Because it’s the time for counting things down and looking back over the year, let’s re-enjoy some of 2010’s most watched stories from our YouTube channel.

#5 Meg’s short and sweet “Epic Fail.” (Watch her Best Presentation-winning Grand Slam story here.)

#4 Liz Spikol “spills her guts” at our May Salon, Spilling Your Guts

#3 The story that took current “Best Storyteller in Philly” Amanda to the Fall Grand Slam. (Watch her Grand Slam story here.)

#2 Cecily can make a funeral hilarious.

#1 Not a big surprise here… Olga tells us about her not-so-little friend, Carlitos at the Summer Grand Slam.

At last night’s Spilling Your Guts Salon, our three juicy oversharers and host did not disappoint. Waist Nippers were bravely displayed (think Spanx), critics were told to fuck off and many more revelations inspired, touched, and entertained our SRO crowd.


Our audience was invited to share secrets themselves (a la Post Secret), some of which were read aloud during the event. It did not take too much prodding to get our audience jotting down some intimate disclosures – most on the topic of sex and love, unsurprisingly. Knowing that we have some Nosy Nellies in our First Person blog readership, I knew you’d want to get a glimpse.


“I’m 30 and never been in love.”


“I tell him how much he hurt me hoping to hurt him back.”


“I quit dating a guy because he cried after sex. Every time.”


“I invited a friend that I’d always secretly loved and his boyfriend to stay with me. After his boyfriend went to bed, I wound up giving him a blowjob in my kitchen while listening to Stevie Nicks.”


“When you were shitting, I opened your cell phone and read the text messages.”


“I want to learn how to hip-hop dance.”


“I like Miley Cyrus.”


“I think I might be pregnant.”


“I used to think Liz [Spikol] told too much about herself, but now I just think she was ahead of her time.”


Inspired? Have to get something off your chest? Feel free to add some anonymous confessions in the comments section!


Thanks to Emily Gould, Dr. Judith Sills, Liz Spikol, Emily Steinberg and our awesome audience for a great Salon!

So Rudy might have a crush on Emily Gould, but I have to fess up to digging Liz Spikol, the non-Emily on tomorrow night’s Salon program. Her troubles have made for deliciously uncomfortable stories, first in her popular Philly Weekly column The Trouble with Spikol and now her blog of the same name. While the focus of her writing has changed since leaving PW – her new job at the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania means less time for blogging and (according to at least one fan) a little “less edge” – she is still attracted to topics that many would rather sweep under the rug, including suicide and bisexuality. Check out last week’s Philadelphia Gay News interview with Spikol and get a taste for her (edgy as ever, in my opinion) new work before seeing her live tomorrow at the Arts Bank (601 S. Broad St.). Tickets still available here.


And feel the slice of that Spikol edge from some past writings…


From a blog post about a study on sex:
How did I know I was attracted to women from the start? Well, my friend in grade school, who I’ll call Julia, came over to my house one Sunday and told me she had something to show me. We were about 8. She grabbed the comics section of the Philadelphia Inquirer and told me to look at Dagwood from the Blondie strip. She said he was “sexy.” She said if I looked at him I would start to feel funny but there were things I could do to make it go from funny to really nice.


I had no idea what she was talking about. I stared at Dagwood as long as I could, but nothing happened. She kept trying to explain. Finally, I let my eyes wander to Blondie, with her long, pretty legs and bouncy hair and I felt funny. I told her I understood but I didn’t mention Blondie. Even then, I knew it was wrong to prefer a girl over a guy.


The incident–which would be repeated not in its particulars but in its generalities countless times to come–made me understand who I was. I’ve always had a soft spot for Blondie since then.


From a column about addiction:
I started my love affair with pills in 1998, when my then-psychiatrist erroneously prescribed methamphetamine. I asked him at the time if addiction was a risk. Yes, he said, but in all his years of prescribing, he’d only “lost” two people to the drug.


Make that three. I quickly (speedily!) ramped my daily consumption up to four times the recommended max, popping the pills like they were Tic-Tacs. My weight dropped to 89 pounds, and obsessive-compulsive rituals, like counting, started to clog up my day and make me late for appointments. Things would happen in my apartment that “I” hadn’t done—but then, who had? I was too scattered and dissociated to pay bills, to eat, to return calls. Life was all about maintaining the “right” amount of meth.


It was completely unsustainable, but much of the time I felt like a god.


From a column about her body:
Last week I saw Thomas at an outdoor party. He looked especially pretty, his sunglasses pushed up on his head, his blue shirt creamy and pale against his skin. I walked over and we did the air-kiss thing, followed by a profusion of chipper inquiries. As usual, Thomas talked about business.


I was zoning out a bit when I noticed Thomas’ eyes travel the length of my body. He looked at me with a secretive smile. Was he finally going to mention the unmentionable? I giggled in a way I hoped was schoolgirlish but probably seemed demented.


“You look great,” he said. “Are you expecting?”


My reaction was not graceful. I shrieked in horror, then grabbed my billowy shirt and held it tightly around my body as though I were a pork roast being wrapped in Saran.


“No!” I answered, dancing around like a liquored-up court jester. “See? I’m still skinny and cute; it’s just the shirt!”


Thomas apologized, but I prolonged the agony by saying, “The next time I see you I’m going to be wearing something really sexy, I swear.”


There was enough humiliation in that moment to last through 10 life cycles—conception, pregnancy and death included.


- Karina Kacala

Now I have to spill my guts. I think I have a crush on Tuesday’s Salon artist, Emily Gould. Is it the florid tattoos marking her lean arms? The languid tones with which she reads a free audio chapter about love lost and cute (but stupid) dogs from her new memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever? Her defiance of the prescriptions on “women’s lit”? Mmmm… I think it’s all of the above.


