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.

Later that same day, the three of us were eating ripe, perfect peaches in the kitchen, the juice dripping down our arms, wiping our mouths with the back of our hands, moaning in pleasure at the taste of such edible perfection.

So I started thinking what it would mean if eating became the new sex. If eating was considered a thing to do in private, a shamed thing. Would you get embarrassed if you ate in front of someone? Would it be different if you ate a piece of hard candy versus a ripe, juicy, dripping peach? Would people pay for the pleasure of watching you eat? What would the social ramifications be of someone who wantonly ate in front of others, who invited others back to their kitchens, who broke bread with a stranger? Would there be repercussions if someone forced you to eat against your will, essentially raped you will food?

I can have an idea –and god knows, I have a million of them – but a story isn’t a story for me until I have a character, an image, a voice in my head. “Seeds” didn’t come to life until I saw a man buying cherries at the local farmers’ market. I watched as he fed them slowly, one by one, to the woman he was with. And in that instant, I had both the narrator of my story, and the catalyst.

–

Shanna Germain claims the titles of leximaven, she-devil, vorpal blonde and Shrodinger’s brat. Her work has appeared in places like Absinthe Literary Review, Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Romance, Pank, Storyglossia, Subversion and more. Visit her wild world of words at www.shannagermain.com.

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

The Story:

‘Francis Observes How Babies Are Made’ is published in New Writing Scotland #29.

An extract:

Francis is watching the moon. It is white like a bowl of milk and it makes the plain outside the window look black and silver like it’s on television. Francis hopes that if he stays very still then maybe he will see the moon move. Kulowali says that a beautiful woman lives in the moon because she flew there to get away from a man she did not love. The man knows that she is in the moon but although he spends all day looking for her, he can never find her. Francis thinks that the man sounds silly, and is glad that he is clever enough to look at things in the nighttime as well as the daytime. He likes the story of the beautiful woman in the moon but he is not sure that that is Science. A thing is only Science if it is observable and repeatable.

The Inspiration:

Dad is the wee blonde boy at the back.

My dad spent a few years of his childhood in Nigeria with his two brothers. It was the years of the Empire and my granddad had a job that was something to do with the British government, though I don’t really know what.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my parents and grandparents a lot. This is largely because my dad recently died, and of course that brings up all sorts of memories and thoughts about opportunities missed.

My gran, Margot Logan.

I’m 27, and that seems to be the age when you finally realise that the older generation are actually humans with lives and desires and opinions, rather than just grumpy creatures who exist to make your dinner and pay your rent when you’ve spent it all on Jaegarbombs and sushi. Okay, I haven’t actually done that last thing, but you get the point. My grandmother was a Proper Lady, the type who wore skirt-suits and powdered her nose. I know I can never be a lady like that because I have tattooed wrists and a tendency to mumble. But she raised three boys and had perfect pitch and ate dinner with the Queen (though she wasn’t the Queen at the time) and taught me to play the piano even though I was utterly rubbish. And I’m sad that I didn’t get a chance to really know her as a fellow adult, rather than just as my granny.

My dad, however, I knew very well. Like all families we had our differences, but I’d meet him for lunch at least once a fortnight, and we talked on the phone every week.

Dad is in the middle.

So although the story is about Frances (or rather, about the child version of my dad, Ewan), it’s really about my grandparents and the life they created for my dad – and for me, too.

NOTE: My dad was always a science nerd. I don’t know if he asked for a calculator for Christmas, but I like to think that he did.

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.

When I was small, holidays to my grandma’s house were a proper treat. As well as living right next to the beach in Cellardyke, as writer and English teacher, Alison Thirkell (grandma to me) always told the most amazing bedtime stories. Hearing her homespun tales, making strawberry tarts together and running down to the beach to play are some of the kind of childhood memories that feel so idyllic I can barely believe they are true. Lucky for me they are, I have photographs to prove it.

The holidays are mainly light in my mind, sunlight on the sand, the glow from the fireplace, but there’s smudge of grey on the lens, a child’s clumsy fingerprints. Closer, the smudge is a moment, a fact. I remember very vividly having a tantrum under the dining room table, refusing to eat the soup that had been put in front of me.

Alison Thirkell, Lynsey's grandmother

My grandmother’s head swung down, visiting me among the legs of the adults, a place I thought wholly mine, and gave me what for. She asked me how I thought I would feel if I’d spent a long time making something, and an ungrateful little girl said she hated it without even trying it. I can’t remember whether I stopped crying, whether I ate my soup like I was supposed to or whether I stayed there sulking for a while longer. I do know something sank in, and it never really left me.

I suspect I’d never so succinctly understood that other people had feelings before, certainly not people who had only one function in my mind, for example, to be my grandmother. In a way, it doesn’t matter why I remember it, only that I do. And smudges like that are destined to end up in stories, blighting the lightness of a page.

