Winners of the HFR Elementary School Writing Contest (2 of 4)

compiled by Marissa Grondin

Welcome to our continuation of Stories Inspired by HFR. We received over 60 submissions to our Elementary Creative Writing Contest from talented students first through eighth grade at Dobson Montessori School in Mesa, Arizona. We’ve selected here just a few of our favorites. Though young, these writers are already well aware of how to craft compelling characters and unique storylines.

In our next installment, we will feature stories from Meera, Zane, and Holly, who all chose to write their stories in response to Caleb Charland’s “Silhouette with Matches” (HFR #52). But before we get to those, let’s take a look at a story from Cooper, a second grader who wrote this thriller in response to Leonie Hampton’s photograph “Our Home, 2007” (see image below), featured in HFR #51.

By Cooper, Second Grade
In the Wisconsin Mountains there was a haunted house. It was being investigated by a team of five: Ben, Jack, Bill, James, and Paul. They were living in the house at the time. They were creeped out, especially Bill, because he was lazy and always ate hamburgers.

Ben was in the attic bedroom. That’s always the worst place to be. He looked under the bed to see if there were any strange things, and a werewolf came out. Ben was so scared that he ran down the hall to the others. They all tried to run away, but Jack was pulled away by the werewolf. The smart one, James, knew there was more coming.

They went downstairs to the basement to look around. Paul found a bag of Skittles, and James found Jack’s jacket. Then James saw hamburgers and soda cans falling down the stairs. Bill had also been taken by the werewolf. So now, only James, Ben, and Paul were left. James went up to the attic and looked under the bed, but there was nothing there. He looked in the closet, and there was Jack, tied up.

He untied Jack, and they all went to find Bill. Ben and James were scared. They opened another closet and Bill was not there either, but there was a blue, circular ruby. James took it to research. He saw that it was a werewolf egg, and he broke it. The boys tracked down the other werewolves. They found another werewolf, and Paul threw Skittles at it.

James knocked out the werewolf with a punch. He was surprised he could do that. He sent it to the Phoenix Zoo. He then looked for Bill with Paul and Ben, but they were never able to find him. They left the house and gave up the investigation.

Issue 51 Fire Sale!

With the release of issue 52 just around the corner, we’ve decided to put issue 51, our In the Dark-themed issue, up for sale by switching it to back issue prices a couple weeks early! We’ve only got a few copies left, so do yourself a favor and snatch up this excellent issue before it’s too late! Issue 51 features amazing work from Monica Berlin, Caleb Curtiss, Stephen G. Eoannou, Julie Funderburk, Leyna Krow, Charles McLeod, Matthew Minicucci, Rosalie Moffett, Kimberly O'Connor, Christian Patterson, Vincent Scarpa, Purvi Shah, Corey Van Landingham and so many more!

And starting today, all new subscriptions will start with issue 52, tentatively set to be released April 15! We can’t wait for you to see it—stay tuned for cover art and contributor spotlight posts!

Buy issue 51 here before it is all gone, disappeared into the darkness of a sold out print run forever!

Behind the Masthead: Christine Holm, Poetry Editor

The ever-mysterious Christine Holm was one of our esteemed poetry editors last year, but she continues her verse-selecting duties for the forthcoming issues 53 and 54, this time in collaboration with Dorothy Chan. Intern Kacie Wheeler caught up with Christine to get an update about what she’s been reading and writing, as well as to find out what she’d like to see show up in the submission queue. Will she ever show her face and reveal her true identity? Impossible to tell.

Kacie Wheeler: What are you currently reading (outside of HFR submissions)?

Christine Holm: I’ve got the Best American Essays of 2012 and Rodney Jones’ collected poems nearby. I’m also working through a book about ants. It is slightly less dry than you’d expect, but still a bit tedious. I’d been noticing ants near my apartment and was fascinated with how they move and coordinate; I think the author is doing her best to make the book readable, but so far it seems like their movements are still mysterious.

KW: What are you writing right now?

CH: Over the summer I needed to trick myself into writing, so I gave myself a bit of a project by writing a sonnet every day in response to a track from Kid Koala’s album Space Cadet. I’m revisiting that raw material, dismantling and trying to make some stronger poems through that exercise.

KW: Who is your favorite poet? Why?

CH: Can I say Jay-Z? My real answer is Jay-Z. Hip-hop has always been a big influence in my life, and in terms of writing, much of the work a rapper-poet does is play with language and vocabulary. Somehow I remember this play so much more when it is spit versus on paper.

