Yvette Viets Flaten
CONTACT:
Email: flatenyv@gmail.com
BIO:
Yvette was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up in an Air Force family, living in Nevada, North Dakota, and Washington state as well as France, England, and Spain. She graduated from Madrid American High School in 1970 and studied Spanish in Madrid with the University of Saint Louis. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish (1974) and a Master of Arts in History (1982) from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Yvette writes both fiction and poetry. Her award-winning poetry has appeared widely in numerous journals, including the Wisconsin Academy Review, Midwest Review, Sow’s Ear, Blue Heron Review, Red Cedar Review, Barstow and Grand, Ariel Anthology as well as many Wisconsin Poets’ Calendars. In May 2020, her poem “Riding It Out,” was one of ten winners in Garrison Keillor’s Pandemic Poetry Contest. See her interview with Garrison Keillor on The Writers’ Almanac.
Yvette is a Life Member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. She served as the WFOP Student Contest Coordinator for many years and edited the WFOP Poets’ Calendar in 1999. She is the recipient of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Muse Prize for Excellence in Poetry (2008, 2013), WFOP Triad Contest (2019), Lakefly Writers’ Poetry Contest (2020) and the Wisconsin Writers’ Association Jade Ring Prize for Poetry (2010, 2015, 2020).
Yvette is married to Daniel Flaten and they have two grown children, Matthew and Avril. She loves collecting new words, finding old cookbooks, trying new dishes, and travel, always to expand one’s horizons.
Poetry
Girl in the Apple Tree
Fading in and out on chemo, I dream again
about climbing in the apple tree. Age five.
Prince Valiant hair. Feet in leather slippers
brought from Tripoli, embroidered with silver
thread. High above the tree’s main crotch,
among the thickest leaves and budding apples,
both pinkish green, I hide away, then and now.
The gardener reports me, more worried
about the tree’s limbs breaking than my own.
But I ignore him, swing back up again and
again, to sit ensconced in leaf-veiled silence
with my jungle dreams, or horse dreams, or
just plain dreams, of life.
Red Cedar Review 2020
Doll’s House
For the third time in six years
I’ve bought a doll’s house.
The first came from the Salvation Army.
The last two were from garage sales.
All were home made: Grandpa cut,
Grandma decorated. Mom discarded.
I think I bought them because they are
the kinds of homes I never had. Standard
dimensions. Six over six. Cape Cod,
Georgian, Victorian.
Mine were odd, transient. Ancient French
hovel built before Napoleon, trailer house
at the end of a runway, Spanish piso in a
Roman outpost rebuilt by the Moors
a thousand years later.
Home, I came to see, is not where
my parents were born, nor where my
grandparents are buried. It is the spot
I unpack my suitcase for the night, the
place I brush my teeth and crawl between
sheets that cover me like a veil of sand,
soon shifted by prevailing winds.
Verse Wisconsin 2010