Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
April 3, 2007 - Shameless Self-Promotion
At the end of this month, Wild Violet will be participating in an event showcasing Philadelphia are literary magazines.
Two of our contributors, Erik Kestler and Dean Borok, will be reading, and I'm supposed to write up an intro about the magazine.
When I asked him to participate, Dean told me that he was pleased to do so, because he found Wild Violet to be one of the most exciting literary journals of today. I asked him to tell me why, hoping to use those thoughts when I put together my intro. What he wrote blew me away.
Instead of an informal paragraph about his thoughts, he took the time to write a critical piece that could easily appear in a newspaper or magazine. Intriguingly, his description of the magazine mirrors our goals for the past five years. It's great to hear that those goals are being met.
Of course, reading this piece as my intro would be out of the question, since it would sound self-aggrandizing in the extreme, but I promised Dean I'd incorporate parts of it into my intro. It seemed a shame to waste it, though, so I've asked his permission to publish it here.
Of course, if you take yourself too seriously, the universe tends to send you a banana peel, so at the risk of tempting slapstick, a little shameless self-promotion.
A
Salute to Wild Violet Magazine
By Dean Borok
I salute Wild Violet Magazine and its pioneering editor, Alyce
Wilson for not following the rutted track of literary respectability which
says that literary writing has to respect the shopworn conventions of
the past.
With people now flying around the earth like a bullet and constantly inventing
new dimensions of reality in science, entertainment and cyberspace, the
one discipline of human culture that seems to be resisting the gravitational
thrust of the future with the headstrong longing of a lovesick donkey
seems to be the literary profession, with editors like Tina Brown, who
has stopped the presses with yet another tedious biography of, get this,
Princess Diana, who was stale news while she was still alive and who is
now involuntarily rising from the grave for yet another round of stultifying
the reading audience with her unimaginative exploits as the bête
noire of the British royal family. Big deal!
The only American editor to resist being sucked into this black hole of
tedium is Alyce Wilson, whose discernment and fine sense of balance drives
her to illuminate new areas of literature, challenging the literary conventions
of the past without negating or leaving them behind.
Ms. Wilson, in her quest for new concepts and directions, manages to strike
a balance that permits her to explore the shape of things to come while
at the same time not straying too far from the current of contemporary
popular taste.
Her sources are innovative and transnational, casting an eye beyond the
realm of parochial sensibility to the broader relevance of universal human
experience and awareness in changing times.
Nevertheless, her intuitive sense of the limits of experimentation, coupled
with her instinct for what the literary audience will tolerate, keeps
her product from straying too far into the pointless world of irrelevance.
Ms. Wilson’s selections are always eminently readable and fascinating.
Ms. Wilson’s stated goal is to break down the barriers between literary
expression and entertainment, and this she accomplishes with the skill
of a seasoned impresario, delivering a sense of immediacy and excitement
by exploding through shopworn parameters of writing and delivering a sense
of electric imagery to the reading public. Her sense of show business
in the classic sense enables her to discard what is temporal while reaching
for forms of entertainment that will be relevant in the future just as
they would have been a century ago, while her intuitive sense of the limits
of experimentation keep her choices accessible to her audience.
Through her efforts to bring the most vibrant and immediate elements of
literary expression to her audience, Alyce Wilson and her journal Wild
Violet are achieving an invaluable contribution to international and
American literary culture.
Moral:
Lavish praise sounds better coming from someone else.
Copyright
2006 by Alyce Wilson
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