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http://www.foundlingreview.com/July2010Issue3Peterson.html

The great thing about the Foundling Review, for a writer, is that they have what they call the writer’s corner at the end of every piece, where the writer can do briefly what I try to do here on this blog, talk about where the piece came from, and how it was written. After the poem, “Love Thy Neighbor“, and my bio, it says this in the writer’s corner:

This poem was written while watching Bobby Flay grill lobster tails on the Food Network, and trying to think of a new way to serve hamburger meat.

Seriously. As a mom, you buy a lot of hamburger meat. As a mom, you grow tired of hamburgers, Hamburger Helper, and meatloaf. But what else are you going to buy that will feed you, your spouse, and three kids? Steak? Not on my budget. So I am pretty much always trying to find new ways to use ground beef. Or ground turkey. Or hot dogs. Or tuna in a can. You get the idea.

So, I watch a lot of Food Network. And I get a lot of Bobby Flay grilling up stuff I can’t afford.  Which makes me just want to mash that ground chuck into little patties, throw them on the pan, and go write a little something while they sizzle. This poem is the product of that. Thank you Bobby Flay. Thank you very much.

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http://www.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/gennie.pl?Fiction+480+bi

Recently, Poor Mojo’s published a poem of mine, which I blogged about the other day, but in April they published some flash fiction of mine, titled “The Birth of Madam Satan“. It was another piece inspired by  photos I found on Black and WTF, one of nuns smoking cigarettes, another of a woman in a mask holding a sign that read “I Am Madam Satan”. I put them side by side as writing prompts for a flash challenge at Scrawl, and this is what I came up with. A tale of a good boy gone horribly wrong when his illusions on what it means to be good shatter. Just a tad different from what Cecil B. De Mille had in mind in his movie, but it still makes for a good story. I’m glad Poor Moho’s thought so too.

Seriously, if you haven’t checked out Black and WTF yet, I highly recommend it, if not for writing prompts, then for just plain fun!

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http://frsh.in/60

I have worked with a number of great editors in my writing career, bu Dawn Corrigan over at GWI is one of my favorites. She saw great potential in my flash, “Breaking it Down”, but was not afraid to point out its flaws and make suggestions that made the piece even better without bruising the fragile writer‘s ego.

She was also perceptive enough to recognize that not everything in this story is fiction, and asked if I would rather have it published as non fiction. My answer was no, because then the neighbor in Breaking it Down was still my neighbor in real life, and while I seriously doubted she’d be reading the story, there was always the slim possibility that a visitor to my home might shout out to her “hey, you’re the neighbor with the fat shoulders!” if they saw her sitting out on her stoop, paperback in one hand, smoke in the other.

If the story had been published today, I might very well publish it as non fiction. There are fictitious elements to it, yes, but I’ve moved on, both physically and emotionally, from that time in my life,  and am more secure in who I am that I am willing to admit the darker sides of my life, to truly own my life, and not care as much who sees it. Rereading this story after so many months has made me realize how much I’ve changed since then. I get a little thrill of joy rereading it, not just because it’s well written, but because it’s therapeutic to look back, and appreciate what you had then, and have now.

So today, nonfiction. Put real people in your stories, without disguising them, without fear of hurt feelings or recriminations. Let your stories speak freely.

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http://talesfromthevelvetchamber.blogspot.com/2010/04/flash-fiction.html

In all my time working in libraries, the 398s have consistently been my favorite call numbers to browse. Fairly tales, folk tales, legends, they all have an allure to me that I can’t fully explain. I love reading how such tales evolved over time, for example, Goldilocks was originally an old woman and a thief before the Victorian era when she became a cute little blond with her bloomers showing. Who knew?

This fascination shows up time and again in my writing, and the piece of flash fiction that Tales from the Velvet Chamber posted earlier this year is no exception. Snow White: Sadist, (TVC has it under the original title, Snow White is Bored), explores the mind of our classic soprano Dr. Doolittle, why she would open the door, consistently, for random people just happening by a cabin in the darkest wood, where no one ever goes. Why she would choose to overlook, time and again, the warnings of the dwarfs, and put herself in jeopardy. My spin is boredom, and the wrong animal confidant.

The deadline for this project, by the way, is the end  of October. Here’s what she’s looking for:

Stories that radically revise stereotypes of “bad women” in the Bible, in myth and in fairy-tales. Stories that aren’t afraid to be literary, transgressive, dark, and sexy. Think: Lilith, Medea, the Wicked Stepmother, the Evil Witch, Pandora, Eve, crones, sibyls, fates, muses. Contemporary adaptations are fine. Mythical adapations equally welcome.

