Performance artist, writer, painter, poet, filmmaker, and general Lower East Side force of nature Reverend Jen has spent nearly 20 years cranking out a lovingly and welcomingly outlandish swath of creative work, from creating and curating the Troll Museum to hosting and organizing Anti-Slams to coining the blithely irreverent term "art star" and launching Art Star Scene-aka, ASS magazine. Its editorial mission mirrored Reverend Jen's own: to promote non-boring existence through art. And for roughly two years Reverend Jen served as Nerve.com monthly "I Did It For Science" sex columnist, for which she enthusiastically and wittily engaged in a number of "sexperiments"-attending fellatio classes, attending princess reform school (where a master teaches good girls to be bad), checked out balloon fetish parties, tried to squirt by way of G-spot orgasm. Regardless of the assignment, she approaches the adventure with an insouciant energy and discusses it with nonchalance, such as this thought about female ejaculation:

I also wondered if the idea that G-spot orgasms are earth-shattering was part of The Man's plan to make women feel inadequate. One of the great things about being a woman is never clicking on spam emails for products that promise to help you shoot loads across the room.

Those Nerve essays were collected and published by Soft Skull Press as Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen, which chronicles not only the author's sexual escapades but is a wonderfully candid memoir, recounting a single woman's life in New York as she has fans, falls in love, and gets dumped. Reverend Jen hits Atomic Books Friday, June 5, at 7 p.m. to read from and sign copies of her book. And she was gracious enough to take some time to speak with City Paper by phone earlier this week about the book, intrauterine existence, and who should play her in her book's inevitable movie adaptation.

City Paper: Do you still live in the Lower East Side?
Reverend Jen: Yep. Still living in the troll museum.

CP: You haven't been priced out yet?
RJ: No. I live in a rent stabilized apartment, so all of the apartments in my building are renting for $2,500 a month and I pay $400. [laughs]

CP: Nice.
RJ: If I ever have to move out I'll have to leave the tri-state area I'm sure.

CP: So I know you mention in the book that you grew up in Maryland, and you talk about that a bit in that "Inside the Beltway" essay you wrote for Nerve, but you don't say where you're from.
RJ: Silver Spring.

CP: Ah. No wonder you left as soon as you could.
RJ: Yeah, right.

CP: And when did your Nerve column run? Was it in 2006?
RJ: It was 2005-2007, basically.

CP: Had you read Grant Stoddard's version of the column before?
RJ: No. I have never even been on Nerve before, actually. But when [former Nerve senior editor, current Babble.com editor in chief] Ada [Calhoun] offered me the job I went and read everything Grant had written in preparation, to find out what I was getting into.

CP: Did you have an idea of how you wanted to approach it or what you wanted to do?
RJ: It was tough because Grant had already done so much that, honestly, the biggest challenge was figuring out what to do each month. I spent a lot time surfing the web, looking for weird fetish parties and picking my friends' brains for column ideas. So the fact that he had covered such a wide scope of perversity and sex made it really kid of tough.

CP: I ask because Grant was very, very funny, but, being British, he also had this element of being a bit of an outsider in this big, crazy, American sexual thing going on about his adventures, while you-whether you're attending fellatio school or princess reform school or out being a cougar hunting for younger men-always felt to come at like you might as well be, you know, going to buy a cantaloupe or something. It made everything very approachable and feel everyday. Was that something you tried to do or just part of your personality?
RJ: [laughs] I think it's part of my personality or, at least, now having spent 19 years in New York and having hosted the city's craziest open-mic night for 12 years, it's very rare that I bat an eyelash. So going to these events, some of then felt, like, not even as strange as some of the things that I witnessed at my open mics. So going about it like that, you know, there are very few times where I've been shocked in my life, I have to say.

