One Thursday per month, I invite my favourite writers to share the inspirations behind their stories. Here’s one from the brilliant and dreamy Dawn West.

The Story:

‘Black Wolves’ is published online in Bluestem Magazine.

An extract:

Madeleine forms a silent kiss with her lips at the black wolf head tattooed above Amy Harrow’s bruises, the twin of her own; tattoos they acquired the week they turned eighteen and thought they would run away together, a life or nine months ago.

“Somewhere like Iowa, or Montana,” Amy said, sucking a pen cap during the six days she tried to quit cigarettes. Madeleine licked the paper of a joint closed, lit it, blew smoke rings into Amy’s redwood curls, and said, “I love you, Amy, but you’re fucking high if you think I’m moving to Montana.”

The Inspiration:

Photo by Angelica Ström

I started making collages and moodboards during puberty, which was around the same time I started writing, which was years after I started announcing “I want to be a writer when I grow up.” When I was fourteen I wrote close to one hundred single-spaced pages of a fantasy novel with sighing chain-smoking bookish teens, each equipped with a unique magical power and a secret way to this faerie-populated alternate reality. I called it Quartet, because there were four of them. I thought I was the black Francesca Lia Block. It was serious.

I cut up dozens of magazines and checked out two thick stacks of modern art books from the library as a way of “inspiring” that ninety-something pages. I printed it all and hugged it smelled it caressed it and eventually forgot about writing the ending when I turned fifteen, fell in love with Anne Sexton and became a “confessional poet,” amped up the intoxicants and dating and tripping into hot tubs and hating my body and having in-car dance parties on the interstate and pretending to be straight because oh God, let’s not get into it. I was being an adolescent. All through that, I kept making collages. I also began making CD playlists in coordination with them.

There is nothing like looking at an image, or hearing a song, and feeling something that is not necessarily love. It’s gotten inside you, whatever is so fucking heartbreaking about this song, or this photograph, or this painting, or even this fashion editorial, and then these phrases and independent images are filling you like waves of air.

In my case, with Black Wolves, I didn’t end up making a full-on moodboard. One evening I saw this photo of a girl with a wolf tattoo on her back. How she was curled, how the light met her hair, the unadorned mattress, and that captivating tattoo. I was curious about her, and I was listening to this fucking fabulous song by The Magnetic Fields, and I was somewhat intoxicated, and suddenly it had been fifteen minutes and I had been staring at that image, listening to that same song on repeat, without fully realizing it, because I was preoccupied with this made-up girl with rainbow-rinsed hair and a wolf tattoo like the girl in the photograph and I wanted to know why she scared me. I wanted to make her cry out someone’s name and I wanted to know why and I wanted to know a lot of other things, so I wrote the first draft of her story in a single sitting, keeping a handful of songs on rotation, all by The Magnetic Fields. A few sittings later, the story was over but I’m not done with her. I have more Madeleine Dunn questions to answer, I think. When Stephin Merritt sings, she clamors around inside me, making all kinds of pretty complicated noise.

–

Dawn West (b. 1987) is a fiction writer and book reviewer living in the American Midwest.

Photo by Angelica Ström.

Books:
Best Lesbian Erotica 2011 (Cleis Press)
Girl Crush: Women’s Erotic Fantasies (Cleis Press)
Let’s Pretend: 37 Stories About Infidelity (Freight)
Shut Up/Look Pretty (Tiny Hardcore Press)

Literary Magazines:
Booth #3
Gutter #1
New Writing Dundee #5
New Writing Scotland #29
On Spec #87
PANK #4
Parcel #1
Specs #3

Read Coin-Operated Boys here (it’s free!)

And don’t forget to comment here or email me when you’ve reviewed it, so that I can enter you into the prize draw.

One Thursday per month, I invite my favourite writers to share the inspirations behind their stories. Here’s one from writer/scientist Helen Sedgwick.

The Story:

‘Horizon View’ is published online in Algebra.

