My apologies for not running contests in July and August, but I was busy adjusting to life with my newborn baby. Gradually, I’m getting back on track, so now I’ll announce the topic for our monthly short-form writing contests (500 words for fiction, 20 lines for poetry).

Topic: “Back in the Saddle”
Deadline: midnight, Friday, September 24

To enter, post a link to your entry, which can appear on either a personal site or any blog. If you must, you can e-mail it to wildvioletmagazine@yahoo.com, with the subject line: “September Contest Entry.” Please do not post your entry directly into the comments.

After the deadline, I’ll create a poll, allowing people to vote. The September winner will receive a package of Wild Violet postcards and publication.

Gizmo is missing. I’m
moving on Friday so the search is
frantic. Fliers, phone calls, all without
direction. Gizmo is missing. He left
Tuesday afternoon. I called
up and down empty streets.
The only response from a neighbor
who lost her cat to coyotes.

Up and down the halls, no fat cat
content to sleep in the sun. I’m
moving on Friday so the search is frantic.
Wondering, wandering but
Gizmo is still missing. He left Tuesday to a
neighbors who lost her cat to coyotes.
I stay up all night waiting, hoping he will see
the lights are on at 3 am.

The topic for June 2010 was “Round and Round.”

The June topic was “Round and Round.”

The first entry is a poem, “Gizmo is Missing,” by Lindsey Renuard, which can be read at this link:

http://dishwaterdreams.com/2010/05/gizmo-is-missing/

The second entry is a poem, “Incense,” by Amy M. Levy, which you can read at this link:

http://amylevy.com/wp/2010/06/incense/

The third entry is a flash fiction piece, “Self Repair,” by Elizabeth J. Allen, at this link:

http://elizabetsyallen.blogspot.com/2010/06/self-repair.html

You can vote only once, so please choose carefully! The poll will be open until 11:30 a.m. on Monday, July 5.

The winner of the June contest will receive a Wild Violet rectangular magnet, publication, and will be eligible to compete as a finalist in the annual short-form contest.

Because my due date for my first child is rapidly approaching, I’m posting the June topic early for our monthly short-form writing contests (500 words for fiction, 20 lines for poetry).

Topic: “Round and Round”
Deadline: midnight, Friday, June 18

To enter, post a link to your entry, which can appear on either a personal site or any blog. If you must, you can e-mail it to wildvioletmagazine@yahoo.com, with the subject line: “June Contest Entry.” Please do not post your entry directly into the comments.

After the deadline, I’ll create a poll, allowing people to vote. The June winner will receive a Wild Violet rectangle magnet and publication.

In a circle
Of wind savaged trees.
Branches

Leap from their mothers.  One babe
Taps my door,
But I stay inside, in uteri.

I harbor my thoughts. They fold within.
Pride
Is a constant tiller.
I will—

Not ask him again.
No, not again.

The topic for May 2010 was “My Favorite Mistake.”

Saturday detention lasted four hours, but I was awestruck by the first bathroom break.  I wouldn’t realize the relevance of the book’s opening quotes (Dostoevsky, Miss Manners, and the Talking Heads) until I was finished, but even these were brilliantly chosen.  American Psycho is written in the present tense.  Patrick Bateman seems so normal at first.  It’s the late 1980s, and it seems everyone in Manhattan is extremely rich or extremely poor.  Patrick Bateman and his friends are young, insincere Wall Street assholes.  Like everyone else he knows, he is manically preoccupied with his tan, his stereo, his favorite trashy talk show, securing a good table at the newest good restaurant, scoring good coke, smoking good cigars, his clothes and other people’s clothes, and literally, his wallet — gazelle-skin —t hat he reminds the reader was $850 at Barney’s, again and again throughout the text.  But Patrick Bateman also kills people.  No one is spared for any particular reason.  Nothing matters: age, race, class, gender (though most victims are women).  And it is gruesome.

The violence in this book cost Ellis a publisher.  Simon and Schuster dropped it, but Vintage picked it up.  The violence is horrific.  Tortures and mutilations are detailed for paragraphs, pages.  As much as I love this book, even I can’t reread some sections.  Once was enough.  To be honest, once might have been too much.   I’ve read interviews with Ellis, and writing these scenes was very difficult for him. 

But it had to be done this way because everything in the book is meticulously detailed.  Everything.  It’s ridiculous, disturbing, and just so damn smart.  People are cold.  People are shallow.  People are greedy.  People are cruel.   And believe it or not, it’s funny. 

…the temptation to kill McDermott is replaced by this strange anticipation to have a good time, drink some champagne, flirt with a hardbody, find some blow, maybe even dance to some oldies or that new Janet Jackson song I like.

See?  Funny.

Patrick Bateman’s thoughts are everywhere, and whose aren’t?  One paragraph might go from his shoes to someone else’s shoes to bottled waters to Bon Jovi lyrics to what happened in the porn flick he watched that morning.  The sex is also graphic in this book, but after the orgasm Patrick pulls out a nail gun or severs some limbs, so don’t get too… comfortable.