CP: I get the impression that the column did take you to parts of the city you've never spent much time in before. Did you ever feel like a tourist in your own city?
RJ: There's definitely a caste system in New York, and the bohemians rarely ever have anything to do with the bankers and so it's very cliquish. It's kind of like this big high school and we're the freaks. So interacting with the popular kids-or, I wouldn't call them that, the normal people-was interesting, and seeing that they, too, are pretty crazy. Like, I know in the "How to Marry a Millionaire" column I said to my friend Claudia, "I'm really afraid of talking to rich people, I'm so used to taking to crazy artists." And she laughed and said, "Wait, are you saying the rich aren't crazy." So I did actually learn that everyone is kind of crazy, you know? I'm, actually, starting more and more to think the only sane people are the artists.

CP: Well, that would make more sense.
RJ: Oh yeah. So at times, yes, I felt like I was a tourist in my own city. I've been so insular.

CP: I have to confess that I didn't go back and read the columns online to see what you added to them to make them into a book, but in reading them collected all together, what's very refreshing about the book is not that it's just about this woman doing all these sexually related things, but that in the process you offer a portrait of what it's like to be a single woman in New York during those years, talking about very familiar things that anybody can relate to-the different sizes of beers available at bodegas, talking about what you can and can't afford, or just offering a frank antidote to the illusion of a Carrie Bradshaw's writer's life when you watched all of Sex and the City.
RJ: I wanted the book to be more than just a set of columns, so I think opening up and baring my soul [laughs] was really important to making it something that people can relate to on more of a human level so it's not just, Oh, this girl does all this crazy stuff but to actually get to know me. And the anti-materialism that's in it is just an aspect of being an artist and not really having as much of a choice but also deciding that my quality of life isn't dependent on having $300 shoes or going to the chicest place. It's really about being comfortable with what you have and celebrating what you have. So it was a real conscious decision to include that stuff and it was only after I put the essays together as a collection and, basically, showed it to a few people who said, "Well, you know, a reader in Iowa isn't going to know why you wear elf ears. They're not going to know about your open mic. They're not going to know about this and this and this." So I started by writing a little bit about where I came from, about what I'm doing, about why I live here in this crazy world, et cetera, et cetera. And then it slowly started to become also about how I grew up a little but during writing that column.

CP: I wanted to ask about putting the book together, because it does cover two years of your life. How was that? How was revisiting the escapades and the recent personal past? Fun, traumatic, weird?
RJ: It was really cathartic and I really enjoyed the process. In fact, it wasn't a long process because the columns are pretty much intact except, occasionally, I'll preface them with, "I was working at the bookstore and googling." So occasionally I preface the column with what was happening in my life at the time. But then, going back and addressing things like how the column ended and all that, it just really came out of me really quickly. It helped, too, to have the open mic to go to and read this stuff in performance spaces. So I had immediate feedback and the feedback was very positive. And, you know, I wrote it all when was in a very raw emotional state, especially the last chapter. And what helped was, there's this great debate series in New York that takes place at this bar called Lolita, and they had me debate the novelist Katherine Taylor about getting dumped. Is it worse to get dumped or is it worse to dump somebody? I was on the side of worse to get dumped. And so I had already cathartically written all about the process of being broken up with, so it made it real easy.

Also, all throughout my writing-my "career," I've kept journals, extensive journals. So it was real easy. Like, I wanted to write about the trip to England and I went back and I had a 300-page journal, and it really made the process go fast. So I now, ever since putting the book together, which is what I did last summer, I basically thought, It's really important that I keep these extensive journals, so I try to write at least a couple of times per week, even if nothing interesting has happened. So when the next book comes along, I can go back and go, "OK, what was I doing?" [laughs] You know? I don't have the best memory.

CP: And nobody really has the best memory for those little details and seemingly throwaway pieces of information and thoughts that really bring then to life.
RJ: Exactly. And the details that you think are boring at the time, when you look back, they can be really fascinating. So even on the wildest days, my most hungover days, I've still got my journal out. Like, oh my god, let me write this down.