My love affair with Emily started just recently, upon visiting her homepage for the first time, Emily Magazine. There I was immediately presented with an option – do I check out her blog at Powell’s Books, or, since she’s written her own book, do I check *that* out first? (For the record, for everything from blogging at Powell’s, a favorite indie book seller of some of the most die hard word nerds I know, to having written a book, my heart was immediately won. Maybe I’m just easy like that.)


Well, I picked option “Powell’s” and, jackpot, it was a blog there about putting her book out and weathering the criticism. Right away this quote stuck out: “In And the Heart Says Whatever, I didn’t hammer home my points or penitently explain which specific lessons my youth in New York has taught me, and I didn’t end the book with a triumphant feel-good story about how I’ve found true love and now I’m a yoga teacher. This seems to have worked the nerves of a lot of the online reviewers who specialize in writing about what are called ‘women’s books.’” I’m consistently offended by by the dumbed-down-everything marketed to women and the sassy, snarky swipe double whammy warmed my feminist heart.


::Now, in my best voice that says I’m trying to sell you a Sham-WOW!:: But wait, there’s more!


What’s that you say? You wish such an interesting person did more than just write books and blogs? Because it sounds like she has extra time just coming out of her ears? You want her to vlog as well?! Well today, my friends, is your lucky day indeed. She slices she dices; she blogs and she vlogs. No seriously, it wasn’t just me continuing the infomercial reference, though I do get clever points there. She really slices and dices on Cooking the Books. She also discusses books as she cooks. Well hey now lady, looks like I’m not the only one getting points for cleverness today! Check out a vlog episode below – you’ll notice I picked one where a memoir was reviewed! ::Doff of the hat to our mission statement.::


I should note: Emily is in fact so prolific that Emily Magazine links to even more blogs than I could review for you today – check out ThingsIAteThatILove and Salad for Breakfast to round out her great roster!


The reality is that not everyone is as enamored by Emily as I am. Time Out New York recently described her as “a poster child for aspirational Internet-age literati: a figure that people love- and love to hate.” I say check her out at Spilling Your Guts in person and decide for yourself. Love her or hate her, Emily Gould isn’t going anywhere.


- J. Rudy Flesher

Cooking the Books – Episode 8 – Kathryn Borel from The Awl on Vimeo.

Never Talk to Strangers?


The First Person Salon Spilling Your Guts invites three authors of revealing memoirs and blogs to take the stage. I was asked to interview one of these authors, Emily Steinberg, about her illustrated memoir, Graphic Therapy. Emily’s book offers a very intimate look into her life as a 30-something, struggling artist.


Initially, I was nervous to interview someone who had so completely shared her private life with the world. I have often had the impulse to relate my problems to complete strangers, but have always been afraid of censure. These fears are based on the following, oft repeated, experience: I meet a random person at a coffee shop, and begin chatting about something inane like the weather or sports. All of a sudden, the conversation changes, and this stranger starts telling me his life story, eventually, asking for my advice on his most intimate matters. The end result? I feel extremely awkward.


I never analyzed my negative reaction to receiving confidences from strangers; I just knew that having so much revealed about someone’s life made me uncomfortable. I began reading Graphic Therapy with a similar mindset. However, after several chapters, I realized that I was not at all uncomfortable. I related to Emily’s misadventures and rather than feeling put-upon by a stranger’s confession, I felt liberated to realize that I am not the only person who occasionally has bad judgment or goes through tough times.


Initially, Emily did not realize how truly revealing her stories were. But these candid descriptions of life, for the most part, have sparked a very positive reaction in readers. Many claimed to have had an experience similar to my own; they felt that Graphic Therapy was honest and easy to relate to. Others were made uncomfortable by her blunt descriptions, but still enjoyed the humor woven throughout the narrative.


Graphic Therapy was written over ten years ago, so quite a bit of time has passed since the events in the book occurred. Emily says she is thankful that she did not publish the diary immediately; the lapse of time gave her an opportunity to process and look at her experiences with a more objective eye. Emily occasionally cringes when reading her old diaries. She no longer suffers from extreme depression and self-doubt; and often feels like a completely different person from the woman described in the book.


Writing a graphic memoir also caused unexpected changes in her artwork; Emily began her artistic career as a painter. Graphic Therapy started as a sidetrack from painting, but eventually became a sort of obsession. Writing the book led to a completely overhauled experience of painting; she now feels freer in her artistic expressions and tends to make more immediate creative decisions. For Emily the process of pairing her illustrations with words is more exciting and rewarding than painting ever was. She is not sure if any of her future artwork will feel whole without some accompanying text. The experience of memoir illustration was such a positive one that Emily hopes to eventually conduct classes on graphic memoir writing at local universities.


In many ways, Graphic Therapy seems to have profoundly changed Emily’s life; she said to me that if you are open to new experiences, life has a way of opening up in return. My own experiences at First Person Arts have shown me that people can better relate to the story of an individual – like Emily – than to the history of an entire village. Talking with Emily and reading Graphic Therapy may have had a more lasting effect on my life than I could have expected. At the very least, I will approach strangers differently. You may even run into me at a bar some time, pouring out my own life story to someone I hardly know.


- Sarah Crawford

Put your overshares to good use! For the next two weeks, add the tag #SpillYrGuts to any tweet about your personal life. Tell us what you’re eating, how you’re sleeping, where you’re going, who you love, who you hate. We want all the dirt!


You’re writing about this stuff anyway, you might as well win something!


We’ll randomly choose one gut spiller each Friday to win two free tickets to the May 11th Salon, Spilling Your Guts and a copy of either Emily Gould’s new memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever, or Emily Steinberg’s Graphic Therapy. The more often you share, the better your chances of winning!


Share away!