Submission Do’s and Don’ts
While getting caught up on Wild Violet’s backlog of mailed submissions, I have been keeping a list of do’s and don’ts: DON’T over-package your submission. A submission that arrives in a plastic sleeve, like a junior-high book report, stands out for the wrong reasons. DON’T include extra promotional materials in your submission. Unless you are sending a book for review, and the materials are relevant to that book, sending business cards or promotional cards is simply a waste of your money. DO write polite, brief cover letters. If you’ve been published...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of August 27
Welcome to a new beginning! After years of struggling to maintain the quarterly publishing schedule — with its lengthy, intense periods of design work — we’ve moved towards a publishing model that makes more sense: both for me and for our contributors. Scrapping the “issue” format, each week we’ll publish a small range of pieces that work together. Sometimes it will be poetry, sometimes fiction, humor, essays, reviews, interviews or more. For those interested in how to cite Wild Violet works, now that the publishing format has changed, please...
Read MoreWatch This Space
We’re converting Wild Violet from a quarterly format to a weekly format. As we work on ironing out all the bugs, please be patient. Soon, we’ll be publishing new content on a weekly basis, with featured pieces appearing in a prominent place on the home page. We will also consider new ways to encourage Wild Violet community building. If you have any thoughts about this, please share them.
Read MoreI’m Psycho for this Book
Next year marks the 20th anniversary of its publication. I think it’s just about the greatest book to come out the last half of the century, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. It was published in 1991, but I didn’t read it until ’94. I was a junior in high school when this divine novel graced my naughty, sweaty palms. I recall opening my new paperback at the start of my first and only Saturday detention, for skipping a class too much called Early Childhood Development, basically free daycare for parents in a certain network of...
Read MoreJoan Didion, the Memoir, and the Second Great Depression
Let me begin by stating that Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, is almost unbearably brilliant. It won the National Book Award in November 2005 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In clipped, precise sentences, Didion describes the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the harrowing grief she endured in the following year — during much of which the couple’s only daughter was hospitalized with what would prove to be her own fatal illness. Intertwined with Didion’s own experience is a line attributed to Sir Gawain of King...
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