Category Archives: Creative writing

My interview for Sudden Denouement Publishing

Interview Questions for Sudden Denouement

1. What name do you write under?
Iulia Halatz

2. In what part of the world do you live? Tell us about it.
I live in Bucharest, Romania, a small beautiful country in South-East Europe, washed by the Black Sea, watered by the Danube river, cleansed by the Danube Delta, guarded by the Carpathian Mountains, envisaged in many stories and legends. I have written more about the magic of my country here: https://mohamadkarbi.com/2017/04/15/romania/.

I am Romanian
I tremble with the moon
Building shapes of light
Into rippling pools
After the rain of summer…

3. Please tell us about yourself.
I am a teacher with 25 years’ experience and I manage my own school of languages.
I am a passionate cyclist. I never say: “I am happy”, but I say: “I am cycley.” (Of course, inspired by J M. Barrie.)

My power sentence (one of them) is: “Stories are our meat and our magic.” Nevertheless, because our culture doesn’t think storytelling is (still) sacred, I have to keep it rolling, keep writing and telling until I’ve got it half licked.
I picture myself as a storyteller and I inhabit the stories I write.
Whenever people do not “speak” to me, I resort to the powerful communicative skills of the world, I visit a tree and the lake and I start writing a story to have new armour and new citadel … I’ve got it twofold licked.

4. If you have a blog or website, please provide the name and the link.
http://www.seocopywriting.ro/

5. When did you begin your blog/website, and what motivated you start it?

Some time ago (2012) I was put in a prison. The bars and locks were invisible to the eye, but essential. Then I started forging a way to freedom, a secret underground passage. Paved with words painted in blood. The bars and locks flung open.

6. What inspires/motivates you to keep blogging on your site?
For me writing is a form of freedom…
It is like digging for gold. I keep on digging and excavating until the steel of words transmutes into gold of wonder….
I keep on writing but not publishing on my blog (for a while). I was sort of harassed through my blog so I decided to keep silent for a while. But I write new pieces for SD and new bricks for finishing building my imago mundi.

7. What does “Divergent Literature” mean to you?
Divergently FreeWriters.
Divergent literature is for me a brush of green-warm air above the sea, aliver than life itself. Is represents a hubristic place of wonder.
I have written more here: http://blog.seocopywriting.ro/2017/12/12/divergent/.

8. SD Founder Jasper Kerkau frequently talks about Sudden Denouement writers using the ‘secret language’. What is it?
It is (for me) speaking and writing in many alphabets, there is an alphabet for Love, an alphabet for Freedom, one for the lust for Life…

9. What are your literary influences?
My ordinary order in any given pub is: “Coffee and Somerset for me.” As in Somerset Maugham.
Magnificent and humble storyteller: “Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.”
He could peer in the depth of the human soul. He measured it in tales not fathoms.

Mr. Michael Ondaatje has no longer divided time in Minutes, but in Loves. “The heart is an organ of fire.” Our minds, body, limbs, souls are organs of fire.

Jack London: “Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong?”
I would name his “mythology”, The Moon and the Sixpence, as he trudged for the both.

10. Has any of your work been published in print? (books, literary magazines, etc.) How did that happen?
Yes, some of my pieces have been published in Anthology Volume I: Writings from the Sudden Denouement Literary Collective.

11. Do you have writing goals? What are they?
– To have the clarity of a poem by Michael Ondaatje.
– To write the truest sentences/stanzas that I know.
– To develop my blue alphabet of the Silent Spring, as “language is lackless and limitless”.
– I am of the opinion that the good people have created mythologies. I would like to create one of my own.

12. Which pieces of your own writing are your favorites? Please share a few links.

http://blog.seocopywriting.ro/2020/06/16/writers-of-the-imperfect-maps-2/
http://blog.seocopywriting.ro/2019/08/07/iulia-halatz-trapeze-artist-of-the-moon/
http://blog.seocopywriting.ro/2019/12/20/morning-mist-at-medium-com/
http://blog.seocopywriting.ro/2020/07/03/allowance-at-medium/
http://blog.seocopywriting.ro/2020/03/20/early-liliac-spring-at-spillwords/

13. What else would like to share about your writing, or yourself?
As my word is freedom, for me Sudden Denouement is the purest form of freedom on the rarest of quests. I feel my imagination roaming the fields and painting walls in search of wild horses. The words I have found on SD open for me more and more eyes every day.
I am a newborn Argus.

