Once, a long time ago, something happened.  As a matter of fact, everything happened. Wars were fought, empires were won, kings were crowned. And behind the scenes, everyday people lived and died and fell in love and fought with their parents and had adventures. The past was every bit as exciting as our world today, rich with endless stories to be told.  And yet young writers rarely tell them. Most of our Slammers stay firmly planted in the present, detailing all aspects of the current world, but never looking back in time for inspiration.

Of course, the age-old dictum is to write what you know.  But I would prefer to rephrase this to "Know what you write." No one has to be a great scholar to read up on the stories of the past and bring them to life with a little re-imagining. Sometimes, when my own life starts to feel a little too dull to write about, slipping into a fresh place and time can be just the spark I need to get my creativity going again. And once I've immersed myself in researching a new era, I always find that the core elements of story are the same: human emotions – joy at a moment of realization, nervousness at the brink of something new, yearning for life's hidden mission to sort itself out.

This month on The Slam, two of our writers have stepped back into the past to find inspiration for their poetry.  L. M. Zhukov, who has taken us on many previous sojourns to her homeland of Russia, gives us a new snapshot of her country on the brink of revolution.  Instead of trotting out the dull exposition of history books, Zhukov tells her story through the immediate voice of the people.  Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyats! her narrators shout ("Workers of the world, unite!"), and history is suddenly alive. Zhukov introduces her story not through grandiose battles and courts, but rather through daily details – the newspaper headlines, the breadlines on the street.  While not all readers may be familiar with Stalin and Solzhenitsyn, Zhukov chooses not to fill in every background detail.  Instead, she aims to create an evocative portrait of the time, trusting that readers who are seized by the spirit of the piece will be interested enough to discover the historical background on their own. And the gamble pays off, as her poetic style stays spare and beautiful, unhampered by excess exposition.

EliW, a writer new to The Slam this month, brings similar immediacy to the Irish potato famine in his poem "Lonely Farmer."  Emotional attachment often starts with specificity – and by focusing his narrative on a single farmer struggling with his crops, EliW makes the Great Hunger all the more real. Just as L. M. Zhukov avoids the greater sweep of events in the Russian Revolution, so EliW avoids traditional perspectives on the famine.  Instead of documenting the famine's import for the country as a whole, he portrays the psychological effect the famine has on one farmer, creating such despair that even the potatoes themselves seem to be antagonistic. Like Zhukov, Eli leaves out the bulk of historical exposition and stays focused on the moment.  And in so doing, he brings this difficult period in Ireland's history to heart-wrenching reality.

This month I challenge all of you to find your own stories in the past, and tell them through prose, poetry, or whatever sort of narrative seems right to you.  If you're looking for inspiration, the pages of CICADA – always brimming with exciting historical narratives as well as contemporary works – are a great place to start. Next you might check out the Historical Novel Society – a wonderful organization that aims to promote historical fiction of all kinds. Whatever your inspiration, I hope to see your historical masterpieces appearing on The Slam soon.  History, after all, is the story of everything that ever happened. With that much material to choose from, I'm sure you'll find a tale just waiting to be told.

Cheers,

Ann Pedtke
Slam Master