Tldr; Help Kati take a sabbatical from client work to finish the proposal for her second book, Skin Hunger: A Sexual Reckoning.

Tldr; If you're concerned about the loss of reproductive rights and the undermining of sexual sovereignty in this country, help birth a book that will create powerful conversation about sexuality and desire as essential parts of being human-- from a voice like no other.

What is Skin Hunger: A Sexual Reckoning about?

When I was 22 years old, I was raped in a hot tub in Teton Village, Wyoming. It was my first kiss. For years leading up to that night, I'd been steeped in the purity culture idea that sex was sacred, that having Never Been Kissed somehow made me special. I hadn't "settled," hadn't fallen into messy drunk hook ups. Even as I craved dates and sex, even as I left behind the religion of my childhood, even as I longed desperately to be "chosen" and have the same experiences as my friends--something in me had become twisted and calcified, and I dodged the men who would have kissed me (wondering if they were "good enough") and fell for those who wouldn't.

On the morning after my rape, I woke up understanding I'd lost both the set of rules I'd lived by and the way I'd conceived of myself. The small worm of relief in my belly told an uncomfortable truth: this was a liberation, too. For years I had sensed sex inside me, hot and murky, pulsing against the gates. Now stripped of my "purity," I would have to decide myself how I wanted to live.

Skin Hunger is a memoir about desire over a lifetime spent mostly single. It explores the wobbly first months after the rape when I was learning how to live without the shield I'd been standing behind--as my body lit up with a kind of hypersexuality after finally being touched, overwhelming me with the question of what I was supposed to do with these feelings, and how.

Skin Hunger traces my journey from sex-shamed abstinence devotee to sex educator for a small abortion clinic, teaching youth about anatomy, contraception, and STI prevention--and learning to hold a space of compassionate non-judgment--at the same time I was beginning to date and have sex in earnest for the first time. It's about time I spent at the front desk of a Teen Clinic, learning that everything I thought I knew about sexually-active young people was wrong.

Skin Hunger explores the way serious illness in my 20s forced me to listen to my body, instilling a deep self-trust and embodiment that changed the way I showed up in bed-- as well as how knowing I would have repeated heart surgeries changed the way I screened potential partners.

It's about the way long stretches of singleness can mean deep community ties and vulnerable friendships and quick career progression and an erotic relationship to land--even as long sex droughts wore me thin, drawing me into dark worlds I did not mean to see.

Skin Hunger is about the empowerment and joy of becoming a woman unafraid of sex--and about the emotional decay of having to choose between celibacy and casual encounters year after year, when my heart longed for a love that wouldn't come.

Skin Hunger is about longing, the visceral ache of a body untouched; the raw and throbbing sense of aliveness that swells out of sex; and what happens to us over time when a gap stretches out between what we want and what we actually get.

It's also a book-length inquiry into the power of institutions to affect the intimate lives we lead, from school district sex education policies to birth control access to federal Title X funding to the ever-growing violence against abortion providers, narrated by one whose job placed her in the center of those culture wars. I watched webinars on the latest research about abortion regret, attended trainings on what to do if my lesson ended up on Fox News, and on Saturday mornings checked the Teen Clinic perimeter for bombs, buzzing patients in through a bulletproof glass door.

Skin Hunger is above all else a love song to sexuality--how desire can act as a compass, how pleasure lights up the experience of living in a body, and how intimacy with other humans makes our lives worth living.

Should that description be shorter?

Yes. It's why I need your help. I have been writing terrible grant applications, and after weeks working on the description of this book nothing is landing in a satisfying way. It's incredibly hard to describe a book with a concise logline when you haven't written your way to the heart of it yet. I know there's a story here, and every time I talk about it people say, "I need that book." But I have a gap to cross yet. With time and focus, I will get it right.

Why is it important to write about sex?