The man can string a sentence together.   Ellis’s writing is exquisite, beautiful.  I do like his other books, but nothing comes close to this.  I think the rhythm of the language in this book might be the biggest influence in my own work.   At the very least, it has taught me to take risks when telling a story.   Art can happen without taking risks; great art can’t.  American Psycho offends so many people, but so many people love it.   I promise we’re not all harboring terrible fantasies.  Not that I haven’t done some bad things in my life, like cutting class, but I served my time. 

Class.  I cut class, not people.  Even though I kind of wanted to kill those little fuckers crying at 8 in the morning.

So what bothered me about this account, on a second reading? I could not, until I neared the end of the book, say exactly why I felt disconcerted in a way different from simply reliving my own grief as I read about Didion’s. She names places, favorite restaurants, vacation trips taken, items of clothing with reportorial accuracy, no less so than in her previous prose works. How I felt about the book, I realized with anger and shame, had become colored by the fact that The Year of Magical Thinking is a distinctly privileged, indeed upper-class experience of illness and grief. John Gregory Dunne’s funeral took place in New York City, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the couple’s close friend Calvin Trillin, a New Yorker writer, spoke at the service. The scarf Dunne left draped over a chair was cashmere; Didion recounts extensive foreign travel and expensive restaurant meals; Dunne was pals, as Didion tells it, with one of the doormen at their apartment building, and had a running joke with him about whether Osama bin Laden might be hiding in the building’s penthouse, “maisonette” (whatever that is), or fitness room. Most tellingly, when Didion’s daughter collapses in California, Didion has the financial security to have her medevaced across the country, on a multi-legged journey, back to a neurology institute in New York.

Of course Didion did what any mother would, and should, have done: she used every means available to ensure that her daughter had the best possible care. No reader can fault her for this. But in between mentions of the hospital at UCLA and New York’s Rusk Institute, in between discussions with cardiology specialists at Beth Israel hospital, one wonders how radically these experiences would have differed had this been a more ordinary couple. What would a woman do if she and her husband were not both acclaimed authors, and there was no doorman’s log of entry and exit to reread obsessively in her attempt to understand her husband’s death? What if the daughter and her husband had had to remain in exile across the continent, without the money to transport the daughter anywhere, much less to a specialist institute? What if, indeed, any one of these parties had been without insurance — or belonged to an HMO that stipulated access to only certain doctors and treatment facilities?

In a destroyed economy that analysts are slowly beginning to acknowledge as a second great depression like the one before World War II, it may be increasingly difficult for the reader to relate fully to reportage of such immense privilege. That is not to say that Didion’s life, or accurate reporting of it, mars the book in any way; The Year of Magical Thinking will always remain an important book, one with such power that it has been adapted for the stage — Didion has been played variously by Vanessa Redgrave and Cate Blanchett. But who plays the single mother who works two jobs, neither of which provides insurance? Film portrayals like Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich, or Cher as the mother in Mask, have fallen out of fashion in the new century; instead we have comedies about the sexual problems of middle-aged white men, or movies like Sex and the City 2. I predict, without a dog in the fight, that the latter will have little lasting societal or artistic impact.

No memoir can be rightly condemned for the simple fact that its author enjoys privilege. Were this the case, John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, another classic of illness and grief, might be dismissed out of hand. John Gregory Dunne’s death is not less important, nor its impact on his loved ones less profound, because he graduated from Princeton in the same year as Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, The Year of Magical Thinking may be taken as useful evidence that not even white, heterosexual, cisgendered, upper-middle-class privilege insulates its author from the violence of grief. But recounting her actions later, Didion never stops to wonder, for example, what might have happened at UCLA had the mother been working poor, more daunted by authority, less willing to badger and harass doctors as Didion does over every detail of her daughter’s condition. Taking the book as sole evidence, one would never know the grieving woman was aware of a world outside her own, a New York other than hers, whose inhabitants might not have evenings in Paris to remember.

I will keep Didion’s book close to me and return to it again; I believe that she understands and articulates grief with unparalleled excellence, and my own magical thinking is that, thereby, she understands me. But I wish I could also read the stories of patients on Medicaid, of those without insurance at all, who go through similar ordeals. The single mother with the two jobs might be Virginia Woolf’s proverbial “Shakespeare’s sister”; she, too, might be able to illuminate human experience in haunting and important ways. Will she have time, I wonder, or the sense that her words count? The assurance of being heard is in itself a special type of privilege. Who now collects or considers the stories of those who are not already successful novelists? For the moment, the answer seems to lie with newspaper and newsmagazine bloggers, or with people who somehow find time, strength, and will to track their own journeys via Web 2.0. I will not stop hoping that the Shakespeare’s sisters of this millennium will be published in book form. Not either-or, but both-and: the excellence of polished prose writers like Didion, but also the unfiltered, often uncomfortable truths of that increasingly large category: the rest of us.

The May topic was “My Favorite Mistake.”

The first entry is this poem by Mary Ellen Walsh, which was received over e-mail:

Impact

I park my car
In a circle
Of wind savaged trees.
Branches

Leap from their mothers.  One babe
Taps my door,
But I stay inside, in uteri.