Email story in word attachment to laslugocki@gmail.com Subject line: Submission. Documents should be double-spaced, 12 pt. font, Times New Roman. Paragraphs should be indented five spaces. Bio (necessary) and contact information in the upper right hand corner. Stories should not exceed 5,000 words. Please do not send work-in-progress. Final drafts only.

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http://gloomcupboard.com/2010/04/20/poetry-119/

The poem of mine published in Gloom Cupboard earlier this year, entitled Mr. Stephens Buys a Vineyard, came completely out of my imagination.  I know no one named Stephens, though I know a lot of Steves, including my brother, thought I don’t really think this came from any of them. Looking back, I don’t really know what inspired me on this one.

Rereading it after so long, though, I get it. Right now I feel as if I am starting over, hopefully for the very last time, so I can finally relate to this middle-aged man who has left the corporate world behind and put everything he has into rows and rows of grapes, treating them and the earth that nourishes them as the family he’s never had. I feel sorry for Mr. Stephens, he’s got money I don’t have, but I’ve got people who love me, so we’re more than even, I think I actually come out on top in this one.

To all the Mr. Stephens’s out there in the world tonight, thank you for allowing me to dream you up. For the rest of you, take some time before work tomorrow to dream up your own characters, try hard as you can to pull from nothing.

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http://www.downdirtyword.com/authors/helenpeterson.html#tp

You can follow this link to every little thing I’ve ever published in the Legendary, but for today I’d just like to talk about the two poems published this year, and leave the fiction and nonfiction for another day.

A writer has to draw on everything they know, they have to listen to the language around them, both at home and away.  Both of  these poems, “What it Means to be a Whore’s Daughter”, and “Popcorn Ball Blues” reflect my own listening skills, especially as a child spending her summers in either the Southern US or out West with relatives, grandmas, uncles, that I didn’t get to see the rest of the year, and that talked in words and inflections in ways quite different from the Connecticut Yankees back home.

Not that home didn’t play a part in it as well.  My own feelings of betrayal and heartache birthed the Whore’s Daughter, using the pen and the keyboard to vent as a woman scorned causes, I hope, a lot less bloodshed than taking a sword into the trailer park. Popcorn Ball Blues on the other hand is just plain fun, one of the first flash poems I ever wrote after joining Scrawl back in 2007. They’re polar opposites, these two poems, but they work well together. It’s as if Popcorn was the hot Friday night, and Whore’s Daughter is the morning after, full of regrets.

Enjoy these, and the other work by myself and others in the Legendary. It really is a good read, every issue.

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http://www.apparatusmagazine.com/V1I10HelenPeterson.html

Apparatus Magazine published two of my poems in April, “Bargain Bin Blues” and “Jack and Me”.  Both poems really owe a lot to my life experiences, but both approach them from very different times in my life, and in different ways.

“Bargain Bin Blues” is all about the soundtrack of my college years in Lynchburg, Virginia. A lot of jam bands, Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews Band, and the campfires and freedoms of a person’s late teens and early twenties, where the rules are few, and so is the money. It doesn’t say in the poem, but the CD in question is the soundtrack for the film White Man’s Burden.

Where Bargain Bin riffs off of the musical soundtrack of my life, Jack and Me is all about the poetry that influenced me in the beginning, specifically that of the Beats. I was in love with Jack Kerouac in high school. Crazy dark-haired alcoholic mama’s boy is an acquired taste for some, but has been a type that has always gotten me into trouble. I blame Jack.

In Gerald Nicosia‘s critical biography Memory Babe, he relates a story about how Jack  at a young age would play a mental game with himself while riding in his father’s car, pretending to mow trees down, counting mailboxes, things like that. I would do the same thing. The character Galatea in On the Road was based on a woman named Helen. My Roman name in Latin class was Galatea. Freaky coincidences that don’t really mean much now, but to an easily swayed sixteen year old it was a sign from above, that I would be a writer. Not just a writer, but a Writer!!!!!

So, time changes everything. I got my dark-haired doe eyed drunk, and it was not a happy ending. Is it ever? I wrote a poem poking fun at myself a little, taking off the rosy glasses that romanticized the short life of a man who in the end was rather sad, and setting an expiration date for my life, many many years into the future. Stay tuned to see how that turns out.