I’d like to think I ended up a more likable character than my protagonist is, but I was interested in looking at the ways a momentary experience in childhood can stay with you, transforming your perception of yourself and your place in the world, while the grown ups around you go on with their own lives, feckless, unaware or temporarily forgetful of their power.

—

BIO: Lynsey lives, loves and writes in Edinburgh, where she’s very happily surrounded by cafes, bookshops and the mix of Scottish sweetness and inherent bleakness she’s always trying to capture on paper. You’ll generally find her immersed in a book or procrastinating online, come and help her out on the latter at www.lynseymay.com

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

The Story:

‘Underskirts’ won third place in the 2010 Bridport Prize and is published online at PANK.

An extract:

She found me with my hands around chickens, fingers stretched wide, thumbs over beaks. My skirt, mud-weighed, tugged at my ankles as I dipped low. Silly to curtsey while armed with birds, I knew, but it had to be done. If I’d let go they’d’ve flown at her, chuttering through her red hair. And what a sight that would’ve been! The lady, still horsed, with her legs one on either side and her skirt hitching up to show a handspan of stocking. And her horse as white as cuckoo-flowers, with its little red haunch-spot not quite hidden by the bridle. I kept my thumbs tight over those dangerous beaks.

The Inspiration:

In March 2010 I went to Amsterdam with my girlfriend Susie. This is us, looking like the professional creative people we are:

We went to the Van Gogh Museum and it was incredible and inspiring and enlightening and all that other good stuff, and I went on to read The Yellow House by Martin Gayford (which I highly recommend). But then, at the end of the museum, there was an exhibition of paintings by Van Gogh’s contemporaries. And that’s where I saw this painting, ‘Portrait of Guus Preitinger’ by Kees van Dongen:

And my brain said DING DING DING in the manner of a winning slot machine. Well, okay, it wasn’t that dramatic. It was more like ‘she looks interesting, I would enjoy writing a story about her’.

When I got home, I flipped through my writing notebook and found a note I’d written to myself months ago – lady lifts servants’ skirts. I have no idea what I meant, but I thought it fit nicely with the painting.

But a story can’t be about one character – what the lady needed was a love interest. I searched through online archives of paintings and found this one of a farmer-girl gazing dreamily into the distance. Aha!, I thought, this is the sort of girl who would run away on adventures.

So I wrote a story about a lady who lifts her servants’ skirts, and about the sorts of girl who ran away on adventures. The ending, you might notice, comes back again to my fascination with anchoresses, because as much as I wanted the lady to have a happy ending I knew that she could not.

(Note: My first thought on seeing ‘Portrait of Guus Preitinger’ was ‘hey, she reminds me of PJ Harvey.’ And when I went down to Bridport to collect my prize, who was there at the ceremony but… PJ Harvey.)

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

The Story:

‘How I Learned To Love A Real Man’, first published online at BURST.

Reprinted in Eve’s Harvest (Odyssey Books).

An extract:

Thirteen heralded my Goth phase. I had brief affairs with Heathcliff (too obsessive), Mr. Darcy (too pouty), and Jonathan Harker (too wussy). I went through a brief but decidedly creepy phase of swithering between Edgar Allen Poe and Humbert Humbert. I soon realised that a lust for thirteen year old girls is not necessarily a good thing in a prospective lover.

The Inspiration:

The short version is that I wrote this story because when I was a teenager I had a crush on Rasputin. Just process that for a moment before we continue.

A crush.

On Rasputin.

I’ve always had unusual crushes. Some may say ‘odd’, but I think they all make perfect sense. Right now, for example, my secret boyfriend is Danny Trejo.

PHWOOOOAAAARRRR.

I think it goes without saying that if Danny Trejo was an actual, real, non-famous man who came up to me in a bar and was all “hey baby, wanna get dirty?” (because I imagine that is what he would say), then I would say “no thank-you” and move to another seat. Or perhaps throw my drink in his face and run away before he could wipe the vodka out of his eyes, depending on how scary he looked at the time.

The point is that while the face of Danny Trejo is not attractive, the general persona of Danny Trejo is very sexy indeed. I can’t really explain this, because if you’re not nodding in agreement as you read this then I can never convince you. And that brings me to Rasputin.

Similarly, Rasputin is not attractive. I mean, check this shit out:

He’s obviously a total creep. And yet, and yet! My teenage brain considered him to be the ideal boyfriend. Clearly, a beardy dead Russian mystic is the perfect partner for a queer bookish goth teenager in Glasgow. The rom-com script practically writes itself. Again, I can’t explain this, because if you’re not nodding then I’ve already lost you.

I should add that I had some slightly more normal crushes, like King Charles II and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (they’re normal guys for teenage girls to fancy, right?). Then again, I’m pretty sure I genuinely had a crush on Humbert Humbert and Edgar Allen Poe too. Maybe I just needed to get out more.

Obviously I’m not the only person who can see Rasputin’s appeal, because the illustration that goes along with my story in Eve’s Harvest makes him fit for the cover of a romance novel:

How about you? Who are your unusual crushes?