The more we can step into the specific, awful, fascinating, and glorious ways interactions between humans actually play out (and how policy intersects those sex lives), the more we will open and shift our sense of what is normal, leaving more compassionate space for ourselves and others. Shame causes people to sidestep condom negotiation, skip talking about potential infections, avoid visiting healthcare providers, and lie in intimate conversations, which is to say: beyond the mental health implications alone, shame causes public health impacts. Sex is powerful, and showing readers the scenes from my own life-- strange, unexpected, beautiful, devastating, degrading, euphoric--makes more room for the range of experiences they've had or wanted to have. We still don't talk much about sex, especially about our own. I don't believe our collective politics will affirm sexual sovereignty until normal people are willing to speak up in defense not only of abortion rights or birth control, but sex itself.

The Beginning

When I quit my job as a sexual health educator in 2012 to pursue an MFA in creative nonfiction writing, I had no intention of turning my back on the work of building a more embodied, emotionally-intelligent, medically-accurate, and sovereignty-oriented sex culture. Rather, my goal was to stop wasting my time on what I wasn't built for-- survey collection, data reporting, electronic health records management, and clinic assistant supervision-- so I could become a culture-changer in the form I was born for: as a writer telling honest, resonant stories in the way only I can.

The Middle

At University of Arizona MFA, I worked rigorously to build the voice and career that could hold this work. My essay "In Praise of Contempt" won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction and was included in The Best American Essays 2016. Other essays on sex and sex assault placed in Fugue , Quarterly West, The High Country News , Fourth Genre , and The Indiana Review. After graduate school, I taught classes on sex writing around the country, offered "adult sex ed" at a local sex toy boutique, and facilitated a required seminar for first year medical students at the University of Arizona College of Medicine called "Responding to the Sexual Health Stories of Patients."

When my first agent and I submitted Lightning Flowers to publishers, we included a secondary book proposal for a work called Strange Gifts of the Body. Though that version of the "sex book" got offers from publishing houses, we failed to nail down a deal that included both manuscripts, and ended up prioritizing publishing Lightning Flowers with a brand-new imprint of Little, Brown that didn't have the funds for both up front. (Little, Brown retains the right of first refusal on my second book.)

I'm grateful for this delay. The way I conceived of the book then is not quite how I intend to write it now.

The End

Lightning Flowers came out three years ago this November. I've needed this time to ride its initial (virtual) hardcover publicity wave, go on paperback tour (in person!), reassess my goals for a writing life, and pay back debt from the writing of my first book.

The book once called Strange Gifts of the Body is now Skin Hunger: A Sexual Reckoning.

And it's time to write it.

My first agent and I parted ways after Lightning Flowers. My next step is to build a book proposal and polished sample so I can connect with an agent who's a better fit. I've spent the last two years dipping into journals and letters to understand the arc of my narrator and building prose for various sections of the book. However, I do not yet have an extended sample of what "the voice" of the book sounds like, and this has been hard to accomplish without being able to tap out of other work and let this book lead my life.

Who Cares?

You Might Want to Support This GoFundMe if you...

The Ask

I'm asking my community to help support me for 3.25 months while I develop and finalize a book proposal and sample for Skin Hunger. By the end of this time, I hope to be connected with a new agent and on my way to my next book sale and advance (a preferable way of being supported to write). I need time to get very quiet and step offline without undercutting my ability to take care of myself.

Why can't you work a job and write a book? Other people can.

I was the (undiagnosed) ADHD kid in high school who would pull up one of her grades only to see another fall. I was only really *ever* doing one thing at a time. When I finally got diagnosed with ADHD at age almost-26, the tester said, "You must be insanely smart; I can't believe you have a college degree with a score like this." He didn't know I attended Colorado College, where students take one class at a time, each 3.5 weeks long. CC students work maniacally on whatever they're studying, going deep instead of wasting their time transitioning between subjects. At CC, I double-majored, completing an original 80-page environmental sociological study and writing a 64-page novella, each completed mostly across its own 7-week, "double block" period. Both received distinction. I thrived on the block plan.

I'm 38 years old and I've never successfully written regularly while holding a full time job. All significant drafting and revisions of Lightning Flowers took place during multi-month periods where I was not working on anything else for more than a few hours a week. No, my advance could not fully support this, and yes, debt from LF drove me into financial ruin. This is why I am asking for your support. I cannot write another book on credit cards. And with costs of living much higher than they were a few years ago, trying to work a bunch and save, then take time off, has become impossible. I'm burnt to a crisp.

