Post-weekend Poetry 055: 3rd Generation Education by Victoria King-Voreadi

Welcome to Post-weekend Poetry and the fifty-fifth poem in this series. This week’s piece is by multi-genre author and interviewee Victoria King-Voreadi.

3rd Generation Education

I don’t want third generation education,
A buck .25 from the magazine rack at the convenience store,
Gulped down with a cold beer,
And the latest flavor of pain reliever to forget the empty feeling in my head.
I’d be better off dead.
Maybe I already am.

How many out there?  The people I meet, as I walk down the street.  You see me as if I weren’t there…

The living, please step forward not back.  This is no exercise this is life.
A one time shot.
If you’re not dead yet there is no rush,
Tomorrow is another day.
Life happens now, it’s no disease.

We create phantoms to hide from,
Nightmares to live in…
We make them real: those demons you see are yours!
I won’t buy them, even at a discount.
Burn them at the stake of your freedom.

My stake is already quite full thank you… say, have you got a match?

I asked Victoria what prompted this piece and she said…

I grew up in a very “New Age” area of southern California known as Santa Barbara County, a boutique wine region, full of Arabian horse breeders and patrons of the arts.  In the early 80′s the self-help boom was in full swing.  In every supermarket and newsstand there were self-help titles promising youth, beauty, health and wealth.

A friend asked me to join him in attending a “Wellness Fair” in Santa Barbara, you never saw such a gathering of blonde and bronzed, tanned and trim folk in your life!  The main event was an inspirational speech on the subject of “Prosperity Consciousness” e.g. the art of making oneself wealthy via positive thinking (of course having a bit of investment capital helps too but he more or less glossed over that bit).  The following day I was back in my apartment in downtown LA and went to the corner convenience store – there on a rack near the till was the National Inquirer, and who should be gracing the cover but the very same blonde bronzed tanned and trim chappy who had addressed the crowd in the park so earnestly and with such heartfelt sincerity the previous day.

My kind of poem. Thank you, Victoria.

Victoria King-Voreadi grew up in southern California in a quaint boutique wine region known as the Santa Ynez Valley.  She studied Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles before moving to Greece.  She taught Screenwriting and Introduction to Film Acting at the Stavrakos School of Film and Television Arts in Athens and has worked as a freelance writer, editor and location producer for film and television productions.

In 2005 she became an accredited EFL / ESOL teacher and worked for 4 years on the island of Paros before finally settling on Crete where she has lived with her husband and her two teenage daughters since 2009. You can find out more about Victoria and her writing at http://victoriakingvoreadi.iguanabooks.com.

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If you’d like to submit your poem (40 lines max) for consideration for Post-weekend Poetry take a look here, or 50 lines for Morgen’s Online Poetry Writing Group.

The blog interviews will return as normal tomorrow with memoirist Julie Greene – the six hundred and sixth of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, bloggers, biographers, agents, publishers and more. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further. And I enjoy hearing from readers of my blog; do either leave a comment on the relevant interview (the interviewees love to hear from you too!) and / or email me.

If you are reading this and you write, in whatever genre, and are thinking “ooh, I’d like to do this” then you can… just email me and I’ll send you the questions. You complete them, I tweak them where appropriate (if necessary to reflect the blog ‘clean and light’ rating) and then they get posted. When that’s done, I email you with the link so you can share it with your corner of the literary world. And if you have a writing-related blog / podcast and would like to interview me… let me know.

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Author interview no.605 with novelist and screenwriter Mark Adam Kaplan

Welcome to the six hundred and fifth of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, biographers, agents, publishers and more. Today’s is with novelist and screenwriter Mark Adam Kaplan. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further.

Morgen: Hello, Mark. Please tell us something about yourself, where you’re based, and how you came to be a writer.

Mark: My name is Mark Adam Kaplan, and I live in Southern California, just outside of Cucamonga.  I was first published in my middle school magazine when a classmate fished one of my poems from the desk where I crumpled it up.  I took a playwriting class in high school, and began writing plays while I attended the University of Michigan.  I subsequently moved to Seattle, then New York, finding small stagings of my work.  In 1994 I moved to Los Angeles, to attend the American Film Institute, and struggled in the film industry for about a decade, resulting in a few rewrite jobs, some writer-for-hire work, and one film produced in mainland China, that starred Leslie Cheung.  I began a failed attempt to write a novel shortly after my return.  I completed my next crack at a novel while unemployed in 2003, and ‘A Thousand Beauties’ was published by Bewrite Books in 2009.  Since then I have put out a variety of other work.

Morgen: Congratulations. I went the other way, wrote a couple of novels, tried a (TV) script but didn’t get on with the format (although I liked the story so later converted it into the beginning of a novel). What genre do you generally write and have you considered other genres?

Mark: My personal preference is to explore different genres, rather than stick with one and “brand” myself, as is often suggested to me.  My screenplays range wildly.  I currently have a sci-fi comedy, an interpersonal drama, a high fantasy, a sci-fi action, a periodic Chinese epic, and a romantic comedy, all highly polished and ready to go.  ‘A Thousand Beauties’ is a contemporary American tragedy, and DOWN is a contemporary, YA thriller, and I also have a children’s book, and an educational workbook published through Monsters Unbound.

Morgen: Wow, that is varied. I tend What have you had published to-date? Do you write under a pseudonym?

Mark: Bewrite Books published my first novel, ‘A Thousand Beauties’ in 2009.  In 2011, I co-founded Monsters Unbound with my good friend, Glenn Scano. We made our first picture book, ‘Monsters Do Ugly Things’, and released in in November 2010.  In March 2011, we completed the Monster Activity Book (currently available only through the Monsters Unbound website), a digital Activity Book for use with iPad, eReader, Tablet, etc.  This book is 104 pages designed for children ages 4-9, and has cursive practice sheets, Connect-the-Dots, WordFinds and the like. We are now working on our next picture book, with a target release date of early 2013.

In May 2012, Bewrite Books published my second novel, ‘Down’.

Morgen: I’ve interviewed a couple of Bewrite authors (http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/daily-interview-no-441-with-writer-and-publisher-sam-smith, my most viewed interview to-date – I had 497 views that day!) and http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/blog-interview-no-61-with-romantic-suspense-novelist-rosanne-dingli). You’ve also self-published, what lead to you going your own way?