Christopher Vened's "The Wise Child & Magic. Three Plays" Published in November 2025

The Wise Child & Magic. Three Plays by Christopher Vened

ISBN 978-1-945938-37-5, 122 pages, hardcover

ISBN 978-1-945938-75-7, 122 pages, paperback

ISBN 978-1-945938-76-4, e-Book in e-Pub format

The Wise Child and Magic. Three Plays is a creative adaptation from classical fairy tales. The Emperor’s New Clothes, originally written by Hans Christian Andersen, is a satire on human vanity, narcissism, mendacity, and pretentiousness. The Maiden without Hands, originally included in the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, is a surreal story about the fears and hopes a girl experiences during puberty.  Psyche, originally written by Hans Christian Andersen, is a tragic story about a talented Renaissance artist who seeks perfection in art. But he gives up his vocation as a sculptor because a girl breaks his heart.  

Spirit of the Mountains - photo by Christopher Vened

According to the author, the cover image is his photo of the Spirit of the Mountains (Duch Gór) that comes from the Garden of Fairytales (Ogród Bajek), in Międzygórze, Poland, a mountain resort, in which he grew up. Vened continues: "There is a story about it, or, rather, many stories and it is personal to me because my family was running the place. It was an enchanting place and quite unusual, originally built (without using mechanical tools) by a German man, Izydor Kriesten, only from what he had found in the forest: bark, branches, roots, and stones. I spent many days in this garden during my early childhood because my Grandma was a guide for tourists there. She was telling them the fairytales that those artifacts illustrated."

Garden of Fairy Tales - photo by Christopher Vened

~ Table of Contents ~

Table of Contents ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ vi

Introduction ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~  vii

The Emperor’s New Clothes ~ ~ ~ 3

The Maiden without Hands ~ ~ ~ 33

Psyche  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 69

About the Author  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 113

Redwoods and Ferns - by Maja Trochimczyk

 ~ Introduction ~

The Wise Child and Magic. Three Plays contains three one-act plays that are adapted from classical fairy tales.

The Emperor’s New Clothes, originally written by Hans Christian Andersen, is a satire on human vanity, narcissism, mendacity, and pretentiousness. Everybody sees that the emperor is naked but only an innocent child dares to speak it. Why is only this child truthful to himself but all the adults embrace falsehood? Well, they are all afraid to be canceled, but the child does not know how to lie yet. The play is absurdly funny, but it also has a bitter message for contemporary times about the possible dangers and falsehood of political correctness. Let it be a warning that people must be free to speak the truth. The play is set up in rococo style, and it shall be highly theatrical in realization. 

The Maiden without Hands, originally written by an anonymous writer, is included in the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It is a surreal story about the fears and hopes a girl experiences during puberty. At times the story is like a nightmare, at others, like a beautiful dream. Nothing is realistic about it, but everything is true. The story explores the depth of her psyche through symbolic images, and its function is to initiate adolescent girls to adulthood. The play is set up in the Early Medieval Period that is full of fantastic creatures, superstition, and miracles. It has a feel of a poetical folk fairy tale.

Psyche is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s lesser-known story of the same title. As of yet, it has never been adapted to anything else, which is curious because it is one of his best works. It is not a fairy tale, as most of his works are, but a realistic story. Still, it features the supernatural that occurs in art. It is a tragic story about a talented Renaissance artist who seeks perfection in art. But he gives up his vocation as a sculptor because a girl breaks his heart, and then he spends the rest of his life in a monastery. He escapes from life because it is too dirty for him, and he can’t handle it. He hides in the monastery to find a heavenly peace but instead he is tormented by the devil from within. The moral of the story is this: follow your calling and don’t waste your talent because you will suffer.

~ Christopher Vened

 ~ About the Author ~

Christopher Vened is originally from Poland where he had an illustrious career as an actor in an internationally renowned theatre company, the Wroclaw Pantomime Theatre of Henryk Tomaszewski. When martial law was declared in Poland in the end of 1981, Christopher defected to the West for political reasons. First, he stayed in West Berlin, where he worked in Transformtheater and founded his own company, Impuls. Then, in 1984, he permanently moved to the USA, where he rebuilt his career teaching acting, choreographing, directing, and writing plays. 

