Helena Olufsen
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by John Cordaro
Fourteen Hills: Teeth-First To A Mother is such an intricately textured, haunting read, would you share with us the inspiration for this work and how this piece came about?
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Helena Olufsen: After a family member passed away, someone told me a story about her that seemed completely out of character for the woman I knew. It felt like I was being introduced to a stranger speaking with her voice. I had the idea
of turning that into a story: a stranger speaking with the voice of a deceased loved one, revealing truths about them that you’d rather not know. When I sat down to write that story, it turned into Teeth-First to a Mother, which is perhaps the inverse of that original idea. The focus on food felt right because memory and taste/smell seem so strongly linked.
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14H: What sparked the title of your piece?
HO: All the narrator has left of his mother is memory—that is the only form she still exists in. As he consumes other people’s memories of their mothers, he is simultaneously consuming what little he has left of his own mother. He thinks he’s building a new better version of her, but what he’s really doing is erasing her. I wanted the title to reflect that cannibalistic idea, him devouring her, bit by bit.
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14H: Grief, Regret, Loss, there is so much emotional richness to this story. What do you want the reader to take away from it? What theme(s) do you feel drive(s) this piece and what does that mean to you?
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HO: To me, this story is about grief, but maybe even more about temptation. The narrator’s grief is complex because it’s tied up in other emotions: shame, regret, resentment. When the stranger offers the narrator a way to rewrite the past—rewrite his mother and how she made him feel—he struggles with the temptation of this pleasant lie.
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14H: Your story thrums with life and such vivid specificity, particularly around the beautifully rendered food imagery and recipes. Can you speak a little on this? How do you bring this element (specificity of detailing) into work? What is your relationship with food? Do you have a favorite food or comfort food?
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HO: Like I said, to me, this story is about temptation. What’s more tempting than food? Especially when you’re
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hungry, which our narrator is, in a sense. It felt important to include both the brutality, indulgence, and irresistibility of food, because it’s a reflection of the brutality, indulgence, and irresistibility of the stranger’s offer. For this reason, I wanted to get detailed and specific about the food and cooking. It’s such a gift whenever you get to write about food, because you get to work with taste and the tactility and temperature of something inside your mouth, which always makes for a strong reading experience, I think.
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14H: Would you share a little about your writing process? How you work? How you develop a story from idea to finished work? How you approach the revision process?
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HO: My process varies from story to story, but generally, I begin with a vague sense of a character or dilemma. Then I sit down and write as if I already know exactly where I’m going with this—pretending is essential for me. It keeps me motivated and not overwhelmed. After a few pages, I shift into a more analytical mode: Who is the protagonist? The antagonist? What lesson is the antagonist offering to teach the protagonist? Then I keep writing with this new approach. Once I have the basic story elements down, I shut off my analytical brain and use my intuition to revise, feeling out the story. If something feels off—a word, a sentence, a beat—I keep reworking it until it feels right.
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14H: What’s the best piece of advice or critique you’ve gotten and how did grow from that?
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HO: Make friends with other writers. Or painters. Or actresses. When you share your life with other storytellers, storytelling becomes a natural part of your life. The urge to write isn’t something you have to apologize for or justify or hide, it’s already understood. It may sound silly, but I didn’t understand that it is okay to spend your time writing fiction, until I made my first writer friends in 2021.
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14H: What books are on your bedside table?
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HO: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, which I’m reading for the first time, and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which I’m re-reading.
14H: What author/book/work of art inspired you to write? And how/why?
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HO: I grew up on stories by Astrid Lindgren and Mark Twain, and they’ll always be foundational for me. I don’t know what possessed me to start writing as a kid, but it may have something to do with those two.
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14H: What are you working on now?
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HO: I’m preparing to query my short story collection about the body, which is a literary collection with elements of horror and myth. I’m also working on a literary horror novel about time.
Helena Olufsen (b. 1995) is a Danish/Indian writer, based in Copenhagen. Her writing is forthcoming in F(r)iction and has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Willow Springs, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a short story collection and a literary horror novel. For more, visit helenaolufsen.com.
John Cordaro is a queer writer of fiction—spinning tales of then, now and could be. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. He served as a fiction editor for Fourteen Hills literary magazine. He lives with his husband and a canine of strong opinions on a foggy hill in
San Francisco.