EDITOR’S NOTE: Jessica Haralson isn’t really a smut peddler, exactly. Or maybe she is — it depends on who you ask. In addition to co-founding (and publishing!) her very own Ivy League campus erotica magazine, Jessica is making her mark on the local blog scene with her own advice column at www.phillyist.com. And they say that youth is wasted on the young.

Yo. I’m a college student idealist; currently living (and mooching) off the University of Pennsylvania’s Ivy League idyll. This means I get to major in English — Creative Writing, specifically — and ponder poetesses like Aphra Behn at the same time as pondering Bui’s vs. Hemo’s for lunch (Hemo’s is cheaper — and the Hemo’s guy is less likely to leer.) I’ve studied under some tres cool professors; Max Apple is one, Dick Polman, the Philadelphia Inquirer journalism-cum-luminary, is another. I’m amused to discover that Maury Povich is funding Penn’s nascent Journalism program. Povich, a Penn alum, seems to have used his education to educate the trash-talkin’ baby mommas of our country’s seamy underbelly.

I also have the free time to do crazy things, like starting controversial campus literary erotica publications, and writing a Love and Sex column for Phillyist.com. Who knew a nineteen-year old could be so darned kinky?

But seriously, forks, I’d like to use this space to branch beyond Quake. No doubt I’ve done some pretty cool shit — like meeting Dr. Drew of Loveline, fame for starters, and grilling Trojan Condoms on why it is that prophylactic salesmen are always so embarrassing and leery about the whole damn affair (ED: Why?). I’ve been profiled in Philadelphia Weekly and 34th Street Magazine, mostly as a pearl-clutching Southerner with an eye for shaking things up (I’m a Texan, not a Southerner, thank you very much, reporters!). I’ve been called a harlot by street corner prophets. I’ve received late night phone calls asking me for vibrator recommendations, first born children, and car insurance . But y’know what? I also wanna be a writer. And it’s easy to get pigeonholed when you produce for the literotica readin’, Nerve-enjoying set. Producing Quake has been fun, no doubt, but one doesn’t get Maureen Dowd-esque fame and the Pulitzer peeps knocking on your door by writing Phillyist columns on the best dildo joint in Old City.

I dallied a lot in short story writing before realizing that I have a Voice for non-fiction. I’ve always been fascinated by magazine journalism, ever since I stole away my mom’s Glamour in the third grade to read in the bathroom “for the perfume samples.” She didn’t believe me, and I didn’t believe myself either. I’d love to write in magazines for fun and profit. And with The Bitter Quill, I plan to chronicle my progress – searching for swanky internships, applying for writing gigs, writing proposals, checking mastheads, and screaming into the dark abyss in my sink faucet.

Let us hope I can avoid the inevitable alcoholism. Truman Capote would be rolling over in his grave.