He wrote the acting book, In Character: An Actor’s Workbook for Character Development, which is published by Heinemann Drama since 2000. His writing credits include a one-man show Human Identity; a play Infidel; and A Theatrical Memoir: An Interview with Myself. Recently, he wrote The Theater Manifesto of an Old Man, where he talks about his  own philosophy of theatre. He leans towards the theater of meaning, and believes that in modern, postmodern culture, meaning has been relativized, distorted or lost, and needs to be restored or rediscovered.

 His most delightful project was the theatre production of Three Stories, which consists of three plays based on classical fairy tales: The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Maiden without Hands, and Psyche. He was commissioned to write these plays by the Acting Conservatory of OCSA, where he also directed these plays in the school’s Studio Theatre, in the fall of 2019.  For more information and photos from this performance, please visit: https://dramastudioonline.com/3-stories/.

A Forest Secret - Photo by Maja Trochimczyk

Moonrise Press Publishes "Clocks and Water Drops" by Marlene Hitt

Moonrise Press is proud to announce the publication of

CLOCKS AND WATER DROPS by MARLENE HITT

ISBN 978-0-9819693-5-0, 118 pages, $15.00, paperback

Los Angeles: Moonrise Press, 11 April 2015
Distributed by lulu.com

The first reading will take place at Bolton Hall Museum, in Tujunga
on May 24, 2015, 4:30pm. villagepoets.blogspot.com

Clocks and Water Drops is the first full-length collection of poetry by Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, a former Director at the Bolton Hall Museum, a local historian, poet, and community activist. The book of reflections about her life, family and neighborhood changing through the decades, includes 73 poems in sections dedicated to: Children, Marriages, Portraits, Neighbors, Seasons, Small Things, Passages, and Farewells. The title captures the poet’s fascination with the flow of time, as relentless and powerful as drops of water that can shape rocks and move mountains. Poet Jack Cooper praises Hitt’s “astute and thoughtful voice” while Kath Abela Wilson admires her “confident and consistent phrasing, and exacting vision.”

Marlene Hitt at Pasadena Lit Fest, 2016.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marlene Hitt is a Los Angeles poet, writer and retired educator with local history as an avocation. She has served for many years as Archivist, Museum Director and Historian at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga. She is a native Californian and a graduate of Occidental College. She also studied at CSUN, USC, UCLA, Glendale College and Trinity College, Ireland. As a member of the Chupa Rosa Writers of Sunland for nearly 30 years, she has worked with this small group of poets from whom has sprung readings at the local library, the Poet Laureate Program of Sunland-Tujunga, and the currently popular Village Poets.

Her poetry received several first place prizes in annual competitions of the Women’s Club, San Fernando Valley, and many awards from the John Steven McGroarty Chapter of the California Chaparral Poets. Her work appeared in Psychopoetica (UK), Chupa Rosa Diaries of the Chupa Rosa Writers, Sunland (2001-2003), Glendale College’s Eclipse anthologies, two Moonrise Press anthologies, Chopin with Cherries (2010) and Meditations on Divine Names (2012), and Sometimes in the Open, a collection of verse by California Poets Laureate. She published Sad with Cinnamon, Mint Leaves, and Bent Grass (all in 2001), as well as Riddle in the Rain with Dorothy Skiles, and a stack of chapbooks for friends and family. 

Ms. Hitt, elected Woman of Achievement for year 2001, served as Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga in 1999-2001, at the turn of the century. She has published several books on local history, including Sunland-Tujunga from Village to City (Arcadia, 2000, 2005) based on columns written for the Foothill Leader, Glendale News Press, North Valley Reporter, Sentinel, and Voice of the Village newspapers since 1998. Over the years, she taught in elementary school, worked in a pharmacy, chaired committees, tap-danced, and played English handbells, autoharp and ukulele. She dedicates her successes to her husband, Lloyd, her children and grandchildren, her biggest fans.

