Important Thoughts About Breakfast Cereal
For my family
Sartre said: Hell is
other people.
I say: Hell is
other people
chewing.
Stuart Gunter is working toward a Master’s Degree in Mental Health Counseling and lives in Schuyler, Virginia. He likes to paddle the Rockfish River and play drums in obscure rock bands. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Madison Review, Gravel, Deep South, New Plains Review, and West Texas Literary Review, among others.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Important Thoughts About Breakfast Cereal”? The origin of the poem dates back to my childhood, when I would eat cereal with my brother. His slurping and chewing drove me crazy. I once told my wife she chews funny. And often, I have to remove myself from the room when my son eats his cereal. No table is big enough. I was knocking the Sartre quotation around in my head one day and talking with a friend of mine who is similarly challenged by chewing. And I said the poem out loud, fully formed. The poem itself has gone through a few iterations, finally ending up in the final draft, with working titles such as Eating Breakfast with My Family to Eating Corn Flakes with Jean-Paul Sartre. But the sentiment remained intact during whatever form the poem took: hell is other people chewing. Which, to me, boils the general idea of “hell is other people” down to one small, specific aspect of humanity that makes it so: chewing. Finding the universal in the everyday is important to me. And this idea may sound simple, and possibly even stupid, but it’s also very real. And kind of funny.
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