Running my own business used to give me flexibility, but this year using my brain on other peoples' books has increasingly precluded me from using it on my own.

As a neurodivergent person, my best writing happens when I'm in hyperfocus-- that is, when the rest of the world is allowed to slip away, when I can be timeblind and wander the forest and work late and work early and follow threads as long as I need to. (If this seems to you like a privilege, know that I've always designed my life around this priority.) Being able to disappear from other work is especially important for me when the work is deeply emotional and in places traumatic, as Skin Hunger is.

Skin Hunger lies at the bottom of the ocean; it's impossible to reach her when I'm swimming back to the surface all the time.

What's the money for?

Here are what my fixed costs (roughly) look like:

$2200 Rent

$600 Utilities (phone, water, electric, internet, firewood)

$1500 Car payment, insurance, & gas for commute to town (#RuralLife)

$800 Student loans & tax payments

$1500 Healthcare (health insurance, payment plans for cardiology services already rendered, acupuncture/yoga/bodywork)

$1300 food & misc. (repairs, replacements, mistakes)

=$7900/ month

... Yes: it sucks to be single and not split fixed costs.

Yes: rents are terrible right now.

Yes: it would have been cool if student loans evaporated.

Yes, my medical costs are forever higher than your average bear's.

I lived without stable housing or health insurance last year to prioritize paying back debt, but now I'm feeling clear-eyed about the relationship between stability and productivity.

I recently learned that I did not receive a $25,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2024, which makes your support extra important.

Why isn't this a Kickstarter?

Many of you know that I raised $17,000 on Kickstarter in 2014 to support primary source research for my book Lightning Flowers. (If you supported, THANK YOU!) Tax law has changed since then, and the types of tiers I used back in 2014 would now indicate that you, dear supporter, are receiving something in exchange for supporting my work, rendering the pledges taxable income and cutting out around 20% of whatever I raise. I'm all for paying taxes to support social safety nets, collaborative resources, etc., but the point here is to make as much art as possible happen in an economy where artists are rarely or barely paid. By supporting this GoFundMe, you acknowledge that you are offering a gift of artistic patronage for which you will not receive anything in return.

What if I don't want GoFundMe to take a chunk of my gift in the form of fees?

I invite you to support Skin Hunger directly via Venmo at @Katherine-Standefer-1. This is especially true if you're able to offer gifts over $1,000. (In the subject line, please write "Gift.")

Why don't you have money from Lightning Flowers to support the writing of your next book?

A book advance is not free money--it's an "advance on royalties." Lightning Flowers has sold about 14,800 units (hardcover, paperback, audio, e-book, etc.) which at my contracted royalty rates has paid back about a third of the book's initial advance. I don't owe my publisher money, but I won't receive royalties until the entire advance is paid back. Only about 25% of books "earn out" their advances.

Do small gifts matter too?

Absolutely. Not only does every dollar add up, your support of this campaign provides "proof of concept" to future publishers--a sign that there's appetite for a book like this one.

What if I want to support your writing all the time and not just through this GoFundMe?

Join my Patreon! I'd love to have you along.

Praise for Kati's sex writing:

Jonathan Franzen called my writing about sex "fresh and arresting and risky," Wayne Koestenbaum called it "blissfully contrarian and unruly," and David Shields writes, "I am a besotted fan of Katherine Standefer's writing, especially about sex and its relationship to pain and power... [Standefer] refuses to write about sex with either an ounce of sentimentality or an ounce of false cool...[her] work beautifully and powerfully embodies and proves the irreducible truth that sex is everything."

About me:

Katherine E. Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, which was a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice/Staff Pick. Lightning Flowers was selected as the 2022-2023 Common Read at Colorado College, named one of O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of Fall 2020, and was featured on NPR's Fresh Air, in People Magazine, and on the goop podcast. Standefer earned her MFA at the University of Arizona. She lives in a forest of pine and aspen beside the Greys River in northwestern Wyoming.