An extract:

He remembers asking her if the comet was a falling star and how much he liked her reply: that it was more like a dirty great snowball hurtling through time and space. He looks up to the sky in his empty field and focuses his eyes on comet Hale-Bopp and presses his shotgun into the roof of his mouth and pulls the trigger. As his heart stops beating, an instant before his brain bursts from his skull with shattering violence, he remembers his almost-sister, almost best-friend, and thinks that he will visit; turn up on her doorstep and ring the bell and tell her that she is remembered, that she is –

The inspiration: 

It started with a title. In The Days Of The Comet, taken from the book of the same name by H.G. Wells, was used to inspire an art exhibition, and then borrowed again to thematically collect short fiction for Tramway’s Algebra magazine. I must admit, I haven’t read H.G. Wells’ novel. I must also admit that I didn’t see the art exhibition. What inspired me, perhaps unusually, wasn’t the literature or the art, but the thought of the comet itself.

As one of the characters in Horizon View says, comets are “dirty great snowballs hurtling through time and space.” They are composed mostly of rock, dust and ice, with frozen gasses inside and, perhaps, more complex molecules such as amino acids. Having travelled many billions of miles, they slingshot past earth and for a short time they are close enough to see us – to witness the human drama unfolding on the surface of our planet – before boomeranging around the sun and speeding away. I wanted to reflect that motion in the story, to capture the glimpse of humanity that comets get when they pass us by, and the missing centuries in between.

Like comets, which come in different sizes and with wildly different trajectories, the influences in this story are varied; stolen images like the panel on the Bayeux tapestry that shows Halley’s comet, rooms like the attic with the Velux window that was my bedroom as a child. Each appearance of the comet, in each fragment of story, sees a life that has, to some extent, been stolen. Anaxagoras was a real philosopher, Nero was an exceptionally brutal and paranoid emperor, a nightclub in Edinburgh really did burn down. Sometimes the thievery is more personal. The man who commits suicide on his farm in Brittany is based on my second cousin who, tragically, shot himself on his farm in Ireland. But despite all these influences, I gave myself a lot of freedom – I invented locations, fictionalised events, re-imagined characters. I wanted the historical details to be accurate, but the narrative and the meaning to be entirely my own.

The most truthful aspect of the story, then, was stolen from myself. When I lived in Edinburgh I used to climb Blackford Hill to look at the night sky and remind myself that there is more out there than we can possibly understand. What I wanted to convey in Horizon View was the feeling that, no matter what is happening on earth, whatever cruelty, catastrophe or kindness is taking place when comets visit us, after a few short days they speed away into a universe that is so much bigger than we are. For me, that is inspiring.

—

Helen Sedgwick writes, edits and teaches in Scotland, and recently won a New Writers Award for her science-themed short story collection in-progress, Statistically Speaking.

The Glasgow Women’s Library – Oh, how I love the Women’s Library. It’s the only resource of its kind in Scotland, with a brilliant lending library and a treasure trove of historical and contemporary artifacts and archive materials that celebrate the lives, histories and achievements of women. My personal favourites are the 1950s Vogues and the luchadoras record sleeves.

Radiolab – My all-time favourite podcast, full of fascinating nerdy things that even a science-dunce like me can understand.

Duotrope – A fantastic resource for writers, with thousands of listings, contents and submission stats. And it’s all free! They work hard and deserve our support.

Lambda Literary – For LGBT readers, writers, publishers, editors, librarians, booksellers and the entire LGBT literary community. I love their newsletter, and I always find something new I want to read on the site.

Or if you like, ignore them and make a donation to your favourite charity or organisation. I promise it will make you feel good!

It fastens with a popper on a leather strap, and the Kindle is held in with elasticated loops at each corner. It’s not exactly professional-looking (the barcode on the book’s inside cover is still visible!), but I’m proud of it.

I also made tea lights out of jam-jars and an old duvet cover (and then little matching ornaments out of the same fabric and the jam jar lids), and a wreath out of wool with some spare buttons and a charm that fell off an old handbag:

Lots of crafty things, and all free! Well, I’ve got to do something while I’m procrastinating on my novel edits…

Seriously. I’ve just stopped. I don’t know what happened to all that momentum, but I will now do literally anything other than edit my novel. My days are spent researching, writing articles, teaching classes, doing readings – not time-wasting, but not novel-editing either. And if I’m honest, I’m mostly doing those other things so that I don’t have to edit. Now I feel faintly sick every time I think about clicking on the novel’s Word file.

