke fun instead.
JJ: We had way too much fun writing that introduction.
LS: It was outrageously fun.
CN: No, I bet this was an incredibly fun book to edit and compile. What was the most fun or even the worst or most trying aspects of putting this anthology together?
JJ: I think we really wanted to include everything that we got, and having to trim it down to kind of the strongest pieces overall. Because honestly, there are so many amazing writers out there with these great stories and we really wanted them all. And so it was really difficult when we had to say no to people.
LS: And oftentimes when we did have to say no, it wasn’t because of a lack of merit in the story. It’s like we had another story that was very similar, and we had to pick between the two. There were so many different factors involved in selecting works and choosing how we were going to represent these stories, because we wanted to make sure that we had established writers, emerging writers. We wanted to make sure that we were representing writers of color as well as writers from the queer community. And we donated everything. We don’t make any money off of the book, all the proceeds go to Planned Parenthood. So that goes for contributors, for the editors, the book gets printed at cost, and then anything extra goes to Planned Parenthood. So we wanted to make sure that we were very intentional that this was a sex-positive book, that this would be a book that we would feel comfortable giving to our children when the time was right. Neither of us were mothers at the time, but in the course of making the book, we became mothers. That was fun. But I wanted it to be like, yeah, I could give this to my nieces and my nephews and have them read it, to be the book that… I approached it as, what did I need when I was first becoming, I guess, sexually active and learning about romance and romantic expectations, and what did I need? I needed not the porn industry. And instead I needed a really real, funny, sometimes cringe-worthy look at, yeah, this is how it really is. And it’s okay if it’s funny or awkward, or if there’s like, I don’t know, whatever weird happens. Like it’s fine. As long as it’s consensual and everybody’s being safe and you’re having fun.
JJ: Yeah. And I’ll just to add to that. I mean, I think Leslie really kind of hit the nail on the head when she talked about kind of the diversity that was really important for us. Even when we were, um, you know, we have an amazing comic artist, Babs the Great, who designed the cover, she designed all of the… you had mentioned earlier that there are illustrations, but really they’re their own standalone narrative stories, those comics. So throughout the anthology, we have these one-page comic narratives. Babs the Great amazing job of kind of bringing those in. And even when we were having conversations with her, we told her we wanted to make sure that some of these comics, we wanted to make sure there were individuals of color. We wanted to make sure that we had some queer relationships there. We wanted to kind of cover the gamut in order to kind of have diversity displayed, because we wanted this to be kind of all aspects of the sexual experience. Even if you look at some of the stories within the book, some of the stories have no sex at all, you know, so it’s just being kind of sex adjacent. So if you look at “Penis Cheese,” which is just a wonderful title, but it’s really about a girl who’s at kind of like a sex toy party. And so she’s surrounded by all of these insane things, including this mold of cheese that’s been shaped into a penis, right? Or you look at my personal favorite from the collection, which is “Paper Cranes,” which is about sexual tension. And it’s these two kids’ last night of college. They’re not going to see each other again for like a year. And they’re deciding do they want to cross that line and actually have sex? And they never even kissed in the story. But then of course you have the flip side where you have stories with people playing with sex toys that get stuck in their butt, or someone’s having sex and they accidentally shoot their own man juice in their eyes. So we really wanted to be as diverse as possible in the subject matter.
LS: Man juice.
JJ: Man juice. Yeah.
LS: Some people are like, “Well, is this like vanilla? Is it, is it not?” I was like, well, there’s an entire giant story about being on Quaaludes. There’s “Love in the Time of Collies” by Lisa Lanser Rose, which is amazing, it’s about a dog watching you while having intercourse…
JJ: …while you’re trying to have this romantic connection…
LS: …and the dog is watching you! And like, that’s a thing. There’s a poem about watching porn with your mother that’s, you know, Peter Gordon. So like…
JJ: …a heartbreaking poem…
LS: Yeah. You would think that would be awkward and it’s not. It’s just so interesting, the variety of stories that we got, because when we put the call for submissions out there, it was more like, “Hey, tell us about your awkward sex stuff.” And, you know, we got so much, like, so much, like it was, it was really great. It was really refreshing. And the way we put it together was like we, everybody did the call for submissions, we got all the submissions. I think it was like a, we made a Google email address for this. And then Jennie and I had a shared spreadsheet and we would vote on whether it was yes, maybe or no. And all that we agreed on yeses were yeses. And then if we disagreed in some way, we talked it out and then we figured out, you know, the structure of the book, what does it need? What is it missing? To figure out like the kind of beginning, middle and end, because with a collection, like each piece does alone, but as a whole, like it’s a book. It’s got to have a beginning, middle and end. So we wanted to be really cognizant of using that, too. Placing the comics in the right spots for, you know, the comedic relief that you need after a really heavy story. That’s like less fun and silly and more like, “Oh gosh, awkward.” And then, you know, all the rest of the spaces were filled in with fun sex facts, because like, really this book was about education. So we wanted to like educate you, but have fun with it.
