Dear John:
You make me cry every time. In a good way.
We’re not writing in exactly the same genre (we overlap with the fantasy, though my writing is science fiction), but that’s not important.
What’s important is that your writing – and I sincerely hope mine does the same – gives homage to writers long since gone from this Earth, who had an expertise with words that moves the soul and opens the heart.
What is it about Penny Dreadful that brings me to tears? It’s not the horror motif; it’s not the erotica (both done exquisitely well compared to anything else I’ve seen). It’s the use of language.
As writers, that’s what drives us: language. How language paints a picture. How language creates a mood. How language drives disparate souls to resonance around a theme that moves the heart to open in a new way.
Fiction and poetry especially are vehicles for this kind of writing. While my novelettes are still in print only (cyberspace style through e-books), your vision of the landscape, characters, and themes you have brought to life through your writing make me work harder to create more stories that may be brought to life in a similar manner.
I always keep as a touchstone in the back of my mind the writers who have brought me to my knees with their ability to capture an emotion or a memory in words. I know from your writing and what you’ve embedded in it from those authors that you do as well.
Penny Dreadful is for me such a wonder not only because the writing is deep, intense, detailed, mature, but also because it goes back to writers of a previous era. My writing is also inspired by the same era – the Victorian Era – and for those who haven’t yet read authors who are dead, I have to ask myself, why not?
For what they wrote is rapturous.
Your return to poets such as Shelley (the connection: Percy Bysshe Shelley was the husband of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein), Blake, and in the new season, Tennyson, and giving their words to actors to speak in conversation brings back to life a world long since gone, to the detriment of us all: the world where people memorized poetry, or lines of prose, because they were moving and beautiful. I had the occasion to participate in open readings at an independent bookstore in Montrose, California in the late ‘90s; we didn’t need to read our own work, we could read anything. One regular “reader” was a chemistry teacher at a local school, originally from India, who could recite Keats by heart – because he was taught to do so when he was in school. This level of writing brought alive goes to the core of the heart of our humanity, and your writing captures that essence.
Why is it important that I write all this down, and admit that you’ve inspired me? To me, it’s because as a writer, what I read (which includes what I hear through actors delivered in other mediums such as television or film) is food for my own work – not just for ideas, but for how to phrase it; how to paint a scene; how to evoke a mood; how to make an instant memorable across time. Words do that if well wrought, and you do that so well. Not just in Penny Dreadful – I was surprised to find that you had written the screenplay for one of my favorite rewatch movies, “Any Given Sunday”. No, I’m not an avid football fan, somewhat the reverse, and Oliver Stone’s movie details why I question the fan fervor. The soliloquies and dialogues you wrote in that movie delivered by Al Pacino (the perfect actor for that role given what you wrote) say everything about the collision of two worlds – the world of honest team play and loyalty against the world of the greedy corporate machine. I think that any aspiring actor wanting to learn a monologue would choose one from that film because they’re deep, to the point, and riveting.
They’re in a style that’s anything but Victorian, which returns me to the inspiration I find in Penny Dreadful, and that’s the return to nineteenth and early twentieth century authors who could command language in a visceral and sublime way that captured all the senses.
When I set out to write what was the first volume (I didn’t know that at the time) of The Casebook of Elisha Grey, my inspiration was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which I had first read at age eleven. Granted, my stories aren’t set in the Victorian Era, but in Atlantis during its Second Era between two Civil Wars, inspired by the revelation that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an esotericist and open to the idea of reincarnation, leading to the possibility that his stories were actually memories. I’m much older now – 57 – and I still keep his way of describing character and action as a touchstone. I also keep many other authors close to my mind when I write: Franz Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolfe, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Benjamin Disraeli, Bram Stoker, and Wilkie Collins.
Every writer needs a library at home, and I have a small one. I believe any writer’s personal library needs to extend beyond one’s genre of choice, as mine does, and as evidenced by your writing, I'm sure yours does as well. Every writer needs fuel and the spark of ideas from other writers in order to spur on their own creativity, allowing us to write stories that readers finish in their minds when they read our words, and actors bring to life in ways that move us to higher and deeper levels. This transmission of ideas via the written word keeps our civilization alive, thriving, growing, and evolving through the mystical and sacred power of storytelling.
I hope someday I’ll be able to speak with you so that I might discover what authors inform the vision of your world when you write, or at the very least, exchange a list of the must-have books for our libraries. For in the end, we as writers begin as readers who are inspired by other writers; we pass on our inspiration to other writers when we create the worlds that have captivated us enough that we are drawn to write them, demanded to write them, devoured in the writing of them, and immersed in the beauty of them.
So thank you, John Logan. I look forward to being moved to tears when I watch the third season of Penny Dreadful. My thanks to you and all the cast who bring your words to life.
With much love and respect,
Isabeau Vollhardt
Author
The Casebook of Elisha Grey
You make me cry every time. In a good way.
