Anaïs Nin: The Sensual Art of Writing

Listen to this episode from Voices of Esalen on Spotify. Anaïs Nin was a literary pioneer who wrote boldly about the inner lives of women long before it was culturally accepted. Her work, including Delta of Venus, Little Birds, The House of Incest, and her 16-volume diary, continues to influence generations of writers. Nin’s life was as unconventional as her prose. She trained in psychoanalysis with Otto Rank, conducted passionate affairs with both Henry Miller and his wife June, and for a time maintained two simultaneous marriages on opposite coasts. Her diaries chronicle these transgressions with brutal honesty and no small amount of poetic insight. She also had a deep connection to Big Sur and to Esalen. She once described this coastline as “a curving hand cupped around a secret." In many ways, she was a secret, too: mysterious, erotic, intuitive and ahead of her time. This is Anaïs Nin in her own voice, in 1972, with the original Q and A/ audience interaction.