Thievery: Seed by Shanna Germain

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

One Thursday per month, I invite my favourite writers to share the inspirations behind their stories. Here’s one from the lusciously literary Shanna Germain.

The Story:

‘Seeds’ is published in print in Subversion: Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm.

An extract:

Last year, one of the men took advantage of Gardin Kaja Kalliara while in her kitchenette, stuffing her mouth with quail bread until she could take no more, holding her against the table and force-feeding her from his own mouth, pieces chewed by his own teeth even after she’d said no and no again. We girls of Kaja’s house do many things in our kitchenettes, things that would embarrass our great mothers if they knew, but to be forced, to eat from the mouth of another? No. Never. Smind Kaja Meira threw the man out, but it was too late. Gardin Kaja Kalliara had eaten her last meal at the hands of a gluttonist, a gorgist, the worst kind of rapist. We mourned her as we should a sister – returning each to our private kitchenettes the hour after her death, grieving for four days and four nights, putting out half our foodstuffs to share with her in a final breadbreak before she left for the aboveworld. But she never came to eat.

The inspiration:

A few years ago, I was sharing a house with two friends of mine for the summer. I had my own room and my own bathroom, and the rest of the house consisted of shared space. While I was in the shower one day, I started thinking about the things we keep private: Mostly bodily functions like self-cleaning, sleep and sex. Yet we eat together, an act that is in some ways a bodily function, and is in many ways far more intimate than self-cleaning or sleep or even sex.
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Kathleen Warnock wears many hats: playwright, editor of both travel and erotica, journalist, fiction writer, literary curator, Ambassador of Love. But here she has on her editor-of-Best-Lesbian-Erotica hat (not sure how that hat would look, but I know I’d like it). I’m a huge fan of the Best Lesbian Erotica series – it was my girlfriend’s gift of BLE ’09 that got me writing erotica in the first place! I’m thrilled to have stories in the ’11 and ’12 books, and so I asked Ms. Warnock a few questions:

Q. What is your process for deciding which stories should be included in Best Lesbian Erotica (BLE)?

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Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

One Thursday per month, I invite my favourite writers to share the inspirations behind their stories. Here’s one from Lynsey May.

The Story:

‘Nesting’ is published online at Imagining Scotland.

An extract:

Declan doesn’t want to find out what is stashed under the stairs, he’d rather run back up them and drink his post-work beer and talk about the sad, far away things happening on the news. But now he’s here he must finish looking, and even though the blanket doesn’t look as though it’s big enough to cover anything but a child, he is finding it hard to bend over and lift it. He wishes he’d brought something down with him and casts an eye around the dusty leaves and scraps of paper littering the floor, looking for a stick or something similar. There’s nothing to help him.

The inspiration:

Wee Lynsey

I suppose all of my stories are stolen from somewhere, somehow, but I’d say the majority of them are made up of so many fragments of here and there, it’s hard for me to work out which actual event inspired what. Not so for Nesting. There are parts of it that came from nowhere, but at its heart is a very clearly defined memory.
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