My parallel answer is probably John Berryman. His work can be great for teaching; I recently brought the first “Dream Song” to an intro class and the conversation started with my students saying they didn’t understand or like the poem. I read the poem aloud and asked them to point out words or phrases they could start digging into and it led to a great conversation demonstrating they did know what was going on, and ultimately did like the poem. Berryman does that for me a lot too, makes me willing to work to discover meaning.

KW: What kinds of things do you like to see show up in the submission queue?

CH: I’m really interested in storytelling through poetry, so I like poems that play with those expectations and find a way to tell a story in a new way. Often this also means a strong, unique voice and an equally captivating setting - it feels a bit silly to write, but there is a difference, however slight, between hand-holding and holding the reader’s hand: I want to be made complicit in the poem, in a sense. It is such a great reading experience when you are put in that world someone has created through his language.

KW: How do you prepare for a reading?

CH: Usually I’ll practice a reading two or three times. I almost practice the banter between poems more because that is difficult for me, but also I think an important part of a poetry reading. You have to give yourself and your listeners a breather, but this can also be pretty darn awkward and kill a good vibe.

KW: What are three reasons a poem is rejected?

CH: Three reasons a poem is rejected? Oof. Poems with a last-line, one-note punch. If the poem doesn’t necessitate repeated readings, if it won’t be as good in a few years as it is right now, those are harder poems to welcome into the fold. There are a lot of great poems I’ve declined for that reason. Project poems are also difficult - we only have so much space and sometimes a poem is dazzling when in conjunction with four or five other poems in that series, but doesn’t stand as strongly on its own. Those are poems I really hope to see in chapbooks someday. Plenty of times poems also get rejected because they aren’t working with what we’ve already got - that is probably a pretty unsatisfying response to the question, but we’re trying to curate a collection here, so if I’ve got a whole bunch of bees making honeycombs of the heart, an image I find irresistible, I have to send a whole bunch of bees home after we’ve picked up the first one, unless there is something that echoes or bends another one in a really unique way. A lot of submitting is a huge gamble of timing, which is why being patient and persistent is so important.

***

Christine is a second-year poet in ASU’s MFA program. She enjoys bike rides along the Tempe Canal Trail into a setting Arizona sun, the papercuts and folds of book arts and attempts at discovering her true b-girl self.

Contributor Spotlight: Purvi Shah

(Re)versing Endings/A Speaking with Art/On “L’Ete”

Sometimes summer is season of beginnings, where year should start, life as bloom.

Sometimes ending is beginning.

Sometimes I dream of summer.

*

On May 14, 2011, I participated in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival as part of the Kundiman slate of poets responding to paintings in the Peabody Essex Museum.

Our work – to make the visual speak, an ekphrasis.

But what would it mean not to speak for – but to speak with – a piece of art?

I am always imagining dialogue, even with silence, even with shadows, even with the still.

*

A final timestamp of creation – 5:37 a.m., May 14, 2011.

*

For my poetic response, I chose Syed Haider Raza’s “L’Ete.”

Or perhaps “L’Ete” chose me.

With its tender blacks and glowing reds, burnished oranges, and glimpsing whites, I find a pungent garden of shadows in Raza’s “L’Ete” – a speech simmering, perhaps that moment spilling after one has spoken dark truths, vulnerable and anticipating response.

*

Then again, neither paintings nor summers are silent, even in absence. Both have at least two dimensions. When we add our own memories and wants, sometimes an approach of infinity.

Here, it is winter in NYC. A winter belated. Climate change or otherwise, sometimes a better never than late.

*

In reverse, I wrote the six prose sections of “L’Ete.” Like a multivitamin, one a day from May 14-9, until the day of the poem’s presentation, until debut.

An upside bloom: the last section (part VI) is the first I wrote (on May 9, 2011) and the final from May 14, the opening of the poem (part I).

Fitting for a painting where sun is black, where the borders are red, where flora grows and drops. Here time stretches, a reversal, summer’s wilting or lengthening – simultaneous.

*

All my poems express longing. Perhaps.

This one expresses directions, absent voices, the imagined icons of a painting elaborated: a scythe, flowers, sun, haze.

“L’Ete” speaks to me to what is absent in its presence, the lovers we have known, the lovers we have not known. Our selves we have grown. Our selves we have bent. The intense haze of our lives as we are present – in each and every moment, this weight and possibility, this undeniable presence.

*

In some languages I know, the word for time and season is the same. A passage, a conjunction, a going & coming. A bothness. A there there.

*

Like me, Syed Haider Raza was born in India. We have both traveled to settle in other lands. Perhaps this is where similarity begins & ends.

He, born in pre-independence India and settled in France, my journey a U.S. post-1965 immigrant story.

Then again: across nations, religions, disciplines & desires, we meet in expression, in the love of mystical moment, in the art of powerful emotion in ineffable space.

