Literary Contest I

Dear readers,

Have you read the first chapter of Maria Dracula? Could you imagine yourself traveling on the streets of Marigold's fantastic Salem?

If so, please write a 500-words essay about Salem, as this town is described in the first chapter.

The first ten essay-messages will be accepted in this first literary contest.

The winning essayist will receive a poster with Maria Dracula signed by the author.

Enjoy your writing!

~ Alice Rose

Guess who's talking?

Dear friends of Maria Dracula,

Can you guess the point of view of this poem of mine? Stylistically, I pay tribute to the great American poet Charles Bukowski.

But whose voice is it?

THE KISS

Dear Mina,

my beloved from seven mountains,

seven seas, and seven fields afar,

my nails used to screech

your name on the table of the universe.

My tobacco laughter

used to frighten you.

But now my cough couldn’t startle

the starfish at the bottom of the shark tank,

in the Venice Beach bar,

where I gargled scotch, as lampposts

conjured the gargoyles of the beach.

The moon in the cracked window

sent arrows of mist

into my retina of a thousand cats,

as I wrote you letters

on palm leaves in the wind.

I searched in my left pocket,

found the hole, in time,

and the locket with your auburn hair

tied to a chord of pain.

It led to my heart

of skulls, garlic, and fangs.

Like a Gypsy,

I searched for my destiny

into my palm.

Survival and solitude

was the reply of my jagged lines.

I rolled the cigar flickering on

on my face,

saw my cuts in the broken mirror

among glasses filled with licorice.

I thought of the dried corpses

I had left on pikes

in the mountains of Carpathia,

and turned to wolf, lizard,

goddamn phantom.

Yet for all eternity I gave you,

that bite you never returned.

more books...

For the Fulbright kids :),

Here are some children/young adult books I read in the U.S.. They have inspired me while writing Maria Dracula. When you get here, you might want to read them, too! In the meantime, you can check them out on Amazon.com.

· Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl (great action vocabulary)

· Kate DiCamillo - The Tale of Despereaux (written in rhythmic lines)

· Natalie Babbit – Tuck Everlasting (poetic images)

· Cynthia Kadohata – Kira-Kira (sensitive language)

· Alice Hoffman – Water Tales (Aquamarine & Indigo) (fairy-tale-like, but with an urban twist)

· Sandra Ciseneros – The House on Mango Street (written in poetic prose)

Hello, I invite you to Maria Dracula’s blog, which is based on the character Maria Dracula from my fantasy novel for children with the same name (www.mariadracula.com).

I grew up in Eastern Europe (Bucharest, Romania). Because now I live, read, and write in North America, I invite readers and writers who grew up in various places in the world to post their thoughts about the books they read as kids and how a childhood spent in different countries and cultures influenced their writing and reading as adults.

What are the stories you love most? I will start with my own experience. Growing up in Eastern Europe, I'd read Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Brothers Grimm, Carlo Collodi, Edmondo de Amicis, Jules Verne, Hector Malot, Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Petre Ispirescu, and Shahrazad. They left an enduring mark on me to this day: I see the world beautiful, innocent, promising.

Maria Dracula is a coming-of-age fairy tale about a ten-year-old apprentice witch and orphan from Salem, Massachusetts, who discovers that she is the great-granddaughter of Dracula -- Maria Dracula. But this is also a fantasy book written the way stories are told in Southeastern Europe. In that part of the world surrealism supplants the gothic and Orient meets Occident in literature and art. Hence, natural elements – such as the Sun, the Moon, or the Milky Way Galaxy – are part of the adventure, and can intervene in the life of the characters at any time.

Maria Dracula is a fantastic story parents and grandparents would tell their offspring, hoping that children will learn about poetical language, and that through adventurous voyages any kid can become a hero. I guess, as writers possessing a hybrid diasporic sensibility, we instinctively bridge novelty and old style, the newly-found home and the lost one, the stories we learn as adults and the ones we've heard as kids.

Alice Rose