Tag: Psychological Thrillers

  • The Demon Lover – a play for 2 voices by Alysse Aallyn

    SCENE III

    EVAN
    This is the letter I would write you if I dared,
    if I weren’t frightened bf the cancer
    Of your Elayna-hatred.
    I am overworked, wrung out.
    I feel possessed by you.
    You must always live at the pitch of anguish.
    Our love has roots in good and evil,
    It lives in the darkest places of our natures
    Despite of its pleasant surface.
    Shall we end by destroying each other?
    You have the deadlier weapons.

    EVA
    I have a bad effect on people.
    Guilt, conspiracy, love,
    I cannot breathe without them.
    Oh, the pain of your reproach!
    Not seeing you would kill me.
    I live for the memory of our every moment.
    I wouldn’t give a damn if I had a month to live.

    EVAN
    Boredom, dissipation, remorse,
    And apprehension– I can’t escape this obsessive cycle.
    Beneath the controlled surface of my mind
    Opportunities to be frenzied are endless.
    I’m afraid of saying something evil which many stick.

    EVA
    Gratitude for our happiness chokes me.
    This restlessness of things going to waste.
    Missing you is like an illness.
    I have never fallen out of love with you.
    The flame is always there.
    The place is full of you.
    I can no longer look at hyacinths

    EVAN
    There’s a worm in this bud
    But who is its corruptor?
    Your insights are so powerful they alter mine.
    I’m sorry for your husband’s death.
    I feel a shift in the angle of vision.
    A sadness fell on me
    A foreboding so final it seemed the end.
    Your pleading for our life dissolved my will.
    I agree to renewal, something I can live by
    But I refuse your guilt.

    EVA
    Did I leave my diary behind?
    Don’t read it, not that you would.
    It’s anaphrodisiac. I am filled with envious admiration
    For the way you spend your time.
    You get so much done!

    EVAN
    Of course, it’s an incentive to work, being alone.
    You have created your own circle
    Even if the intelligentsia is as insensitive as you say.
    I’m grateful we are calm,
    Those fearful scenes never likely to begin again.
    I’m sure the panic of youth has played a part.
    I used to hope you would love me less over time
    But now I think we love each other equally.

    EVA
    I believe we should exchange rings.
    Do you think this faux? Would Elayna object?
    This is so I have something in case you die of that itch or fall out of an airplane.
    I wonder why Elayna’s throat won’t heal?
    I believe she is ice-bound.
    She’s sealing you away from life.

    EVAN
    You witch, you have
    Frozen Elayna’s throat.
    I begged you not to. You make
    Sadness physical.

    EVA
    Elayna’s frozen her own throat
    I wish you’d see it.
    Depression is hallucinatory.
    Guilt and sorrow undermine all confidence,
    I refuse to give them credence.

    You are so near me I feel we are one person.
    I feel you now beside me.
    I will make you real.

    EVAN
    These acute waves of feeling sometimes come over me
    As if you’re signaling.
    I owe you happiness
    But I can’t express it.
    We must always believe life is as beautiful as the music
    Says it is. The illusions you must cultivate are in fact
    A form of courage.
    Forget my deficiencies
    Find amusement in the worldly game.

    EVA
    Without Allen, I re-experience my youth.
    Oh, the bafflement of the young!
    I broke off my engagement because I loved too much
    And cast about for a spouse I could
    Control. I believe you did that, too.

    EVAN
    Our parting was unbearable.
    I had to run away –
    Your rush of talk was like someone bursting into tears.
    I feel like an executioner robbing you of sleep.
    My nose began to bleed and
    It’s been bleeding ever since.
    We must love each other less to become more tranquil.

    EVA
    I am a witch and you should fear me.
    I glow with contempt and boredom and fury.
    I don’t understand why
    I can’t experience life by your side.
    We share the same senses,
    The same vein of joy.
    Our life together is timeless, continuous.