CN: You got to something I was going to ask. You talked in the acknowledgements about all the good that Planned Parenthood has done in terms of sex-positive education, you know, things like that. So some of the factoids that you have spread throughout, sort of a fun way of alleviating some of the somewhat more weighty stories in there. And I did want to comments on that, it was something I wrote down, is that some of these were actually kind of sweet and touching, I thought. You know, they weren’t all messy and embarrassing, and I think everyone can read this and relate to it, like, “Oh yeah, that sounds about right.” Or, you know, “I’ve been there,” if not in those specific situations then in something, you know, akin to it.
JJ: I think that’s part of the, you know, part of the discussion that Leslie and I had early on is if you look at the movies, you look at television, you look at romance, you know, sex is often described as passionate and raw, but it doesn’t have to be all of that. Like, it can be, sure, but it can be sweet. It can be funny. It can be awkward. You know, I think another one of my favorite stories in the book is called “Pretty in Plastic.” It’s about a girl who, she’s ready to have sex with her boyfriend for the first time, but she recognizes that if she has sex with him, he’s going to sleep over and she has a C-PAP machine. These are very kind of human things that we don’t really see discussed, you know? And so whether it’s sweet or funny or silly, those are all the emotions that we wanted to kind of have come out with this book.
CN: I’m also curious how you reached out. You described a little bit of your process with soliciting entries and stuff, but it seems a lot of the writers, not all of them, but a lot of them are from Florida or have Florida roots or things like that. Was there any intentional design to that, to keep this sort of regional or local or anything like that?
LS: Completely accidental. We just put out the call for submissions through social media, and there are a couple of call-for-submissions websites out there. So we got it out online as much as we possibly could. We couldn’t afford to take an ad out in one of the big writing magazines, but all of the big forums and stuff. We stuck it there, and it just caught fire from there. We got a lot of attention and people being excited about it. But because we put it out on social and the people that saw it were our friends and colleagues, they happened to put in. But when we were reading the submissions, we were reading them pretty much blind. We weren’t looking at who submitted what. We were looking at the story for its merit and what it had. But we have international submissions. One of the authors is from India. We have somebody from the UK. So we have international authors, as well, which is really fun. And we were very delighted to get so many submissions from so many different places.
JJ: I think the fact that Leslie and I are both heavily involved in the literary community here in Florida, it just kind of stacked the deck there. So as we were putting these calls out, it was a lot of writers that we know that submitted. But we said no to a lot of Florida writers, too. And yeah, Leslie’s correct. Anusha V.R. is from India. And we do have a writer from the UK, as well. Her name is slipping my mind right now, but Leslie’s probably looking it up…
LS: Kate Rigby. She’s “Hard Workers,” which is so funny. And I don’t want to tell you why it’s super funny because you have to read it. And then when you get, you have to…
JJ: …you don’t really get what it is till the end of the story…
LS: And then when you get the revelation, when I read it the first time, I was literally laughing out loud, probably so hard that I was like tearing up and my husband thought something was wrong with me because I was just laughing so hard.
JJ: But yeah, we’ve had writers from all over who submitted, but it was not intentional that we had so many Florida writers. It was just like I said, Leslie and are very heavily active in the literary community here. So when we put it on our own personal social media accounts, so it was a lot of local people that wound up seeing it.
CN: That kind of leads into my next question. In the acknowledgements, you thank the literary community of Central Florida for kind of helping you grow. I had discussed this with Leslie in the past, but just what is it like being an editor, a publisher, a writer in Central Florida? It’s not really an area that leaps to mind when you think of a thriving literary community. I know Burrow Press, another publisher based in Orlando, they kind of have a little fun with that in a lot of their acknowledgements. I’m curious your thoughts on that. What is your assessment of like what it’s like to thrive here?