I harbor my thoughts. They fold within.
Pride
Is a constant tiller.
I will—

Not ask him again.
No, not again.

The second entry is a flash fiction piece by Amy M. Levy, which you can read at this link:

http://amylevy.com/wp/2010/05/upgrade/

You can vote only once, so please choose carefully! The poll will be open until 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 22.

The winner of the May contest will receive a Wild Violet rectangular sticker and will be eligible to compete as a finalist in the annual short-form contest.

The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater
Directed by Carmen Khan
(April 7 – May 9, 2010)

Love can be dreamlike. One minute, it’s sure as a compass; the next it’s completely transformed into doubt and confusion. One minute, lovers feel lighthearted, skipping around the room as if clutching pink balloons; the next, lovers may feel bereft and confused. In the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater’s production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the company captures that ephemeral quality of love, with a pared-down performance in the round.

One of the challenges of translating a Shakespearean comedy is that many of the verbal jokes no longer make immediate sense. When paired with physical humor, however, these jokes make audiences not just understand but roar. Such was the brilliance of this production: making Shakespeare’s lines come alive.

On a nearly empty stage hung two sets of red trapeze silks, tied securely to the ceiling and used for various purposes (tying a character up, climbing or concealment).  This “tissue work,” as it’s known, lends a circus air to the production, helping to create a place of fantasy. Similarly, the prelude, sung by Puck in an Asian-inspired mask, introduces the idea of a dreamlike landscape, as Puck distributes pink balloons to the cast, who react with amazement and wonder.

This season calls for great versatility amongst the company, as most of the actors appearing in the airy MND also performed in one of Shakespeare’s darkest plays, Macbeth. That versatility is embodied by the actors who played Theseus (Ron Heneghan, who played Macbeth) and Hippolyta (Christie Parker, who played Lady Macbeth), doubling as the king and queen of the faeries, Oberon and Titania. As the humans Theseus and Hippolyta, Heneghan and Parker play their roles as upright and controlled. However, as fairy royalty, they are capricious and childlike.

Just as the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Macbeth borrowed from Asian music and theater forms, MND is inspired by Indian music, movement, and costuming. For a western audience, this creates a world far different from current depictions of fairies while better embodying the original place of fairies in European mythology. While today, fairies are primarily seen as beautiful and harmless, traditional perceptions included a sense of danger and darkness.

So, for example, when Titania dances, instead of emulating ballet, with graceful pointed toes and smoothly-flowing arms, she pokes her toes up, thrusts her limbs and makes striking facial expressions: both beautiful and, at the same time, fearsome.

Costumes also borrow from Indian styles, with banded collars for the male courtiers (which also happens to be a current style, so that it both updates the look and evokes an Indian feel) and a stylized sari for Hermia (Kate Russell). Titania and Oberon wear facial jewels, and Oberon’s coat looks very much like the princely raiment of Indian royalty.

Puck in this production is performed by a woman, Mary Tuomanen. Instead of  costuming her as an androgynous, Peter-Pan-type character, costume designer Vickie Esposito put her in a very animal-like suit: with stripes and long, false breasts, complete with a multicolored, straw-like wig and raccoon-like circles painted around her eyes. Her look, in combination with Tuomanen’s controlled movements, make Puck appear to be either an Asian-inspired monster or a very primal human being.

Like Titania, Puck is more than just a mischievous sprite in this production. At times, she is playful; at others, almost frightening because of her unearthly ways. Her exceptional timing in delivering her lines adds humor even to such throwaways as “I’m here.”

The runaway crowd favorites amongst the cast were Kathryn Raines as Helena and John Zak as Bottom, both of whom are skilled at physical humor. Helena’s teary, over-the-top pursuit of Demetrius (Chris Braak) evoked laughter and sympathy (after all, who hasn’t found themselves, at least emotionally, in a similar situation of unrequited love?). Bottom’s prating self-confidence is reminiscent of the late Don Knotts, who was similarly fearless about using facial expressions and body language to make himself look silly in the pursuit of a laugh.

The production was pared down to about two hours of total running time: two one-hour acts with an intermission in between. Yet, it felt like nothing was missing. Upon comparison with the original play, this adaptation removed several preambles and passages of exposition, as well as making all the fairy parts non-speaking. This kept the focus on the main characters and helped expedite the plot. These changes also make the play more accessible for a modern audience.

Fortunately, they did not trim the production by Bottom and his craftsmen cohorts, a play within a play that was one of the highlights of the production, as the audience roared at the craftsmen’s bumbling efforts.

The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre captures the capriciousness and dreamlike quality of love, creating a fantastic or mythical space through careful attention to body language, music, and lighting. All of these factors bring A Midsummer Night’s Dream vividly alive for a modern audience.

Rating: **** (4 out of 4, Must See)

Note: While the theater is in the second floor of an older building, and exiting is not permitted during the play due to the actors’ frequent use of the main theater entrance, accommodations for the handicapped or those with special concerns can be made ahead of time by calling the box office.

Disclosure: The author received complimentary admission to the theater for this production.