You can find out more about her in a wonderful interview with Kath Abela Wilson on ColoradoBoulevard.net: http://coloradoboulevard.net/mapping-the-artist-marlene-hitt/

Threaded Thoughts

Around this hand I wind
a yellow quilting thread
thick and strong
over and over, back onto itself;
Around my hand goes
the Bad Man thread;
with scissors I cut him out.
Mr. Barker’s store 
when I stole a pin,
I tie in a knot.
Tommy, whose thread 
had snapped, whose death
changed the world.
Through my heart
winds a thread around kindness 
and a doll from a stranger, one with
eyes that closed and real hair.
Around and around I wind
the men in the drug store
who teased this child,
I tie them tight, choking them
below their lidded eyes.
Around and around their 
smoke rings, cigarette burns 
on the tables, smoke
blown into the eyes 
of little girls sent to buy
“Wings, two packs for a quarter”
as they clutched their father’s coin 
or ration stamps for their mothers 
who yearned for sugar, butter. 
Around my hand, thread, 
thick like a tumorous growth, 
thread so many-colored 
as to turn brown with the winding
into the brown of your eyes, 
you, who saved me from one world 
to place me into another
where we dragged ourselves
dreaming about bright kingdoms
and robes of kings.
One fine day the needle, threaded, 
pierced my flesh. I bleed 
easily and long, spill red 
onto the thread around my hand, 
the honest cotton through my heart 
and around my arms. 
With the threads knotted 
and frayed I stitch my words 
for you to see.

(c) 2015 by Marlene Hitt, from Clocks and Water Drops

ABOUT THIS BOOK

“Clocks and Water Drops” is a book of treasured gifts packed in memories and reflections as tasty as homemade bread, fanciful as a rose petal salad and healing as warm camphor oil on a child’s skin. Marlene Hitt’s astute and thoughtful voice paints a world as gentle as lamb’s wool and precious as a girl’s fisrt pony. Open this cedar chest of poems, don its knitted socks and prepare to chase the moon through love and time.

~ Jack Cooper

Author, “Across my Silence”

“Marlene Hitt is a poet beyond measure… she holds each thing to her eye and finds inner correspondences. She finds in the mind- an empty glue a “back alley” and wonders what words to write, as we all do, on a blank page, or “the bronze grave marker” she buys for herself. Each of her poems works on several levels, and almost always ends with a very interesting surprise or revelation. The significance of each detail is stunning and inspiring. She sees objects as possessing uncanny power. She recalls her feeling that the clock pendulum in the house has captured time with its sound, and stolen it from her own grandmother. By her confident and consistent phrasing and exacting vision, she follows her own life from early childhood to now. She calls upon us as readers to look at her life, and back into our own for the metaphors inherent and active… alive, in all of us today.” 

~ Kath Abela Wilson

Poet Artist, founder of Poets on Site

“Marlene Hitt is an attentive poet, an inspired poet. She listens to the sounds of the past, disappearing from our electrified, virtually connected lives:  the “plodding of beetles,” the ticking of the grandfather clock, the tapp8ing of rain on the windowsill.  She watches shifting hues in the sky and the mesmerized faces of children “glued” to their TVs; she sees how the children still brighten at the sight of the Christmas tree. Marlene shows her readers what a life well lived could be; she makes her poems from family stories, community celebrations and discoveries in the back alley. She portrays her grandparents and her children, yet she does not forget her neighbors, the homeless, the lost…

Clocks and Water Drops, her first full-length poetry collection, is a gift of “small things” – a gift of remembrance and affection, a whimsical and wise offering of carefully calibrated images and reflections. We are thankful for the talent of Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, a historian of local communities, and a treasure of poetry in the Foothills.

~ Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D.

President, Moonrise Press

TO ORDER YOUR COPY VISIT:

 www.lulu.com/shop/marlene-hitt/clocks-and-water-drops/paperback/product-22125602.html

MORE INFORMATION:

Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D.

President, Moonrise Press

818 384 8944

maja@moonrisepress.com

www.moonrisepress.com

Announcing "Clocks and Water Drops" - Poetry Book by Marlene Hitt

Cover with photo by Lloyd Hitt

ISBN 978-0-9819693-5-0 , 116 pages.

Moonrise Press is pleased to announce that the next poetry book in our Women Writers series will be by Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, former Museum Director at the Bolton Hall Museum, organizer of readings, community events, editor and author. The book includes 73 poems divided into sections on: Children, Marriages, Portraits, Neighbors, Seasons, Small Things, Passages, and Farewells.  The title captures the poet's fascination with the flow of time, as relentless and powerful as drops of water that can shape rocks and move mountains. 