    EVAN
    Your letter’s fraught with dynamite.
    I can never be alone, it is me and the gin bottle.
    I am home nowhere now – except with you.

    EVA
    I don’t want you getting yourself into a state
    But Edgar has proposed, forcing me to face the fact
    That I literally cannot live without you.

    EVAN
    I dread you will fall for Edgar.
    You called him “sweet” and “cozy” and “brilliantly entertaining”
    And I am none of those things. Did you bewitch him?
    he said in a persecuted voice.
    It would your justice, sending me to hell.
    We would lose each other by inches,
    But aren’t we doing that already?

    EVA
    I can’t show Edgar the brutal candor
    Behind my loving kindness.
    He mistakes the hostess for a person.
    I arrange the flowers in symbols of you
    And everyone’s too stupid to notice.
    To bed alone again tonight.
    I wish Elayna would die.
    Then we should be equals.

  • The Demon Lover – a play for 2 voices by Alysse Aallyn

    SCENE II

    EVAN
    Do you really love me?
    Why should you?
    I don’t seem any longer
    To be able to cope with friendships.

    EVA
    It is a horror, an outrage
    That we should not be here together. I struggle against
    The wound of not knowing where you are each minute.
    Everything you do is more important to me than my own life.
    The whole of me is with you.
    I see and feel you so distinctly,
    your beloved cold hand in mine
    Your touch on the nape of my neck.
    Both joy and agony
    – my insides torn by pincers.
    A double goodbye would have been awful
    – two bites on the bullet of pain.
    This love is like something we have given birth to.
    We must never blunt our imagination or tenderness.
    Don’t get a cold in your soul.

    EVAN
    I disappoint everyone.
    I deliberately left one of your letters for Elayna to find.
    With me love is linked with
    A need to betray. I invite possessiveness.
    She made me promise our love would never be physical.
    I lied fluidly.

    EVA
    Even the thought of
    Such a loss of pleasure tears at my heart
    Like some medieval torture.
    You harrow me unbearably.
    My defenses are down.
    I’m filled me with a sense of ghastly injury.
    How I wish I were more beautiful –
    It’s my mouth that ages me.
    I want you seeing all of me –
    Even if it hurts.
    You are your own child,
    You preserve your youth with the harm
    That you cause.
    I am dead and already
    Interred – in you.
    You are my eternity.

    EVAN
    You can’t have everything.
    I am kept aloft by the conflict of
    Unbearables.
    I am happy.

    EVA
    Our dancing life is over –
    Shall I enter a convent?
    There’s no point in being alive
    if we’re not together.
    I show my deepest self to you alone.

    EVAN
    Please – no more shaming conversations
    Over Irish whisky. Let’s cut our losses
    And get some fun from life.

    EVA

    
The gash in our love might close
    But I can’t forget it’s there.
    Life with you is a remote happiness to which I cling.

    EVAN
    And all this time you write
    Fantastic books. If you were as unhappy as you say,
    You couldn’t write so well.
    I am the whetstone on which you sharpen –
    I should be thanked for all your works.

    EVA
    You shed your light around me.
    I am always aware of that other world we share
    – Or do we? Our pattern seems set –
    If treachery can’t break it,
    There is no death.

    EVAN
    I am losing interest in sex.
    My bed gets so icy in the small hours of the morning –
    I feel I am trying to communicate with the spirit world.
    I am in limbo and will never escape this place.
    The adolescent remains alive in me, I have a
    Panic fear of conformity.
    So I cast myself as the elderly rake.
    I’m the bore –
    Marriage gets me down.

    EVA
    When you go on and on about yourself
    You’re a man I don’t recognize.
    I prefer your adolescent self.
    The man of the house is a free agent.
    A respected prowler
    Who looks benevolently upon the faces of his womenfolk.
    Then he’s away – with mistresses or boyfriends.
    In my attack of loneliness, I’m housebound,
    Eating baked beans and drinking stewed tea.

