Hi Everyone:
Today in THE MADHOUSE, I've kidnapped fellow horror author and poet, Peter Adam Salomon. Peter and I have known each other for a few years now as we both exchange and critique each other's writing from time to time, and most importantly, we both have the same twisted flair and appreciation for the dark arts, too. His latest poetry collection, PseudoPsalms: Saints v. Sinners is now running free in the (under)world, and as such, I wanted to give you all a peek behind the veil to hear a little more about his creative process and how for him, the lines between fiction and poetry are a little blurred. Enjoy!
GUEST POST:
by Peter Adam Salomon
Despite two published novels and one Bram
Stoker award nomination (for ALL THOSE BROKEN ANGELS) in the Young Adult novel
category, I still think of myself as a poet. Perhaps this is due to the fact
that I’ve been writing poems since I was seven and only started writing novels
as an adult. Perhaps because I believe my natural ‘voice’ is found in my poetry,
in the freedom and spirit that poetry represents.
Mostly, I consider myself a poet first because
I feel a much stronger emotional bond to poetry, both as a writer and a reader.
With my second novel, ALL THOSE BROKEN ANGELS I threw out all the standard
rules of fiction writing (no run-on sentences, no repeated words, no sentence
fragments, etc.) and pretty much replaced them with some of the rules of poetry
writing. I knew this would result in some people hating the book, which
happened, just as much as I knew that some readers would love it for the very
same reasons. I loved the poetry of the novel and am extremely proud of it. But
it’s prose, no matter how poetic, and it left me with a burning need to write
poetry again.
My first collection of poetry, Prophets, consisted of mostly old poems
with only a handful of newer works. While it was rewarding to see some of my
personal favorite poems in print that way, I still wanted to try to stretch my
wings a little bit more. PseudoPsalms:Saints v. Sinners, my latest poetry collection (published by Bizarro Pulp
Press), allowed me the freedom to do that.
While retaining a focus on the exploration of
identity and self, religion/politics, and sanity/insanity which pretty much all
of my writing deals with, PseudoPsalms
also gave me the unique opportunity to do more than just explore the darkness
and shadows I’ve grown so familiar with over the years of writing horror. As
the subtitle suggests these are not all dark poems. There are glimmers of
sunshine, if not outright joy and wonder, making the shadows, I think, just
that little bit darker. Reaching outside of my comfort zone, into the light so
to speak, forced me to improve my own writing in ways that I hadn’t really
worked on before. I’d found so much comfort in exploring the shadows that all
that illumination in the lighter poems I usually thought lessened the quality
of my own writing. Embracing the light was more difficult than I’d expected it
to be but I hope I managed to capture lightning in a bottle a few times in
those poems.
When writing about those shadows, my process
usually starts from a place of ‘what scares me?’ or ‘what would scare others?’
That difference (between ‘me’ and ‘others’) is what I believe enables me to
write poems from different points of view, working the empathy muscle in order
to attempt to understand someone else’s fears and worries. As I said:
‘attempt,’ since I’m never quite sure how successful I am but I’ll never stop
trying to put myself in the shoes of other people in order to better understand
the world.
When writing about the lighter things in
life, my process was immediately derailed. ‘What do I like?’ Well, I honestly
don’t really know most of the time. I like the shadows. Which, of course, leads
me back to writing a darker poem than I’d originally intended in this
particular process. ‘What do other people like?’ Well, have to admit that is a
question I really don’t know the answer to.
Writing those lighter poems, therefore,
presented a challenge from the very beginning. Plus, while writing them I’d
find myself going off-course, adding shadows where none belonged to ‘improve’
the poem. And usually those improvements ruined the poem (though I was able to
save some tangents for later poems, which was helpful, I suppose). In the end,
I tried to really focus on keeping the shadows away, to really let the light
shine through. To embrace, so to speak, the illumination in order for the
shadows to be just that little bit darker. And to let the shadows make the
light a little brighter. Or, at least, that’s what I hoped for.
Containing more of an equal mix of new and
old poems (my next collection will be almost extensively new, if and when I
finish it…), PseudoPsalms: Saints v.
Sinners was written to be an exploration of both the light and the dark,
and, most especially, of that wicked grey limbo where they meet. Sure, monsters
may be hiding in the dark, waiting for unsuspecting prey, but there are
monsters in the light as well. They’re just sometimes harder to see. Which,
come to think of it, might make them the scariest monsters of all.
Author Bio:
Peter Adam
Salomon is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers
and Illustrators, the Horror Writers Association, the Science Fiction
& Fantasy Writers of America, the Science Fiction Poetry
Association, the International Thriller Writers, and The Authors Guild and
is represented by the Erin Murphy Literary Agency.
His debut
novel, HENRY FRANKS, was published by Flux in 2012. His second novel,
ALL THOSE BROKEN ANGELS, published by Flux in 2014, was nominated for
the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Young Adult
fiction. Both novels have been named a ‘Book All Young Georgians Should
Read’ by The Georgia Center For The Book.
His short
fiction has appeared in the Demonic Visions series among other anthologies, and
he was the featured author for Gothic Blue Book III: The Graveyard
Edition. He was also selected as one of the Gentlemen of Horror for
2014.
His
poem ‘Electricity and Language and Me’ appeared on BBC Radio 6 performed by
The Radiophonic Workshop in December 2013. Eldritch Press published
his first collection of poetry, Prophets,
in 2014, and his second poetry collection, PseudoPsalms:
Saints v. Sinners, was published in 2016 by Bizarro Pulp Press.
In addition, he was the Editor for the first books of poetry released
by the Horror Writers Association: Horror
Poetry Showcase Volumes I and II.
He served
as a Judge for the 2006 Savannah Children’s Book Festival Young
Writer’s Contest and for the Royal Palm Literary Awards of the Florida
Writers Association. He was also a Judge for the first two Horror
Poetry Showcases of the Horror Writers Association and has served as Chair
on multiple Juries for the Bram Stoker Awards.
www.peteradamsalomon.com
www.facebook.com/peteradamsalomon
Twitter:
@petersalomon
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