Bavaria, Germany & London, England

Stella Pierides

 

Poetry, Prose and Contemplations

on the Human Mind

 

Stella writes both prose and poetry. Born in Athens, Greece, she lives in London, England and Bavaria, Germany. She has co-edited and contributed to books and her work appears in many literary and non-fiction publications around the globe. The Muse Apprentice Guild, The Quiet Feather, Aesthetica, the Anthology Dance the Guns to Silence (flipped eye, 2005).

Stella is a member of English PEN and Munich Writers, and International Co-Editor, Germany, for The Muse Apprentice Guild. She is currently working on a series of short stories titled "The Greeks: Wars, Warts and All", and she is putting the finishing touches to her novel "In the Shade of the Lemon Tree".

Stella has worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor, in private practice and in the Arbours Crisis Centre, in London. She also taught courses on the Arbours Training Programme. In addition she was a co-editor and contributor to two books, 'Beyond Madness' (JKP, 2002) and 'Even Paranoids Have Enemies' (Routledge, 1998).

Offer your response to

Stella Pierides.

.

 

 

Tell her you saw this page at Big Pond Rumour.

 

 

 

 

 

The photograph on the left is by

Stella's daughter, Maria Pierides.

 

 

 

 

 

On Jonathan Franzen's

The Corrections

 

 

 

The emptiness of it. The emptiness of Albert Lambert´s mind. The slow, and fast, draining, slackening, loosening of connections, of language, of life. Parkinsons, he says; Dementia. Depression. There is no healing possible. No repair. No reparation.

 

Page after page, as I read the book. Page after page, as it discharges its meaning; Jonathan Franzen´s meaning, I fall. My heart shrinks, my thoughts slow, my hope fades. I read on. I laugh. I go and eat. I squirm. I weep.

 

“Why have you left me?” I say out loud to the empty side of my bed, to the wall next to it – I weep more. Albert lost his world and all that’s in it. I lost you. My world and all that’s in it. Now, the last page turned, the last thought in place, loss aiming at me between the eyes,

I gasp.

 

Again, my emptiness. I pick up the book lying next to me. I put it down again. I blow my nose and wipe my tears. “Why did you leave me?” I ask, my voice hoarse. A black ink circle appears on the duvet cover, crowning the tip of my pen. In a trance, I lift the pen and place it between the pages of my empty notebook.

 

I rise to make myself a cup of fennel tea. As I cross my bedroom door, Albert is more real to me than you. He stands next to me, his head tilted, smiling the inscrutable smile of the terminally embarrassed. I smile back. And reach out.

 

 

 

This prose poem appeared in Aesthetica: A Review of Contemporary Artists, issue 9, 2005.

 

It Could Have Been Love

 

 

 

          Looking both ways, she crossed the road. Jeeps buzzed like insects. The brown earth sizzled.

          “Don’t look around; keep your eyes lowered! Walk fast! Don’t speak to foreigners!” Rana heard her mother repeating in her head.

          “Yes, Mother.” Since her father’s death, she stopped arguing with her mother. Poor woman, she often thought. It’s no small thing she suffered – her husband blown to pieces! Rana hurried her step, pulling her headscarf to shield her face from the relentless sun.

          “Miss, Miss,” she heard the foreign soldier’s call. Glancing sideways, she checked he was calling her. He was. Leaving the cover of the date palm grove, he walked towards her. Rana continued walking away, her heart pounding with fear and pleasure. In that instant, she thought him handsome! Underneath the heavy armour, behind the gun, she saw the young man he was.

          “Miss,” he called urgently, and started running towards her.

          “Don’t speak to foreigners,” her mother again.

          “Miss, Stop!”

          Out of the corner of her eye she saw him near her, his eyes cooling blue oases; and then a surprise. A stillness. She can remember nothing else.

          The doctor at Rana’s bedside says the American was killed by a sniper. He had been trying to warn her when he was hit. She was lucky he took the bullets.

          She can only see the young man running towards her; she can feel the fluttering of her own heart.

 

 

 

This story was short-listed in the Fish publishing inaugural VERY Short Story Competition 2004.

 

 

A member since July 2006.

 

All text © Stella Pierides.

All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced without written permission from Stella Pierides.

Contests:

 

If Trees, Then Olive Trees. (2nd Place Poetry). Summer 2006 Premiere Issue: Big Pond Rumours.

 

Prose and Poetry:

 

He Stands in History. (2005) In the anthology Dance the Guns to Silence. London: Flipped Eye Publishing.

 

The Accident. (2005) The Quiet Feather. Issue 4.

 

Her Brother's Keeper. (2005) online journal The Muse Apprentice Guild. Spring.

 

It Could Have Been Love. (2005) Another Country: A Journal of New Writing. Munich, Germany

 

Of Love and Fish. (2004) Spiked, the Magazine of Ideas, Literature and the Arts. Issue 15.

 

When the Colours Sing. (excerpt). (2003). Another Country: A Journal of New Writing. Munich, Germany.

 

 

Books (Co-edited):

 

Beyond Madness: PsychoSocial Interventions in Psychosis. (2002) J. Berke, G. Mak-Pearce, M. Fagan & S. Pierides-Muller (Eds.), London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

 

Even Paranoids Have Enemies: New Perspectives on Paranoia and Persecution. (1998) Berke, Pierides, Sabbadini, & Schneider (Eds.), London and New York: Routledge.