    EVAN
    In other countries women
    Are less bossy and more decorative.

  • The Demon Lover – a play for two voices by Alysse Aallyn

    Scene I

    EVAN

    I like women willful, late
    For appointments,
    fond of showy clothes and society, vague, drifting, dreamy,
    yet of course all of that is tiresome.
    But I don’t like competence, intellectual honesty, intelligent sensuality.
    Women keep turning on me saying,
    “You don’t love me.”
    What good is it to have been so happy
    when it ends so painfully?
    I am a “crook”, a “torturer of women”,
    “Murderer.” She has made me feel a monster.
    Below the surface of the will
    I feel deep animal distress, as if I had wives
    Hidden away somewhere
    To marry my present wife.

    EVA
    I find your misery gratifying.
    When I was younger I used to
    Accommodate everyone –
    Now I’m recalcitrant.
    You’re never out of my thoughts, but
    Sadness dulls one.
    Honestly, I always risk failing you,
    Failing you in outstandingness.
    You are extraordinary, I am extraordinary,
    we have been extraordinary together.
    We’re specimens under glass.
    It hurts because the pin runs through both of us.
    The agonizing force of missing you
    Is sweeping over me.
    We have eternity connecting us,
    Backward & forward but
    I can’t get anyone to believe it.

    EVAN
    Would my death simplify things?
    My wife struggles with carrying the conversation
    While I stare glumly at the rain.
    We go to an expensive little restaurant
    And pretend we are on a date to really talk.

    EVA
    That woman’s killing you.
    Imagine if you were dead and your wife
    Wrote a book explaining you
    To everyone! That’s true suffering –
    Fodder for the mealy-mouthed.

    EVAN
    My wife won’t be writing any books
    About me or about anything. You’re the one
    To write the book.
    I feel safe in your hands.

    EVA
    Except I’ve told you over and over
    You’ll outlive me.
    You’re killing me.
    Or your wife is.
    I’ll die of my addiction –
    We always do.
    We prefer it.
    Will you write about me?

    EVAN
    I’ve lied to everyone for
    So long, I’m sure that truth
    Is beyond me.

    EVA
    I’d rather see you dead at my feet
    Than dead ON your feet.
    That would be a mercy killing –
    The last unbearable agony –
    Wondering if you existed at all.
    I have small talent for this.
    I have disgraced my idealism,
    Pretending boredom can be fruitful.
    Waiting, waiting for you everywhere. I
    Wake one day to find I’ve lost my looks, my hair,
    fascination, brain – everything.

    EVAN
    You’re simply waking up
    In an empty hotel.
    The light is always different
    The morning after.
    This is what middle-aged people do.
    I love the brutality of your world.
    You never fade. You are my word made flesh.

    EVA
    You are my religion.
    Until In fell in love with you I was 25 inside.
    I lived in a world of dreams and theories.
    Your experiences seem realer to me than mine.

    EVAN
    To have touched the same places
    Is a bond between us.
    Social instinct is my religion.

    EVA
    Middle-aged people go to weddings
    Out of perverse fascination for the bride.
    I was that bride –
    My day was all champagne.
    Anaesthetized
    It doesn’t hurt so much.
    Such a sense of enormity came over me
    I almost fainted. I gave Allen the dirtiest look: “You caused this.”
    Without wedding dress
    I was a restless, dowdy snob.
    People were falling in love left and right –
    Even in decaying marriages.
    I wanted that –
    He read my subtext.
    And I was caught.

    EVAN
    These dreary parties have a decaying effect.
    My loneliness for you is like a whiplash.
    Your absence is a bitter injury
    But nothing can injure our love –
    We’re too strong for them.
    I’m silenced till I hear from you.
    If I let myself go I would feel desperate.
    I can’t bear you’re going to France without me –
    isn’t love our country?