We’re not writing in exactly the same genre (we overlap with the fantasy, though my writing is science fiction), but that’s not important.
What’s important is that your writing – and I sincerely hope mine does the same – gives homage to writers long since gone from this Earth, who had an expertise with words that moves the soul and opens the heart.
What is it about Penny Dreadful that brings me to tears? It’s not the horror motif; it’s not the erotica (both done exquisitely well compared to anything else I’ve seen). It’s the use of language.
As writers, that’s what drives us: language. How language paints a picture. How language creates a mood. How language drives disparate souls to resonance around a theme that moves the heart to open in a new way.
Fiction and poetry especially are vehicles for this kind of writing. While my novelettes are still in print only (cyberspace style through e-books), your vision of the landscape, characters, and themes you have brought to life through your writing make me work harder to create more stories that may be brought to life in a similar manner.
I always keep as a touchstone in the back of my mind the writers who have brought me to my knees with their ability to capture an emotion or a memory in words. I know from your writing and what you’ve embedded in it from those authors that you do as well.
Penny Dreadful is for me such a wonder not only because the writing is deep, intense, detailed, mature, but also because it goes back to writers of a previous era. My writing is also inspired by the same era – the Victorian Era – and for those who haven’t yet read authors who are dead, I have to ask myself, why not?
For what they wrote is rapturous.
Your return to poets such as Shelley (the connection: Percy Bysshe Shelley was the husband of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein), Blake, and in the new season, Tennyson, and giving their words to actors to speak in conversation brings back to life a world long since gone, to the detriment of us all: the world where people memorized poetry, or lines of prose, because they were moving and beautiful. I had the occasion to participate in open readings at an independent bookstore in Montrose, California in the late ‘90s; we didn’t need to read our own work, we could read anything. One regular “reader” was a chemistry teacher at a local school, originally from India, who could recite Keats by heart – because he was taught to do so when he was in school. This level of writing brought alive goes to the core of the heart of our humanity, and your writing captures that essence.
Why is it important that I write all this down, and admit that you’ve inspired me? To me, it’s because as a writer, what I read (which includes what I hear through actors delivered in other mediums such as television or film) is food for my own work – not just for ideas, but for how to phrase it; how to paint a scene; how to evoke a mood; how to make an instant memorable across time. Words do that if well wrought, and you do that so well. Not just in Penny Dreadful – I was surprised to find that you had written the screenplay for one of my favorite rewatch movies, “Any Given Sunday”. No, I’m not an avid football fan, somewhat the reverse, and Oliver Stone’s movie details why I question the fan fervor. The soliloquies and dialogues you wrote in that movie delivered by Al Pacino (the perfect actor for that role given what you wrote) say everything about the collision of two worlds – the world of honest team play and loyalty against the world of the greedy corporate machine. I think that any aspiring actor wanting to learn a monologue would choose one from that film because they’re deep, to the point, and riveting.
They’re in a style that’s anything but Victorian, which returns me to the inspiration I find in Penny Dreadful, and that’s the return to nineteenth and early twentieth century authors who could command language in a visceral and sublime way that captured all the senses.
When I set out to write what was the first volume (I didn’t know that at the time) of The Casebook of Elisha Grey, my inspiration was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which I had first read at age eleven. Granted, my stories aren’t set in the Victorian Era, but in Atlantis during its Second Era between two Civil Wars, inspired by the revelation that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an esotericist and open to the idea of reincarnation, leading to the possibility that his stories were actually memories. I’m much older now – 57 – and I still keep his way of describing character and action as a touchstone. I also keep many other authors close to my mind when I write: Franz Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolfe, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Benjamin Disraeli, Bram Stoker, and Wilkie Collins.
Every writer needs a library at home, and I have a small one. I believe any writer’s personal library needs to extend beyond one’s genre of choice, as mine does, and as evidenced by your writing, I'm sure yours does as well. Every writer needs fuel and the spark of ideas from other writers in order to spur on their own creativity, allowing us to write stories that readers finish in their minds when they read our words, and actors bring to life in ways that move us to higher and deeper levels. This transmission of ideas via the written word keeps our civilization alive, thriving, growing, and evolving through the mystical and sacred power of storytelling.
I hope someday I’ll be able to speak with you so that I might discover what authors inform the vision of your world when you write, or at the very least, exchange a list of the must-have books for our libraries. For in the end, we as writers begin as readers who are inspired by other writers; we pass on our inspiration to other writers when we create the worlds that have captivated us enough that we are drawn to write them, demanded to write them, devoured in the writing of them, and immersed in the beauty of them.
So thank you, John Logan. I look forward to being moved to tears when I watch the third season of Penny Dreadful. My thanks to you and all the cast who bring your words to life.
With much love and respect,
Isabeau Vollhardt
Author
The Casebook of Elisha Grey