How we capture this ineffable in our art forms, with a paintbrush, with a blue pen.

*

I dream of a place without winter, a New York City without down coats & brisk breeze. I dream.

*

And so we all meet in languages of desire, in space where dialogue begins.

This space that summers our desires. This space that speaks our journeys.

The space before you read the poem/absorb the painting and it responds to a feeling you never knew you had but know now, having recognized it.

The space of completion, sometimes a traveling between, sometimes simply a traveling, sometimes simply – being.

Sometimes, in end, a beginning.

***

Purvi Shah, author of Terrain Tracks, is the winner of the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008 for her work fighting violence against women. She recently directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight Asian American voices during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She serves as a non-profit consultant while contributing to the Huffington Post and hosting A Woman's World on Jus Radio. You can find more of her work at http://purvipoets.net or @PurviPoets.

AWP 2013: Boston!

Just a quick note to let you know that we will indeed be at AWP, ready and waiting to meet all our contributors, submitters and loyal readers! Our booth number is 109. We will be giving away bookmarks, stickers and postcards, selling issue 47 and issue 51, our most recent, and chatting away about what comes next for Hayden's Ferry Review (hint: issue 52 is going to be awesome). Since 51 features an In the Dark theme, expect plenty of activities to go along with that: a confession box for your darkest secrets, dark chocolate and yes, even a Lite Brite. We hope you'll stop by and see us, pick up an issue for yourself or a friend, or even subscribe! Safe travels and see you soon!

Contributor Spotlight: Leyna Krow

Tulare, California, which is the setting for my short story “Disruption,” is a real place. I would like very much for you to believe me when I tell you this.

            I’ve never been to Tulare, but I’ve driven by it and seen signs. It’s located in California’s central valley and it’s where my mom spent the first few years of her life. There’s a funny little song about Tulare that goes Tulare, Tulare/Your hills and mountains cry/It’s either do or die/Tulare, Tulare/The county where the mountains meet the sky. At some point in time, my mom taught this song to my dad, and when I was a kid, whenever anyone mentioned Tulare, one or the other of them would sing that song.  

            I picked Tulare as the setting for “Disruption” because I wanted to use the song in the story.

            But then, after I wrote the story and revised it a bunch of times and decided I liked it all right, I was struck by this terrible fear: What if the song wasn’t real? What if one of my parents made it up? Or what if someone else they knew made it up and taught it to them and they sang it not because it was a real song but because they thought it clever and it reminded them of that one super fun time their clever friend started making up songs about everyone’s home towns?

I had simply assumed the song was something my mom learned as a small Tulare child – an artifact of actual Tulare life. This was important to me because I wanted the details of my story to be accurate. I wanted my story to seem realistic. I wanted it to be believable.

            It’s my sense about those of us who write fiction that we are all always very concerned with being believable. This is because most of what we write is made up. We are very concerned with convincing readers to go along with all our made-up stuff. So, to do this, we try to pad our made-up stuff with as much real stuff as possible.

And when I say “we,” I mean I do that.

I have this feeling that if I can get the place and the clothes and the food and the indigenous plant species just right, then readers will buy in to the fake problems of all the fake people I want to tell them about. They will care about my fake people and empathize with all their fake emotions because once, in a real grocery store, they saw that one brand of toothpaste I mentioned.

            But as a reader, I know it’s actually totally the other way around. It’s when the people and their problems and their emotions are compelling that all the other stuff – place and plants and toothpaste – becomes believable, whether it’s actually real or not.

            Here’s an example of this. Last weekend, my boyfriend and I went to a reading by Robert Lopez at our local independent bookstore here in Spokane, Washington (which I also hope you will believe is a real place). Lopez read a story in which the narrator repeats the phrase “The bruised parts of a banana are poisonous,” a number of times. It’s a good story and my boyfriend and I both liked it and then, a couple nights later, my boyfriend asked me if the bruised parts on bananas really are poisonous. “Or do you think he made that up?” he said. I asked him if he’d ever eaten a bruised banana before and he said sure, but maybe they were only a little poisonous. “Or maybe the poison builds up over the course of a lifetime.” My boyfriend’s a smart guy, but he was willing to consider the possibility that bruised bananas can, over a lifetime, kill. He was willing to consider this because he was interested in a story about a character who said such things. He didn’t ask if the character was a real guy. Obviously not. But the bananas…those could maybe be true. 

            I spent a while looking for the song about Tulare online, but couldn’t find anything. I guess I should just ask my mom about it. I don’t want to do that though and so I haven’t. In the story I’ve told myself about the song, it’s real and little kids in Tulare sing it at school assemblies and civic events. I want this to be the way it is. Of course, I know it doesn’t really matter for “Disruption.” If readers buy in to characters and all their problems and emotions, they get the bananas for free. That’s the trick, really. But it’s a hard thing, as a writer, to get right.

