Dragonfly Heart

Dragonfly Heart
Jeffrey Valka
iUniverse
Paperback
Fantasy
170 pages
$13.95 USD
ISBN: 0-595-32189-5

Dragonfly Heart is a collection of short fiction, but in itself, it is a whole story. It is often fantastical, sometimes a little surreal, but always very real, like the cycle of life it represents. The story takes us in a circle through various doors, (as each section is called) beginning with death, then going into rebirth, before going through the final door and into the soul.

The way that it is written is extremely intricate. In each section there are several different stories...in Rebirth, for instance, we open with a simple story about a girl biking down a road, at the end she runs into a cart....the next story, a man is taking clocks around in a horse drawn cart in the hopes of finding them a home. After that, a man taking a cart to work stops in the woods, as he always does, and loses himself while staring at a tower, imagining beautiful realities that disappear when he is forced to see the tower in a new light...a young man walking in the woods discovers magic, and the sweetness of strawberries, in an abandoned shed. In the woods again, another person is given the gift of an apple, and there is bird song. In the next story, music is also the focus, but the clock turns to night, leading us into the next tale...and the next two stories show us two different takes on the moon. These stories are short, extremely evocative, each word carefully chosen. I concentrated on what similarities run through each story, rather than what the stories are about to show you how these similarities create a flow through the book. There are themes, thoughts, ideas, symbols that connect each story in a section, and they are wonderful, not just because this flow makes the stories incredibly hard to put down, but because the similarities create contrasts. They make us see each thing in a different way, force us to think. For instance, in the last two stories, one is in love with the moon, the other running away in fear. This contrast makes each story even more fascinating as we try to understand what the author is telling us, and what each story has to do, in this case, with Rebirth.

Sometimes the stories are dreamlike, both of the troubled and of the sweeter kind, and run the gamut of emotions, lust, love, guilt, desperation. The images are often very beautiful, I like the innocent happiness of one story where the main character is served a slice of sky with lots of clouds, and some are not so lovely, but hard to forget, such as a fight between two men made entirely of glass.

An extremely solid collection, filled with inescapable images. This was a thoughtful read I had a hard time putting down.

Five out of five dreams
Cindy Lynn Speer, GWN Reviewer

Jeffrey Valka is one of those rare writers who can write true short stories...he understands the value of words, he creates perfect scenes without needing a million words to tell the story. He's been published in in The Café Irreal, Mind In Motion, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Nocturnal Lyric, Pirate Writings and been reprinted in The 2nd Coming: The Best of Pirate Writings, Volume 2. His interview is as fascinating as his prose, and I was glad to get a chance to talk to him about his work.

Cindy: What influenced this collection? Why did you choose to make a collection of interlocking short stories?

Jeffrey: My single biggest influence on Dragonfly Heart was a wonderful little book by Barry Yourgrau called A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane. I first read this back when I was in college. Not only did I love it, but I said to myself, "I can do something like this." Mr. Yourgrau's stories are all extremely short (1,000 words or less) and surreal, but presented in a realistic way. He also writes in the present tense, which I think gives the stories a great sense of immediacy, as if this is happening Right Now. Thats also how people often describe their dreams; I've noticed that when people write down their dreams, they tend to report them in the present tense. I was also strongly influenced by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams.

As for making the stories interlocking, that evolved over time as I wrote them. I noticed recurring themes, images and motifs, and I began to think of the stories as all being connected in a web.

Cindy: What got you started writing? Who are your main influences?

Jeffrey: Stephen King was the first writer who influenced me. Through middle school and high school I devoured everything he wrote, and it made me want to be a writer. He also led me to Ray Bradbury and Clive Barker. Other writers whom I admire and try to emulate include Italo Calvino, Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Philip K. Dick.

Cindy: What are your plans for the future? What are you working on now?

Jeffrey: Currently I'm rewriting a novel length manuscript called The Flowers of Persephone. The story is finished but it still needs a fair amount of work. I would love to attract the interest of an agent or an editor and get published by a mainstream publisher, but until that happy day arrives I will continue to write for the love of creating fiction, because it really does make me happy.

Cindy: Why did you choose to go with iUniverse? How have you liked your experience so far?

Jeffrey: Since 1997 Ive written four complete novels in addition to the Dragonfly Heart stories. Ive had more than my fair share of rejection letters, some of them nice and encouraging, but Ive never been able to find an agent or an editor who was willing to take me on. I have seen some modest publishing success with my short stories, but my dream has always been to be the author of a book. Ive considered self-publishing before, but always found the amount of necessary legwork to be overwhelming (having the manuscript typeset, getting an ISBN number, getting a barcode, and so on). With iUniverse and print-on-demand a lot of that legwork got taken care of for me. The burden is still on me to promote and sell my work, but so far the experience has been very positive for me. I might never break through to the big leagues of mainstream publishing, and if not then at least I have a book with my name on it and a small but very supportive audience of readers.

Cindy: If you had a chance to live anywhere in the world for a few years, where would you go, and why?

Jeffrey: London, England. I traveled there four years ago and just fell in love with the place. I always loved it from afar, but very quickly I started to feel at home there.

Cindy: What do you think is the most important thing for a writer to know?

Jeffrey: Finish what you write. It's so easy to start something, to be bubbling over with ideas and enthusiasm only to abandon it when things start to get rough. When I write sometimes I imagine myself as an explorer hacking my way through the jungle with a machete. My path might not be pretty, and it might ultimately lead to a dead end, but I always keep pushing myself onward, always keep swinging that knife. Dont give up. Its easier said than done, but dont ever give up.

Cindy: What would you name the monster under your bed?

Jeffrey: Nil, which is to say, nothingness or oblivion. Nil is the one who whispers dreadful lies to me in the darkness and threatens to bite off my fingertips.

Cindy: What is the one word you'd like someone to use to describe you as a writer?

Jeffrey: Fascinating.

Cindy: What are the first five books you see, as you look around the room?

Jeffrey: Where I'm sitting right now, I don't see any books, unfortunately. However, I can tell you the last five books that Ive read: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Edgar Allen Poe Collection, Childhoods End by Arthur C. Clarke, and In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman.

Cindy: What is the one thing you want the reader to walk away with?

Jeffrey: Ideally, I hope that the reader of Dragonfly Heart will pause for a moment after reading the last page, stare into space for a moment and then say, "Wow. That was a really cool book." I hope that he or she then goes back into the world with a renewed sense of wonder and awe. If I can do that much then I have succeeded as a writer of fantastic fiction, and I am a happy man.