Now it’s your turn. Has a childhood hero let you down? Have your ideals changed with time, wisdom, responsibilities and paychecks? Write about it, and let me know how it turns out.

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http://www.iceflow.com/doorknobs/DOORBODY2.html

The fun thing about Doorknobs and Bodypaint is the prompts they give in the guidelines for each issue. They are split up into Dorsal, Doorknobs, Hayward Faultline, Tapas, and the Cairo Room. The Cairo Room can be anything within the issue’s theme, such as the theme for my issue, in February, was Love,  the most recent one was Hot Summer Nights.  Each of the other sections must include a certain word, or turn of phrase, or setting. For example, the Hayward Faultline prompts for the Work issue last May were:

HAYWARD FAULT LINE (shake us up)
1. Maximum length: 450 words.
2. The sub-theme is: toil.
3. The setting is: Auckland, NZ.
4. Within the story, you must use this bit of text: gum up.

Fun prompts like these give a writer a chance to stretch out of their comfort zones, look at new ideas and old stories in ways that they hadn’t thought of before.

For example, the story I had published there in February, “Hello Young Lovers” was already pretty much written when the guidelines came out, but I hadn’t found a home for it yet. It was the only real love story I had sitting around on my hard drive, but the prompts from DK & BP required the story to take place in the mid fifties, and my story was a modern one. So, I changed Baby Girl‘s Juicy Couture jeans into pedal pushers, played a little with the language, changing a few words to include the phrasing the Dorsal prompt required, (charity of second chances was originally just plain old second chances), and a masterpiece was written. At least, I convinced myself and the editors of DK & BP it was so.

Today, click on the link, read through some of the old and new guidelines for Doorknobs and Body Paint, and try your hand at one. Send it to them, or post it here with me.  Stretch those writing wings a little.

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http://snowmonkeyjournal.blogspot.com/2010/05/helen-peterson.html

This May, Snow Monkey published my poem, “Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Grandmother“. Giving credit where credit is due, the title came from a book I once bought my mother-in-law for her birthday. This was a running joke with us, since she was in her mid thirties when I had my oldest son. Her husband, my ex-husband’s step-dad, was twenty seven, but it’s funny, I never did find a Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Grandfather book. Freud would have something to say about that, I’m sure.

Anyway, the title may have come from a funny little book, but the body of the poem came from the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of my favorite poets. According to Nancy Millford’s excellent biography, Savage Beauty, when Millay’s mother thought her daughter might be pregnant, she forced her to take multiple scalding hot baths, and ride her horse bareback up and down the valleys and meadows near their home. It was such a crazy contrast to how my own parents and in-laws reacted, it stuck with me, more than anything else in the book, and it was a very good book, worth the read if you have the time and wish to do so.

You may notice, though, that I don’t use Millay’s name in the poem. In earlier drafts I did, added more details specific to her own life. In workshopping, others found the specificity distracting, and so I applied a name I had used before, in Baby Girl poems, the fragile and distracted Sweet Baby. It added another slant to the idea of a mother manipulating her daughter’s body, even after the girl is grown into her own sexuality.

This is just one example of how I sometimes get inspired by the lives of real people, and by what I read in books. Take something you’ve read, that has stuck with you, and use it as a writing prompt this evening. When you’re done, pick up a book you’ve been dying to read.  Begin to read it with an eye for inspiration, as well as for leisure. Taste the words and stories within, mull it around your tongue with the spices from your own life. Begin to read like a writer.

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http://dansemacabre.art.officelive.com/PoesieAuxBarricades.aspx

Danse Macabre has to be one of the most beautiful online literary sites up and running today. Every issue is so well put together, with the art and the words. So, I was pleased as punch they published a poem of mine earlier this year called “The Feminine Mystique“.

The poem was based upon something my good friend and fellow poet Katie Moore, editor of the Legendary posted on Facebook once, how she almost “drank” a brown recluse that had slipped into her coffee cup. The image was so vivid to me, a self-proclaimed arachnaphobe, that I had to write about it.  I thought about what I thought of as Katie’s strengths, as well as those of some of my other favorite ladies who write, and wove a simple tale about the recycling of a spider corpse. A bit creepy, a bit empowering. It’s all good.

Tonight, take someone’s status update and weave a tale through it. Share it here, or share it on your friends’ wall. Create unlikely dialogue through the time-sucking device of social networking. Make Facebook work for you for once.