JJ: I don’t know that there is communities that are more heavily literary than others anymore. You know what I mean? Yes, New York is still going to always be kind of the core of publishing here in the U.S., traditional publishing here in the U.S. But we’ve seen more and more writers coming from everywhere. You can have somebody who lives in the middle of nowhere, where they might even have difficulty getting a bookstore. Right? And they can still be a writer. They can study their craft, they can self publish, they can still submit to agents. Even agents aren’t all based in New York anymore. I know several really wonderful agents that are here in the Central Florida area. Is it a New York literary community? No, but I think it’s very rich community here in Central Florida. I worked in Los Angeles for a long time. I was working in the film industry, and I never saw the large number of people that are interested in writing or that have novels out there, whether they’re traditionally published or self-published, like I’ve seen here. And I think it is a very supportive community, and people will go out of their way to help you in this environment. You just have to ask. If you look at the Orange County Public Library, they have writing workshops every week almost. The NaNoWriMo Orlando community is extremely strong. There is a lot that’s happening here. And I think that no matter where you are, you want to be, if you’re an introductory kind of novelist, if you’re published, there’s a lot that’s here, and we do have some pretty nice authors that have come from this area. You know, you look at anything from Billy Collins, who’s the poet, to John Green, he wrote “Paper Towns,” which actually takes place in Baldwin Park. He changes the name in the book, he calls it Jefferson Park, but it’s basically Baldwin Park. There’s a scene where his two main characters sneak into Sea World. So there is a lot that comes out of here. Orlando is known as being kind of the theme park capital of the world, but there’s a lot of amazing writing here, as well.
LS: I think Central Florida is very unique because we have the theme parks, but because we have so much entertainment. Entertainment, and not so much in like the, you know, Disney and Sea World and Universal, which does bring a lot of talent, but you have a whole bunch of MFA programs cramped in a really small space. So you have the professors of the MFA programs. You have the students of the MFA programs. You have the alumni of the MFA programs, all kind of being together. We have so many different reading series, which used to be live. Now they’re all on Zoom. We have, Atlantic Center for the Arts, which is in New Smyrna Beach, which is not far away. We form all of these partnerships. This isn’t your typical cutthroat, only-one-person-can-be-the-best kind of community. It’s like, “Oh, everybody does something a little bit different. And we can all work together and elevate each other to grow stronger.” So, if you’re local in the Orlando community and you want to get involved, don’t be shy. Go to one of the reading series, pop into one of the stuff. We are not going to say no. We’re not going to tell at you to get off our lawns. We’re going to welcome you, because any new writers wonderful. We do this deliberately with the Kerouac House. We bring in a visiting writer four times a year, they stay and they live in Jack Kerouac’s old house for three months. And that’s awesome. Florida has such an amazing, rich history for literature that goes back literally hundreds of years, longer than the U.S. has been around. And it just tickles me. And I’m just so excited that we just continue this tradition.
JJ: Florida has more than methheads and crocodiles.
CN: Well, now, technically crocodiles only live in the extreme Southern part of the state.
JJ: That’s that’s too much detail for me.
CN: It’s strange, because I’ve taught Florida literature over the last 10 years, quite a bit. And when I mention that to people, even my friends are like, “What? That exists? Florida literature?” You know? And so I feel, in asking that question, it’s not so much my feeling, but public perception.
JJ: We’ve got Hemingway. We’ve gotten Zora Neale Hurston. But I think Florida is known for its Florida Man stories theme parks. And I think people don’t really look at our community in the same way. They don’t look at the literature that we’re doing. And like Leslie was saying, you know, we really support each other in this community. Not only did all of our writers contribute their works for free, our comic artist contributed her work for free. Many of the workshops that take place here in Central Florida, nobody’s being paid to be a part of those. I run the Full Sail University Writing Conference, and we have agents in New York Times bestsellers and screenwriters, and they all come and they all donate their time to help support our community here. There isn’t much of a reputation, but there should be.
LS: I’m glad that you mentioned Burrow Press earlier, because that seems to be like their goal. Like Ryan Rivas is the publisher for them. He published my very first anthology. So I always have a really soft spot for both of my publishers. And all of the works that Burrow Press is really focused on is always Florida-centric and always about debunking the Florida stereotype. And I’ve been spending the last three years working on an anthology with a couple of other Florida-based writers that is all about Florida literature. We’d been shopping it around. Our first publisher had to drop it, so we are courting new ones. Hopefully we will have an acceptance soon. It’s in the queue for a couple of different places, but it’s all about the beautiful, wonderful literature of Florida. Florida’s amazing and wonderful. And like you said, there’s so much more than just Florida Man.
CN: I’ve told my students, I think Florida’s kind of having a literary moment, even on the larger stage. You have people like Kristen Arnett or Karen Russell or Lauren Groff…
LS: Jeff VanderMeer!
CN: Yeah! I always try to point to those things in addition to, like you’re saying, Hurston and Hemingway and all the people who have historically defined what most people would think about.