CP: Any columns you're particularly fond of looking back, for whatever reason?
RJ: Probably my favorite, wow, that's tough. I think the balloon fetish one I wrote while I was serving jury duty. Actually, I didn't get picked for jury duty, but the pressure that was on me to get this column finished and to spend a week at the courthouse and do my show and everything else. Wow. And, at the time, I was reading Cleansing the Walls of Perception-or perhaps its Cleansing the Doors of Perception, not the [Aldous] Huxley one, the one that came after the Huxley one. And so I'm reading transcendence and intrauterine existence and things like that and it's interesting to me the way it filtered into that column, my thoughts about being in the balloon. So I kind of like that one for the transcendental aspects of it. And, I guess, the tantric sex one because it was so challenging to write about falling for someone while also trying to write about sex. There's a few, like I read the porn column last night at a show and the laughs were really steady, which is nice-because I wasn't really ever trying to be funny. I wasn't writing stuff going, This is going to make people laugh. I was just being as totally frank and honest as possible and I think when you're frank and honest about sex, it's hilarious. [laughs] When you remove the smoke and mirrors and mystique and stop trying to be so erotic and juts write what really happened, it can be either erotic or really hilarious.

CP: And both of those work.
RJ: [laughs] Yeah. I'll take either one. Somebody e-mailed me-I've been really enjoying fan mail from people I don't know-and somebody e-mailed me and said, "I've never laughed so hard while simultaneously sporting en erection in my life." And that was just the ultimate praise.

CP: That really does have to be one of the best compliments ever. So, have you brought your male alter ego Steve from Jersey City out since that column?
RJ: No. I've been planning on having Steverino make an appearance. He's always inside of me. Anytime I take a bong hit or something, Steverino comes out. I'm always-despite my size or whatever, I'm a pretty manly woman, so Steverino is always brewing right under the surface.

CP: That columns read like you had a very good time being a dude.
RJ: Oh yeah. Just showing up at the bar as Steverino and not being recognized. And it was liberating not to try to be pretty or try to do this but just be this grungy stoner from New Jersey and spend a lazy day in the park hanging out.

CP: Do you still do the Anti-Slams? Do you still maintain the troll museum?
RJ: Yeah, I have the troll museum but right now somebody is living in it to save money. Yeah, my friend is sleeping on a cot in the troll museum. But we still have visitors over. And I still do the Anti-Slams, but I do it monthly now. After Mo Pitkins [House of Satisfaction], where I was doing it in 2007, closed, I retired it as a weekly show and now I do it monthly at Bowery Poetry Club. It got to where it was really hard to maintain a job or a life when you have to, every Wednesday, spend five hours hosting a show.

CP: So what else are you up to these days? I know you do a column for Artnet. Where do you focus your various creative energies?
RJ: Well I still work at the bookstore. I'm still painting a lot. And I also do this cable-access show called The Adventures of Electra Elf. And I spent several months writing a feature and we're shooting that, which might take, god, a year to complete it since we're kind of broke. I also do it a serial play-I like to call it a live-action TV show-called Reverend Jen's Really Cool Neighborhood. And I get little writing gigs here and there. I write for an Australian women's magazine called Cleo. And, basically, just having tons of fun doing lots of shows and coming to Atomic Books Friday and, next weekend, I'm going out to L.A. and then the next week I'm going to London. And just hoping that the book is going to do well and in six months I'm helping them cast whoever's playing me in the movie.

CP: Who do see in the role?
RJ: I'd like John Cameron Mitchell to play me. [laughs]

CP: That would be great.
RJ: Yeah. I think it would be way more interesting. And he does really look like me-or, I look like him.

CP: Isn't he, like, really tall?
RJ: Oh yeah. That could be a problem. Maybe the Olsen twins. They could just rotate. Like the Mary-Kate one could me on the rough days. They seem like they'd be into it. They're kind of art stars.

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