    EVA
    I won’t say “I’ll die if you don’t come”
    Because I know you would come if you possibly could.
    What a skeleton in the cupboard a wife is.

    EVAN
    Don’t be jealous of Elayna. You are the only goal
    Toward which my life is tending.
    You are the meaning of my life.
    I could never live for work alone.

    EVA
    You enlarge my soul.
    In your mind is my existence.
    You’re more real to me than me.
    I’m in a peculiar psychic state.
    It’s an atmosphere of illusion.
    I envy Elayna all the time.
    It drips like an irritant over my nerves.

    EVAN
    What of Allen? You
    Have your worse half too.

    EVA
    Oh, Allen spends his time lost in woods,
    Falling in love with trees. He’s
    No threat to anyone.

    EVAN
    To understand one’s destiny
    One needs a framework for this mass of experience.
    How can I live separated from you?
    If I stopped caring for you
    I couldn’t care for anything.
    I need my wife, her whip-cracking organization.
    I loathe living in the squalor I get into on my own.
    Having breakfast OUT of bed is the last horror.
    Miasmic feelings of impossibility and terror. Help me.

    EVA
    We help each other
    By existing. Except for God I have no help but you.
    Our love is growing more formidable as our unshakeable belief
    Grows stronger. Like grace, it renews itself.
    All yesterday I glowed. My inability to accept your wife
    Is my deformity – help me with it.
    The light of our love is the only light for me.

  • Film Review – The Three Faces of Alfred Hitchcock

    APOLOGY FROM ALYSSE – Somehow the first version of this came out in Plaintext! Sorry.

    Film Review: Spellbound

                A Viennese psychiatrist in this movie demands a dream “the more cock-eyed, the better” and Hitchcock obliges with this wildly uneven picture offering us Alfred at is best and worst. This film about psychoanalysis is schizy; pretentious, illogical, childish and afraid of its own emotions. Unfortunately it starts with an awkward, talky beginning in which misogynist doctors accuse Ingrid Bergman (for the first time in her life, I’m sure) of being a “glacier” who’s uninterested in men.

                No one heats up a screen like Ingrid Bergman, shooting smoke and fire in all directions from the get-go and it will surprise nobody to find out she and Gregory Peck conducted a hot affair during filming. 

                Dr. Constance Petersen is a psychoanalyst at an upscale Vermont looney bin full of nymphos and weirdos, galvanized by the arrival of Gregory Peck as the new doctor in charge and he’s just as worked up about her. It doesn’t even faze her to discover that he’s an impostor, the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and her swain is accused of his murder.

                The film begins to gather speed as the couple goes on the run together with Connie telling everyone they’re on their honeymoon.  She takes the amnesiac to her training psychotherapist’s house in Rochester where she promises to “cure” him.

                Her teacher tells her that “love smitten analysts playing dream detectives” make “the best patients” but she is making good progress breaking down Peck’s resistance when the police show up and the couple flees to a ski resort called “Gabriel Valley”. 

                The famous dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali is pretty interesting – gamblers in a club decorated with eyes, a man tumbling down a rooftop and a masked man laughing behind a chimney brandishes a wheel.  Constance interprets this as her boss murdering Edwardes on a ski vacation to prevent the younger man from replacing him and framing her lover for the crime.

                When she tells this discovery to her boss he threatens her with the very same gun, but she faces him down and he shoots himself instead. Seen from the killer’s perspective the gun fires directly at the screen.

                Film ends with Constance Petersen and her Big “100% Cured” male making out at the train station. To get to this point Hitchcock had to battle a sappy film score, (Bernard Hermann wasn’t available), a bossy, clueless, tone deaf producer (David O. Selznick) and a woman-hating screenwriter (Ben Hecht) to ignite a modicum of his signature passion and suspense. At least it was a huge hit and broke all records. What a film this could have been without the frozen art direction, the awkward rear projection and the hysterical film censors. Someone should definitely take another stab at it.

