Overview

Michael V. Smith is a multi-talented force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male - a fey kid growing up in a small town amid a blue-collar family; a sissy; an insecure teenager desperate to disappear; and an obsessive writer-performer, drawn to compulsions of alcohol, sex, reading, spending, work and art as a means to cope and heal.

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9781551525778

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Reviews

My Body Is Yours is frenetic with experience--the joy and compulsion, purity and loneliness of cruising for sex; the rawness of public vulnerability in performance and writing; the anguish and innocence of searching for a way to inhabit your body when the world tells you it cannot be yours. Michael V. Smith flames and flails, he instigates and interrogates, revealing gender as a 'conscious, live response' instead of a societally prescribed formula for shutting off. From choreographing group sex to commanding the stage in drag to helping his father to live (and die), Michael V. Smith shows us the full range of the open heart. --Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The End of San Francisco

My Body Is Yours is frenetic with experience--the joy and compulsion, purity and loneliness of cruising for sex; the rawness of public vulnerability in performance and writing; the anguish and innocence of searching for a way to inhabit your body when the world tells you it cannot be yours. Michael V. Smith shows us the full range of the open heart. --Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The End of San Francisco The writing here is intimate, complicated and soulful. There is a lineage of gay men who write about sex without divorcing it from the broad context of their lives. Michael V. Smith is part of that lineage. --Kirk Read, author of How I Learned to Snap To read Michael V. Smith's My Body Is Yours is to accompany him on an intimate journey in which he struggles to create his own definition of manhood ... Regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic background, or any other superficial definition, readers will appreciate Smith's forthright presentation of his most intimate history, revelations that avoid sounding confessional but instead read as honest recollections and observations. -- Foreword Magazine

Author Information

Michael V. Smith won the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers from the Writers Trust of Canada for his first novel, Cumberland. He's since published two poetry books and a second novel, Progress. An improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, and occasional clown, Smith investigates notions of community and belonging, especially as relating to sexuality, gender, class, and identity. He teaches creative writing in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus in Kelowna, BC.

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