Opening Up...

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. (The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.)
-- Blaise Pascal

Listening to Weekend Edition on the local NPR station today, I heard an interesting piece, “‘I Am A Boxer’: Fighter In The Ring, Lady Outside It,” about female boxers who hope to make the U.S. Olympic Team for women’s boxing. The first woman profiled was Bertha Aracil, a 29 year old amateur boxer. Talking about Aracil, reporter Marianne McCune said this (emphasis mine):

When I met her she was living in a basement apartment in the Bronx with a man and a woman she called her husband and her wife. They were cooking for a band of nieces, nephews, and sisters, part of a big family of Cuban immigrants. Aracil is 5’9″ with jeans, boots, she says that her many tattoos tell the story of who she is.

Whoa, what? That’s right. Not only was Aracil clearly open about her nontraditional and nonmonogamous (polyamorous?) relationship, but the NPR reporter treated it as completely ordinary, just part of the profile. Unfortunately, this little item is missing from the written piece on npr.org, but you can download the audio of the segment here.

Jacqueline Applebee, who has previously written erotic fiction and was published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2008, has released her first full-length book. An Expanded Love is a fictional romance novel that explores the joys and obstactles of polyamory.

An Expanded Love follows a bisexual woman named Nadia. When she meets a polyamorous woman named Christine, Nadia must re-think her traditional views on relationships:

Nadia decides to try this way of relating for herself, but her first steps into polyamory are terrifying, exhilarating and downright strange. The jealousy she feels over sharing Christine with another woman goes out the window when Nadia falls for a Pagan synchronised swimmer, Yolanda, and her cookery-obsessed boyfriend, Sam . . . When Yolanda’s crossdressing son, and Nadia’s moody ex-boyfriend get thrown into the mix, things get rather interesting…

I’ve truly enjoyed reading Applebee’s work in the past, and I highly recommend you check out this exciting new novel. An Expanded Love is available as a paperback or e-book; go take a look!

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