  • Secrets of the Self – Second Book Contract by Alysse Aallyn

    My second book contract was a two-book contract. I had long been working on a novel, Model Prisoner, that was based largely on the true crime story described in Barthel’s Death in California , where a man murdered his best friend and kidnapped the friend’s wife. I was working through the issues created when women are forced to cooperate with dangerous men. As often happens, the characters hijacked the story. The relationship between the two men became more and more important – my poor heroine was just a marker of success or loss. In a lucky flash of intuition, I realized the mythic proportions of what I was dealing with – my protagonist became Persephone, uncomfortably contended over by two Lords of Darkness.

    Another character pushed his way onstage – Persey’s dog, Digger. Because Persey loved him, he was an object of jealousy by the Lords of Darkness, who wanted her all to themselves. This evoked the legends around domesticating wild creatures into household pets and the story became Woman Into Wolf.

    When I was ready to submit the novel I discovered my publisher Bridgeworks had been bought by another publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, so I sent it to them and prepared myself for the uncomfortable weeks long wait for consideration lowly authors are subjected to. A few weeks later I heard from my old editor (who I’d dedicated my second novel to!) that Rowman & Littlefield in fact had no editorial department, and so my contract was essentially null and void. I submitted Woman Into Wolf to my old editor to see if she had any good ideas about what I should do next. She suggested I de-emphasize one of the characters (the Bird Lady) and play down Persey’s past life – I took all her suggestions. But when I sent her the revised manuscript I discovered she had forgotten all about it and wanted me to tell her how the novel USED to be!

    At that point I lost faith in her. My trusty Girl Focus Group (my daughter’s friends) loved the book, and I feared further monkeying around might break something important! It seemed a better idea to jut publish the thing myself. And the reviews bore me out.

    …a thrill-ride, unique and highly recommended reading.” –Entrepreneur.com


    “deceit, rape, fertility, imprisonment and a mother’s grief…as each piece of the tightly coiled fiction was loosed I waited for the revelation to come…she couldn’t imagine the extent of the deception until it was spelled out. Neither could I.” – MyShelf.com

    “one of the most unusual mysteries I have ever read…I loved reading Woman Into Wolf … kept me on the edge of my seat right through the end…I highly recommend this novel to fans of crime mysteries that also
    enjoy some extra spice in their stories.” – Readerviews.com

    “a very fine psychological thriller…
    the characters in this book are as bright
    as crystal and as sharp as shattered glass.
    Aallyn not only can describe them to a
    neo-noun, she can make them speak
    true to those characters.
    Quite a talent…a novel every bit as worthy as
    her first.” –ArmchairInterviews.com

    “Satisfying as hell.” – Quoth the Raven

  • ALYSSE AALLYN

    Alysse Aallyn is the author of four well-received thrillers, Find Courtney, Depraved Heart, Woman Into Wolf and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, one historical novel (Devlyn) and a book of short stories (Awake Till the End.) Her work has been translated into German and Italian. She has three published books of poetry – The Sacred Quiver, The Hot Skin, Haunted Wedding and The Five Wounds and edited another (The Feathered Violin.) She trained in theatre at Circle in the Square Theatre School and Martha Graham School of Dance. She appeared in the part of Isabella in Jean Giraudoux’s The Enchanted at the New Yorker Theatre. She has held writing fellowships at Brooklyn College and LaSalle University. Her novel Depraved Heart won a 2011 CT Press Club fiction award and her play Queen of Swords was a semi-finalist in the 2014 National Arts Council First Play award. She has been invited to read her original work at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC and has taught creative writing at Catonsville Community College. Woman Into Wolf was a semi-finalist for The National Playwrights Conference (2016) and her play Our Father’s Restaurant was performed on Pacifica Radio. She has also appeared as a crime commentator on ID – TV’s Blood Relatives. Her play, Let’s Speak Vietnamese was published in Dramatika Magazine. She directed The Maids and played the Mother in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders for Theatre Upstairs. Other plays she’s written are The Honey & the Pang about Emily Dickinson’s posthumous career, Cuck’d – a modern Othello, and Caving, in which the theatre is transformed into a cave for a spelunking dare. Rough Sleep, (based on her novel I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead) was produced by Manhattan Repertory Theatre (W. 45th St) in 2019. Her latest play, The Dalingridge Horror, (short version Leonard & Virginia) explores the partnership between Leonard & Virginia Woolf in their own words and was a finalist for the Tennessee Williams 2021 award. Her newest poetry collection, Haunted Wedding appeared in 2022 from Thriller Library.