So what’s happened? Is it fear of failure, or fear of success? Or a bit of both?

I think it’s that it feels too real. When I was writing the novel I did, of course, hope that someday other people would read it. Now I now that the next thing I write will be read by my agent – a professional, a person who reads the work of dozens of wannabe novelists every day. Even scarier, she’ll then send it out to – oh good god! – editors. It cripples me to think that the sentence I just wrote (the one I’m sure is so imperfect, so clunky, so self-conscious) could one day be read by strangers.

I knew it would be a struggle to get an agent, to get a publishing deal, to get reviews, to get readers. But then the first draft and the agent part seemed to happen fairly easily. So what if the rest of it is that easy? And what if it isn’t? What if I stumble right off the starting block? Far better to just feel pleased with my achievements so far, and never have to find out whether I can really succeed.

Except that’s bullshit. I know it is. I might have some potential, but that’s useless if it stays unfulfilled. I know exactly what I have to do: stop being a fucking wuss and just get down the the grown-up business of editing.

Knowing something isn’t the same as being able to do it, though – so here I am, writing a blog post about how I’m scared of ending up as a failure or a success, instead of moving a step closer to seeing which one it will be. So this is what I ask of you: give me a good, hard kick up the arse and tell me to get back to my bloody edits.

I’m in Edinburgh!

1st March: See Edinburgh’s beautiful buildings lit up with famous quotes as part of enLIGHTen. Download my story ‘Sleep Pictures’ then get yourself down to the Roxburghe Hotel at Charlotte Square to have a listen.

I’m in Glasgow!

4th March: Don’t miss Words Per Minute’s Feminisms special, featuring novelists Helen Fitzgerald and Jessica Gregson, new writing from Amber Sparks and Suzanne Egerton, live music from Two Wings and Doves of Disorder. It’ll be braw.

I’m in London!

6th March: Pop down to the Queen of Hoxton at 7pm to hear me read at The Special Relationship. I’ll be joined by the fabulous Katy Darby, author of The Whore’s Asylum.

I’m in Glasgow Again!

8th March: Draw, listen, talk, laugh, think, create, observe, learn, share as we celebrate the one hundred and first year of International Women’s Day, and the end of a year-long community project raising money for 5 women’s charities. I’ll be reading with fellow lady-writers Helen Sedgwick and Kirstin Innes.

I’m in Copenhagen!

23rd March: I’ll be reading at Copenhagen Central Library at 4pm along with the wonderful writers Allan Wilson, Raman Mundair and William Letford.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, it’s my 28th birthday. Phew. After all that, I will most definitely need a sit-down, a cup of tea, and several handfuls of biscuits.

The Story:

‘Fuck You Too, Pixie Meat’ is published in Gutter #5.

An extract:

Some girl was up on stage doing her thing, standing on her tiptoes to sing because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to lower the mic after the boys had played. Her band was Bitches on Acid, or Cuntfight, or Slit, and they had red glitter drumskins and Hello Kitty stickers on the bass. You know exactly how they looked: pink hair, smeared lipstick, and muffin-tops anchored over the waists of their jeans. There was even a plastic unicorn standing guard at the front of the stage. You know exactly how they sounded too, but who needs more than three chords anyway?

The Inspiration:

Like many misunderstood teen girls in the 90s, I adored Courtney Love. I was all about kinderwhore style: big black boots, torn slip dresses, red lipstick. I had long multicoloured hair and I’d adorn it with cheap diamante tiaras or tie it up with rosary beads (see photographic evidence of me at 16). Oh, I thought I was the shit.

I’m now 27 and although I do still wear black boots and red lipstick, I save the tiaras for fancy dress. And I still love Courtney Love and Hole and especially their 1994 album Live Through This.

I wanted to try a new thing (well, new to me) where I’d write a story based around the structure, sound and lyrics of a song. I chose the Hole song ‘Rock Star’ because I thought that the word repetition and stuttering start and end would lend themselves well to prose. Also, I was in a bit of a rut with pretty, floaty, fairytale-style stories and thought something with lots of screaming and swear-words might snap me out of it.

