Victoria Leigh Bennett, (she/her), was born in West Virginia and received her early education there. She completed her B.A. degree cum laude in Theatre Arts for playwriting at Cornell University in New York State, taking a double major in English Literature and Theatre Arts. Next, she completed her M. A. & Ph.D. in English Literature concentrating on 19th & 20th C. Literatures at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, rated one of the 25 best universities in the world. She traveled around and lived in areas on the East Coast of the U.S. until settling in the Greater Boston, MA area in 1992. She connected with Twitter in 2012 and had about 7 followers and followings until August 2021. In August 2021, she published a book of poetry (334 pp.) entitled Poems from the Northeast, by the kind offices of Olympia Publishers in the UK, with worldwide distribution. In the year since then, her participation, followers, and followings at @vicklbennett on Twitter have grown above 1200 in number, and she has added another Twitter account as of Summer 2022: Victoria is now one of three organizers of @PoetsonThursday, a poetry collective on Twitter, along with Dave Garbutt (@DavGar51) and Alex Guenther (@guentheralex). Currently, she is concentrating on trying to have published a series of eight thematically related novels which appear right now on this website. One is them is now with a publisher, as it has not proved possible to find a publisher for all of them in order of composition. She also has a book of short stories entitled Sympathy and Centripetal Force, and Eight Other Young and Hopeful Stories, which concentrates on giving pictures of different kinds of individuals in different walks of life, with all their foibles, prejudices, and suppositions about life intact. It is not a book which focuses much on providing the author’s insights, ideas, or feelings, but upon showing these character types with all their thoughts, experiences, and interpretations of these experiences exposed. It is to be found on this website to read for free, under the title above. Also for free to read on this website is Victoria’s second in-print publication, a short (58 pp.) novella entitled Scenes de la Vie Americaine (en Paris), wholly in English except for one line of dialogue, and dedicated to Balzac. This publication is a sprightly and vivid look at American youth on holiday in Paris, which has been ill-fated in its publication history. It was originally published in February 2022 by The Alien Buddha Press, with artwork and photo supplied by Editor Red, and a kind and extremely appreciated blurb by the EIC of @voidspace_zine, Katy Naylor (@voidskrawl). Lastly, Victoria is also engaged in writing further poems, fiction, CNF, and occasional essays, many of which appear or have appeared with online publishers or print publishers who are very active on Twitter. Victoria to date has been featured with work in: Roi Faineant Literary Press, Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Art, Barzakh Magazine, The Alien Buddha Press, Amphora Magazine, The Madrigal Press, Discretionary Love, Winning Writers (two of her works were especially requested for newsletters), & Cult of Clio. In 4/23, she will be featured with four works in Bullshit Literary Magazine. All in all, so far, between August 2021 and September 2022, she will have been featured at least 22 times in print or online. First reader of all Victoria’s work is usually her intelligent and highly motivated/critically sound mother, Patricia, and final vote on work rests with her eight-year-old cat, Lucie-Minou, who reads by osmosis, judging all pages of work by sitting on them and thereby giving them something better than the Good Housekeeping Award, namely the “Kitty’s Asshole Seal of Approval.” Victoria has sometimes been encumbered with a few difficulties, but has not in the end been held back by two disabilities, emotional disability (she is manic-depressive–“bi-polar” sounds like something to do with global warming, which Victoria only wants to bear her due amount of blame for), and ocular disability (she has glaucoma and dry eye, and occasionally when deprived of sleep, double vision).
ABOUT THE BLOG/WEBSITE
The blog/website creative-shadows.com is a free-themed blog site hosted by WordPress.com which featured literary articles, reviews, and a few prose meanderings by me, Victoria Leigh Bennett. WordPress.com’s blogging costs on a plain website are competitve or free. I hope you will continue reading here if you are a follower or commenter, despite recent changes to my website, such as deletions of some materials for revision. If you recall making a comment on a given article and you don’t see it there now, it’s almost certainly because when an article/essay/piece has to be taken down for necessary revisions, the comments are erased willy-nilly.
Above all, try to enjoy and reflect upon what you read: I certainly did. Feel free to join me in dialogues about both the literary canon and recent writers you’ve enjoyed. When time allows, as it sadly has not lately, I follow other blogs, too!
creativeshadows 