What are the most unusual characters in famous novels?

Uriah Heep from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

“I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,” said Uriah Heep modestly, “let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in an umble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father’s former calling was umble; he was a sexton.”

His name has become synonymous with sycophancy.

Captain Ahab from Moby Dick Charles Melville

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”

“Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”

(From his object mad I extracted the question “Who is your white whale?”, question I ask my customers.)

Miss Havisham from Great Expectations Charles Dickens (a forger of astounding characters)

“I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.”

“Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy.”

I’ll tell you,” said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, “what real love it. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did!”

“Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”

Berenice from Berenice – short story by Edgar Allan Poe

“Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew –I ill of health, and buried in gloom –she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side –mine the studies of the cloister –I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation –she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! –I call upon her name –Berenice! –and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh! sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! –Oh! Naiad among its fountains! –and then –then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told.”

Art – Uriah Heep by Fred Barnard

Also featured at Quora.com.

Blue Insights Newsletter — 2020–08–05

As always, I am honored and humbled to be a writer for Blue Insights at Medium.com.

“August has started and I hope you are having the best summer you can hope for despite all the harsh blows we all have been living in 2020.
Please, take the time, where ever you may be on the planet, to enjoy reading the latest Blue Insights Newsletter.”

Read the full article at Medium.com.

Photo by Luis Vidal on Unsplash.

Love is The Fifth Season

Love is the fifth season
It starts in March
With shines of longer days,
guarding the waters more.

It moves along with
greens and joys of May.
It flourishes above the lilacs
And with you I sleep
Amidst lilies-of-the-valley…

It drifts down July dusks
Colored in bluish touches.
……………………………………………
October is the beginning of times
Cutting edges and bringing back
Memories of youth.
Now it is the season to embrace
The truth…

This is an old poem from year 2015.

Also published at Medium.com.

© Iulia Halatz

Art – Viktor Vasnetsov

The Wild Swans

” ‘Do you see this stinging nettle in my hand? Those you must gather, although they will burn your hands to blisters. Crush the nettles with your feet and you will have flax, which you must spin and weave into eleven shirts of mail with long sleeves. Once you throw these over your swan brothers, the spell over them is broken…’ ”

From The Wild Swans by HC Andersen.

Illustration – Florence Harrison

All Roads Lead To Rome

written by: Iulia Halatz

All words lead to Love
And the poetry in the afterLove

I wish I wrote poems
For the dreamers of barren lands.
They do not go to Rome
They go to places
That cannot be.

Maybe love is a colourless, odourless
stainless haze
We see through
with the eyes of
the bricked sky,
pathless oceans
walled shrubberies
streeted lunarian trails
breathing and tingling
scents
In the perfect nightmare
of flowers…
Vines reward our sun
with the sweetness
of grapes
wedded in perpetuity with
the linear shades of amber.

From a Good Place
Where joy is an illumination
To the Place that Cannot Be
They would have worn
The silver claw
of the Moon
above their heads
nightly
daily
musingly
vibrantly…

Also published at Spillwords.com and featured at Quora Digest.

Buried moon at Medium.com

Buried moon, buried moon
Who to talk about at noon
When dreams are plundered by light
And powdered in gold and charcoal dust.

Crescent fairies are sad in the rouse
and at falter to surmise
the scanty slumbering traces
that led stupors into trenches.

The owners of the light
Do not know its might
and the pleasure of the sun
to astound and burn above…

Buried moon, buried moon
I want you soon…

As to play my feral dreams
around the all surviving tunes!

© Iulia Halatz

Published at Medium.com.

Art – Buried moon by Edmund Dulac.

The Moon

I wrote this in 2017.

The Moon

In the evening
with my eyelashes
I kill all the events of the day
I choke perceptions and
reveries green
That could be real
Pending dream.

In the evening
with my fingers

I spin yarns
For your sweet bedlams…

Also published at Spillwords.com.
Also featured in Quora Digest.

Art by Yajuro Takashima.