Anyway, I hope if you read my story, you believe in the song. I hope if you read my story, you believe in Tulare, California. 

***
Leyna Krow lives in Spokane, Washington. Her fiction has been published in Sou’wester, Santa Monica Review and Ninth Letter. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her story, “Disruption,” appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review #51.

Contributor Spotlight: Rosalie Moffett

EXPERIENCES INCLUDE A SCINTILLATING AND EVER-CHANGING AND DEFORMING LIGHT GRID WITH OCCASIONAL DARK SPOTS

                                                                                    —from the Wikipedia entry on Phosphenes

           

           I imagine that your body, like mine, has made a makeshift projection screen out of the back of your eyelids. I know you've done this before, but do it again now: close your eyes. Shut them tight. That weird glowy box where your computer screen was? Those other roving fireflies or whatever they are? Let’s talk about those.

            They’re phosphenes. You might get them when you sneeze or receive a blow to the head or stand up quickly or do psychedelic drugs or meditate in the dark or have a near death experience. They also can happen spontaneously to people with prolonged deprivation of visual stimuli, and thus they are often experienced by those confined to dark cells; this is known as the “prisoner's cinema.” Darkness is not a requirement, just a lack of external visual stimulation—pilots or long-haul truckers staring into a snowstorm also see them.

            People once thought the body created its own light and this notion of “self-illumination” makes a certain gut sense to me. But apparently, that’s been disproved. Instead, we know that pressure on the eye activates your retinal ganglion cells (those cells that transmit visual information to the brain) in a way similar to light. Spontaneous generation of phosphenes has something to do with neural adaptation, which is usually experienced through a change. For instance, when you have your hand on something, a table for instance, at first you feel it there. And then, after a time, you stop feeling it. The constant stimulation causes the neurons to respond less and less. However, faced with a paucity of stimulation, the retinal ganglion cells, the visual cortex, and the part of your brain that is supposed to make some sense of your visual information get hyper sensitive and start working with spurious input.

            (Right now seems a good time to say that I’m not a scientist. I learn things from the Internet, and I’m not vouching for any accuracy here. But if I can put my faith into Wikipedia, you can too. Which brings us to ghosts.)

            Phosphenes are said to account for some measure of ghost sighting. I guess people studying phosphenes often report seeing human figures, since this is the conclusion our brain jumps to when given a shred of evidence. So if you can’t sleep and have had your eyes open in your dark bedroom all night, you’re ripe for spontaneous phosphenes, which are not ghosts, but your retinal ganglion cells sort of freaking out.

            I am one of those people who needs to know this sort of thing. I have to know the scientific facts—but, like most people, I usually just put them in a box labeled “knowledge” and go about my business of experiencing the world as usual.

            For instance, despite knowing about phosphenes, it doesn’t make much sense to me to deny the existence of ghosts. One of the reasons for this is that I have mistaken a coat tree with hats on top for a person more times than I can count. Absolute certainty for a moment: I know someone is standing creepily, stiffly behind the door. And then, of course, a second later, my knees weak, I realize, no, no one is there. But the objective fact: that there was never a person there, mattered, in that moment, very little to my body. That is to say, it doesn't matter to me whether or not ghosts “really” exist if we're still going to be sitting in the dark and watching flashy white figures float around. Sure, you can calm yourself down, say “Calm down, self, those are just phosphenes,” but that won’t erase the moment that your gut reaction said “Holy shit, a ghost!”

            (I imagine that this philosophical debate of objective vs. subjective reality is an elementary one—if a tree falls in a forest, etc. I apologize if you’ve written some kind of lengthy term paper on it and must now watch me bumble through it.)

            You’ll notice—especially if you live some ungodly humid place like Indiana—that the weather station still gives you two temperatures: the actual one, and the “feels like” one. Who cares what the actual temperature is if it’s just going to feel like something else when I walk outside?

            But I do care about objective facts. I love my box of knowledge. Isn’t it wild to know this stuff about the brain? That your body, when faced with long term confinement, will put on a little light show for you? That after two days of a blindfold, most people start to get complex geometrical hallucinations, and these same patterns, called form constants, are recurringly observed by different people. Isn’t it kind of wonderful?

            Sometimes it’s fair to say that I write poems to justify all the time I spend on Wikipedia.

***

Rosalie Moffett was the winner of a 2012 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Field, Salt Hill, Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, 32 Poems and elsewhere. She is a Washington native currently living in Indiana.