    Her current work is The WarriorOracle – Becoming a Warrior on the path to enlightenment.

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    The Goddess – Power !

      What It Means When This Card Chooses You – You are one of the Elect. Most people feel that because the Goddess card represents power it’s the most valuable card in the Warrior Oracle
      deck. But we are all familiar with fires that get out of control, rage-fueled spirals, explosives that blow up in your face and escalating weaponry. Owing to the Goddess’ power, much can go wrong.

      You Have The Power – The true meaning of this card is that you have the force within you to get things done and to bend unfriendly circumstances to your desire and will. Isn’t that what we all want – a little magic?

      You Are Iconic – But the Goddess card is about more than magic, it is about the inherent magic that is especially, irreplaceably You. You have a power no one else has, incorporated in your being, your possibilities, your desires and your memories. This takes a lifetime to accept because we all nervously want to be Someone Else and experience existence through the armor of Having only an Outside instead of just the very vulnerable Inside in which we all feel imprisoned.

      Dreams Instruct You – Your dreams bring all these passions together as psychic poetry, elucidating what you think you want, what you hope you want and what you are afraid you want. The ultimate magic is to seize conscious control of this potent power source.

      Warrior Challenge – The challenge is to truly connect with others, reveal our world Inside, and avoid blasting their apparently impenetrable Outside with our terror, our longing and our fear.

      Warrior Danger – We cannot take hostages and we must never become a hostage. Freedom is a fine line to walk. If we wish to reach out, we must treat others with respect and claim like respect for ourselves. Accept your “experiments”; do not fear them but allow them to take you where you need to go.

      Warrior Opportunities – There will be stumbles and terrors aplenty, also successes that LOOK like stumbles and terrors, but which we only realize on reflection were real leaps forward. This is why we must carefully assess our daily efforts without being harsh with ourselves. Speak gently to yourself as you would to a most beloved child. You are your own Most Beloved Child. It is not selfish to commit to this belief, it is simply placing the oxygen mask over your own face FIRST so that you can administer this life-saving force to others. Find someone with whom you can share your journey, without fear or judgment. This connection will teach us everything we need to know about how to connect with others.

      Fear & Trembling: Where would we get the courage to become warriors? Human history begins with an enormous fear of God or whoever is causing all that lightning, those earthquakes and striking everybody down. Killing small helpless, pretty things was meant to be flattering and propitiatory to this God (I don’t get it either.) then Jesus came with a message about how God was really loving, generous and wanted the best for us. We know how that turned out.

      Becoming a Warrior: As children, we struggled to understand where we fit on the power spectrum. I tried killing a snake and experimented with bullying other children the way I was bullied. I didn’t care for it. The only relief was in thinking about, researching and understanding what was going on. My earliest researches, as for many children, were in astronomy and dinosaurs. The cold magnificence of the planets and the complete wipeout of the dinosaurs gave me a way to stand back from the immediate suffering of the schoolyard. I then moved on to the early Egyptians who tried to solve their problems through magic and art. The art was visually appealing and the magic was emotionally soothing.

      Pick Your Battles: I saw that most schoolyard fights were a reaction to the immediate suffering of pain or confusion, and that they magnified, rather than solved, those problems. There was a manifest holiness about this discovery. It rescued me from the torture of everyday life and elevated me to a plane where every other contributing thinker had already become immortalized.