LS: You have your classics, and then you have your new hotness. And there’s a lot of new hotness coming up. I’m just saying like… I think you’re right. Florida is having a renaissance, and there’s so much awesome, wonderful, amazing literature about this incredibly diverse place. So if you’re not reading Florida literature, what’s wrong with you? Go read some Florida literature.
CN: And you guys have contributed your own piece to it, “Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix,” your own particular contribution to that cannon.
CN: So, anyway, I guess my last question on this would be, did you guys think about contributing anything yourself outside of the introduction? Would that have been tacky?
JJ: Tacky! Yeah.
LS: It’s super interesting, because in the creative writing, academic world, it is frowned upon to include your own work in an anthology. It’s like, no, you don’t do that. Especially, if you have been invited to guest edit an anthology, you do not put your own work in there. Everybody gets mad at you. It’s bad. But in other academic circles, they’re like, “Oh, you’re editing a book on this topic? So what’s your chapter going to be on?” And it’s like, “Excuse me? I’m going to write the introduction. And then everybody else is going to write their stuff.” But that’s expected in other circles. That was super wild to me, because, I have an MFA in creative writing, but when I talked to my literature or my pop culture studies or my media studies friends, they’re like, “Oh yeah, you know, I wrote a chapter for this book. I also edited it.” And I’m like, you double dipped! And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s normal. Why aren’t you double-dipping?” But yeah, for both of us, we talked about it, we thought about it. We both had things that we could write about it. And ultimately we decided that the collection would be stronger if we let everybody else’s voices speak.
JJ: And I think it also allowed for us to have a little bit more objectivity when it came to the sorting and the organization. Me and my left-brain head. I did a lot of, “Okay, what order is the stories going to be in?” And I think it would just be a lot easier. When you are putting your own work out there, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, you’re going to be attached to it. You know what you think you wrote. But you always want someone from a third-party to look at your work and make sure that what you think is on the page is actually on the page. And that’s harder when it’s your own stuff. And yes, it’s like I could have edited Leslie’s piece and Leslie could have edited mine, but this way we were able to just stay completely objective and make sure that the overall flow of the book worked. Because, like Leslie mentioned earlier, we wanted to have kind of the balance of you might have something really serious. And then we want to put something really funny, or we might have something really weird and long. And then we want something super short afterwards just to kind of balance everything out. And it was a lot easier coming at it from an objective standpoint to not really have our own stuff outside of the introduction. Plus the introduction was so much fun. We didn’t need to write anymore.
LS: It was great.
JJ: It was very fun.
CN: So thank you for coming aboard! Do you have any other projects in the works that you want to discuss? Talk about? Promote? Otherwise mention?
JJ: I have a textbook out there right now. It’s been out for a little bit. “Crafting the Character Arc: A Practical Guide to Character Creation and Development.” It is a textbook that’s used in some creative writing campuses around the world. So you can check that out. It’s basically applying a structure to character arc. So you can definitely check that out.
CN: Leslie, any final words? Any works you want to talk about?
LS: Oh gosh. I’ll just say I’ve got lots of irons in the fire… There is that book, the Florida literature book that we are querying around to publishers. We’ve gotten lots of positive, positive, really positive reactions, but… I believe in this book, it’s very strong. It’s beautiful. It’s been in the works for like years. Our poor contributors are so ready for it to be out there. But yeah. So that’s my next anthology and there’s a couple of other stuff, but, uh, that’s the one I’m most excited about.
CN: All right. “Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix.” It’s available on, uh… anywhere you would personally recommend ordering it from?
LS: I don’t know if you can order it directly from the publisher website. I know it’s on Amazon.
JJ: I believe you can order it from Beating Windward Press’s website. It is on Amazon. It is on Barnes & Noble. But always check your independent bookstores. See if you can order it through them.
LS: Buy from independent bookstores!
CN: Leslie Salas, Jennie Jarvis, you are now official members of the Florida Book Club. Thank you for coming aboard.
LS: Thank you so much for having us.
JJ: Thanks for having us.
CN: Thanks for attending this meeting of the Florida Book Club. Join us again next time when we discuss “From the Sideshow to Walt Disney World: Florida Reimagined,” with the author and professor of art history, Carrie Watson. If you have any comments, suggestions, rebuttals, or thoughts to share, let us hear from you, and remember to support your local independent bookstores and public libraries. “Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix” is available through Bookshop and through Beating Windward Press. And there are links on our website. Remember: All proceeds from sales of “Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix” go to Planned Parenthood. See you at the next meeting.
