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Middle school is never easy. It’s especially tough when you’ve always been a little socially awkward. As I was. And, ok, continue to be. I think most writers, most creative people, live within their minds to a degree that interacting with other people isn’t always easy. Add to that an embarrassing childhood illness, and you’ve got a made for tv movie in the making.

Or, in my case, fodder for good poetry. A great example is the poem Pirene‘s Fountain published of mine earlier this year, entitled “When the Wall Came Down”. The wall of course refers to one of the big historical moments during my youth, Perestroika, and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Also, great fodder. Especially when you combine it with preteen angst.

Today, make a list of all the defining historical moments of your youth. Thinks about where you were, what you were doing, how it impacted you, how it didn’t. Start brainstorming how one thing mirrored the other, how history could be used as a metaphor for the first person you kissed, the bully that pushed you into the mud, the joy of making the soccer team, the defeat of not gaining a part in the school play.

 

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http://www.bartlebysnopes.com/querrie.htm

This story came from a flash writing prompt on the online writers’ workshop I belong to, Scrawl. One of the prompts was ‘Fifth Column‘, and one was quisling. Of course that lead to a story about a rebellious teenage rock band, just the way my mind works.

Fifth Column really is an all girl punk band from Canada, contrary to this story, they’re not all that bad.

 

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In 2009 The Cartier Street Review published some of my more experimental poems.  Oral Fixation was written on a challenge, to write a poem about going to the dentist. Most of us within the challenge took on the dark side of dentistry, and I was no exception. But instead of the winding narrative typical of most of my work at the time, Oral Fixation is clipped, short, random.

Night.Mare. has more of a story within it, but is still a jarring, disjointed poem. Based upon an incident in my youth, when my horse got tired and decided to lay down and roll with me riding her, and a confusing, blurred dream years after. Using the symbolic importance most women place on horses in their youth, I managed to touch on the disturbing feeling of puberty without spelling it out literally, the sense of being overwhelmed, confused, and crushed.

Is there an animal that has taken importance at some time in your life? Think there’s something you could never write a poem about, like the dentist? Try writing one or both today.