      Study & Strategy: I read everything I could get my hands on in history and biography (research) and in fairy tales (magic). When I fell in love with the novels of C.S. Lewis and Rumer Godden, the world judged my taste good – when I discovered Agatha Christie, it did not – but it turned out everyone else was reading her too. Agatha is a short course on human nature (original sin) and a proponent of both the scientific and Socratic methods. She’s great training for a Warrior. I wrote it all down in my Training Journal.

      Claiming Your Power: By the time you’re a teenager you can see you have some power – some mental, some physical. The question is developing it and finding appropriate gurus. Avoiding the dominance/submission game.

      Keep Going – Recognize that you have been touched by the goddess and honor her by being grateful for the glorious gifts of life.

      Models & Mentors: “I did not deceive you. I permitted you to deceive yourself.” Agatha Christie

      “An Indian proverb says everyone is a house with four rooms – physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. Most of us live in one room or the other but if you don’t visit each room each day you are not a complete person.” – Rumer Godden

      “You are never too old to dream a new dream or set a new goal” – C. S. Lewis

      “You have to believe in yourself” – Sun Tzu

      #Haiku: Wyvern

      My power
      Beast bristles
      Fire;
      Eats critics
      Guards path
      Sleeps in my
      Mirror

    1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

      Aspiration – The Future

        Being a warrior means you never give up, you modify goals and you redesign maps.

        My explorations into True Crime had taught me what people REALLY do. Clearly, there’s no necessity to make up plots; in my next novel the challenge would be explaining what humans get up to and why.

        After the weirdly destructive father/daughter vibe of my last full-time job I became interested in three real stories – a kidnapped toddler where the FBI became convinced the parents were lying, a father in Florida pulling out all the stops searching for his missing teen (later found to have been murdered by a serial killer) and a father pimping out his own daughter (later revealed to be a kidnap victim.)

        I swirled all these into the psychological thriller Find Courtney, where a college student helps a distraught father search for her missing roommate, only to discover that he is definitely NOT what he seems. I whipped the paintings of Edvard Munch, tales of long-dead fan dancers and arson scams into a fine froth of first-person storytelling.

        I got an offer from the first publisher I submitted it to, an exciting Bridgehampton start-up promising the personal touch. It was published to wonderful reviews, but there were unseen cliffs ahead! Luckily warriors are good at managing hard landings and surprise outcomes.

        #Haiku: Find Courtney

        In the
        Dead
        Killer’s house;
        Who needs
        A sexy pirate
        Playing Daddy?

      1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Dawn – Relief

          After the birth of my first child I bought a printing press – an adorable little toy that printed a 3×5 inch page and elegant “Egyptian” type. I wanted to print my own book of poems – The Hot Skin – and I didn’t want to ”delegate” anything. I also bought a binding machine and designed the covers – plain black and white –by myself. The pleasure of not having to rely on other people was immensely freeing.

          I also bought a sorter in which to place the ordered printed pages, taped to it the slogan “Work Is Love Made Visible” (St. Catherine) and moved this whole conglomeration, plus the baby’s playpen, to the small cottage at StormFall Farm for a poetic summer in the Berkshires.

          My husband planned to commute back and forth from Philadelphia.

          I was determined to have the experience Virginia Woolf so movingly describes in her diaries – sorting type as a way to self-soothe.

          At the time I was staying in the cottage, my husband’s grandmother was up at the big house where I often went for drinks and dinner with her. This grandmother had always been wealthy but was a big believer in “noblesse oblige” and common sense. She was very shocked that I would sometimes alter one of my poems to suit my type requirements and told me, sadly, this meant I was not a real poet. I laughed out loud. This woman would not recognize Art if it bit her.

          When my husband arrived he was angry and aggrieved that I had dedicated the book to him, thanking him for helping with the baby. Didn’t I understand what an insult that was? What would people think? Who would want to invest their money with a baby-minder?