I named the characters Jennifer (after the song ‘Jennifer’s Body’) and Tabitha (after something Courtney Love said in a live show that I’ve never understood: “This song is about the girl in your class who always smelled of pee – that was me, not Tabitha.”)

The song starts in with a stuttering repeat so I started the story the same way:

It went like this: the sky was glittering, the dancefloor was throbbing, and every single goddess there was looking at the way –

Once upon a time there was a girl, and one star-strewn night she met a boy who was a bite of perfection, all lipstick and bones, and they lived happily –

Fuck it. This is how it really was: Wednesday night at the Olympia and everyone looked the same.

It goes on, loosely following the structure of the song, using words and imagery from the lyrics. And I enjoyed it so much that now I want to write a short story collection, Kinderwhoring, inspired by the Live Through This album. Of course, that’s after I finish my other story collection, and my first novel, and the other two novels I’ve been researching, and the dozens of unconnected short stories I want to write, and…

Anyway, here’s the song:

And you can read the story in Gutter #5.

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.

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

First, I read a story entirely on its own, for a sense of its quality, style and fitting the genre; from there, it gets a “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” As I read, I generally begin to get a sense of recurring themes, kinds of characters, and ideas that seem to be on a lot of peoples’ minds. I read the stories again, and begin to get an idea for how they might go together. I’m looking for a range of style and content: they can’t all be very dark, or very funny, or all hookups, or all long term relationships. There has to be a mix, but it’s good when one story might lead to another in style or theme. And, no matter how well written a story is, it has to fit within the genre: erotica. I’ve had some wonderful stories that could definitely be published that wouldn’t fit in this anthology for one reason or another: usually because someone ends up dead (not erotic), or there is an element of self-loathing that’s not resolved (also not erotic).

I try to get it down to a set of stories that I feel is publishable; then I hand it over to the guest judge, who makes a final selection of about 20 stories, and some alternates. Sometimes I make bets with myself on which stories the judge will choose. I’m never 100% right. The judge gets the stories back to me, I give them an order, and I submit them to Cleis (the publisher). Cleis gives feedback, and may suggest adding or dropping a story, and we go back and forth on it, and that’s how we end up with our final table of contents.

Q. What is your favourite part of editing BLE?

I like emailing authors and saying: “you’re in,” and later, I like sending them money. I love getting the books in the mail! (No, I do not have a Kindle).

Q. Do you regret letting any stories go?

There was one story I loved two years ago, and it ended up getting cut for space reasons, and I contacted the author and urged her to submit it again, and it was a finalist again (amid a crop of completely different stories), and a different guest judge chose it the following year. So “the one that got away” one year, didn’t get away the next.

Q. Are there any common themes/plots/characters that you’d like to never see again?

Well, I’ll give any trope a chance if it’s told in a new or different way, but some of them are hard to pull off. For example: teacher/student stories; badly done domme/sub relationships (usually written by people who are intrigued by the idea, but don’t have a real sense of the scene); relationships where a woman is terribly jealous of a man, and convinces her lover have sex with the man (while some of those stories are actually submitted by male authors, there are some submitted by women as well).

Q. Is there something you’d love to see in a story, but never or rarely do?

Sex with animals! No, I’m just kidding. I really don’t want to see stories that have sex with animals. Or anything coerced/non-consensual, or anything with an underage protagonist being seduced/dominated by a much-older woman. What I would like to see, and in fact, I am seeing more of since I’ve started editing this series, are stories that have some emotional heft to them (well, like yours, Kirsty). I certainly like well written stories that are pretty much just about people fucking, and there will always be a lot of them in BLE, but I also like ones where memorable, real characters go someplace that we want to go with them. I told one of the authors in BLE ’12 that I could see her story published, as is, in a literary magazine, and it fit perfectly in with our anthology. I look forward to your novels, because you’ve got a craft, a way of creating a sense of place, and a fearlessness that characterizes a good writer.

–

The deadline for this year’s BLE is April 1, and you can get specific guidelines at www.kathleenwarnock.com

This year’s BLE (selected by Sinclair Sexsmith) is available now, as are BLE ’11, selected by Lea DeLaria, and BLE ’10, selected by the band BETTY.