          I was gobsmacked. His violent hysteria was even more frightening than his arguments. My first husband was a cool, smooth seducer, accustomed to lying to get his way. My second husband was very different, but I was beginning to see that the rage and the pathos were deeper than I’d realized. But with poetry you can understand – and express – anything.

          IN THE BUTTERFLY PAVILION

          This evening you said you wished
          I was more ordinary.
          I bowed my head. I did not speak.
          Outside the animals leaned together,
          Breathing lightly; waiting
          For my answer.
          Cats-tongue ferns
          Swelled up like swords, pushed out a stink
          Occluding fields of vision while
          The rabbit-bloodied lawn curled away. 
          Phlox flamed  
            Sows littered in the cyclamen
          Dwarf stars broke free as
          Frazzled molten ore raced across a sky
          Darkening to night.
          Summoning my power
          My hands stay folded in my sleeves.
          Nighttime is my kingdom.

        1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

          Symbiosis – Interdependence

            During pursuit of my never achieved degree in Rehab Counseling (at Springfield College) I worked three years at Easter Seal. There were good things about it but it was not a happy experience. I taught Career Exploration – that was the fun part, trying to open the eyes of frightened people diagnosed as “disabled” to the possibilities out there. I knew very little about computers – just coming into vogue – and Easter Seals refused to get me training – but I passed on what little I could figure out. We worked on resumes, interviews, goal setting, and seeing yourself through the employers’ eyes.

            While I worked there Easter Seals built a glamorous new building and moved all “managers” out. It was carefully explained to us that anyone actually providing services to clients was unimportant, replaceable, and would be paid as little as possible – being a manager, on the other hand, was a high-status, remunerative, important occupation.

            I saw I needed a new job, pronto and used my new skills to get hired at a non-profit start-up of ex-addicts hoping to influence legislation. As the sole “office help” I enjoyed creating business practices from the ground up. I kept track of members and planned member events. Unfortunately, my boss was a very angry man (he once threw a book at me) and was usually seething about what he saw as my completely misplaced confidence and independence. After three years, we had enough work to hire an office helper; but I was not assigned to be her supervisor. This was actually fine with me because I was busy managing a family and writing on the side. You hire a poet at your peril, and I don’t think I could conceal my distaste for office politics. Office Helper observed this dynamic and began immediately planning to take my job. This only worked briefly – once I was pushed out she lasted a month.

            I was determined to keep up the good relationships I’d forged, but it turned out to be impossible. Their world was just not my world. In the meantime I had one child in college and another finishing high school – I thought I might make it on a part-time job and on paper I certainly had the skills. The weird interplay with my ex-boss – officially fatherly yet boiling with suppressed sexual rage – gave me an idea for a novel.

            Seawracked

            He lost her
            Spoke too soon
            As men are wont
            Words freighted by an inner logic
            Fell to earth and lay
            Prey to busy bristle-footed worms
            Tidily dismantle
            Subject, verb & predicate;
            Sucked out sense and left
            The elegiac bones to rot
            Amid kelp-wigged rock & glass-rope sponge
            Cheek by jowl with
            Long dead fishermen’s wives
            Punished now for ill-set dough and
            Worse-set hair
            Mouths agape in imitation of
            The badly sutured wounds of childbirth
            Secrets told; corpses left to nourish
            Nature’s counting-house
            One season only; sharing space
            With shattered petrels
            Feathers spewed like pillow-stuffing
            In passing frenzy of love-struck boy s-
            Strewn among the shavings of these once great ships
            Built by hearts & backs of men
            Who loved their daughters far too well –
            Losing them to sailors
            Crueler than the great sea-god himself;
            He who stirs our sleep these nights
            With grief-crazed cries of loons
            Casting on the waters for their
            Far-flung children
            Lost forever now
            As we are lost as
            He lost her.