Marlene Hitt

Marlene Hitt is a Los Angeles poet, writer and retired educator with local history as an avocation. She has served for many years as Archivist, Museum Director and Historian at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga. She is a native Californian and a graduate of Occidental College. She also studied at CSUN, USC, UCLA, Glendale College and Trinity College in Ireland. As a member of the Chupa Rosa Writers of Sunland for nearly 30 years, she has worked with this small group of poets from whom has sprung readings at the local library, the Poet Laureate Program of Sunland-Tujunga, and the currently popular Village Poets.

Marlene Hitt, Photo by Lloyd Hitt

Her poetry received several first place prizes in annual competitions of the Women’s Club, San Fernando Valley, and many awards from the John Steven McGroarty Chapter of the California Chaparral Poets. Her work appeared in Psychopoetica (UK), Chupa Rosa Diaries of the Chupa Rosa Writers, Sunland (2001-2003), Glendale College’s Eclipse anthologies, two Moonrise Press anthologies, Chopin With Cherries (2010) and Meditations on Divine Names (2012), and Sometimes in the Open, a collection of verse by California Poets Laureate. She published Sad with Cinnamon, Mint Leaves, and Bent Grass (all in 2001), as well as Riddle in the Rain with Dorothy Skiles, and a stack of chapbooks for friends and family.

Ms. Hitt, elected Woman of Achievement for year 2001, served a Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga in 1999-2001, at the turn of the century. She has published several books on local history, including Sunland-Tujunga From Village to City (Arcadia, 2000, 2005) based on columns written for the Foothill Leader, Glendale News Press, North Valley Reporter, Sentinel, and Voice of the Village newspapers since 1998. Over the years, she taught in elementary school, worked in a pharmacy, chaired committees, tap-danced, and played English handbells, autoharp and ukulele. She dedicates her successes to her husband, Lloyd, her children and grandchildren, her biggest fans.

About this Book

Clocks and Water Drops is a book of treasured gifts packed in memories and reflections as tasty as homemade bread, fanciful as a rose petal salad and healing as warm camphor oil on a child's skin. Marlene Hitts’ astute and thoughtful voice paints a world as gentle as lamb’s wool and precious as a girl’s first pony. Open this cedar chest of poems, don its knitted socks and prepare to chase the moon through love and time.

~ Jack Cooper

Author, Across My Silence

Marlene Hitt is an attentive poet, an inspired poet. She listens to the sounds of the past, disappearing from our electrified, virtually connected lives:  the “plodding of beetles,” the ticking of the grandfather clock, the tapping of rain on a window sill.  She watches shifting hues in the sky and the mesmerized faces of children “glued” to their TVs; she sees how the children still brighten at the sight of a Christmas tree.  Marlene shows her readers what a life well lived could be; she makes poems from family stories, community celebrations, and discoveries in a back alley. She portrays her grandparents and her children, yet she does not forget her neighbors, the homeless, the lost… Clocks and Water Drops, her first full-length poetry collection, is a gift of “small things” – a gift of remembrance and affection, a whimsical and wise offering of carefully calibrated images and reflections.  We are thankful for the talent of Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, a historian of local communities, and a treasure of poetry in the Foothills.

~ Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D.

President, Moonrise Press

California Poppy. Photo by Maja Trochimczyk 

I Can Hear the Plodding of Beetles

 I have heard of silence

deep enough to hurt the ear,

of quiet strong enough to know

the sound of blood rushing

through one’s own body.

There was once in this valley

quiet enough

to made public a whisper.

Murmured conversation

pushed away miles with silence.

At night, owl called.  Coyote

sang her blessing over a meal. 

From a dusty trail, once,

hooves made rhythm 

for a wagon’s wheels,

a duet that entertained mid day.

The old parson sang

“Lord, I’m Comin’ Home”

and the song was heard

clear to the hills and beyond.

The men, tired, dusty, hot

slept outside on their cots.

Their lullabies-- the cough of a friend

from across the valley, a quiet song

sung in a tent, a murmur..

Years have passed. Since then,

new sounds fill the air. 

Jays still squabble, 

small creatures scurry

breaking branches,

avalanching piles of pebbles. 

 But now, so many years present,

is a deafness from new noise.

Hammers tap duets with hand saw,  

A cement truck

pounds on the ready soil,

covering  the death cry

of the horned spine flower.

Roaring, as relentless as waterfall,

cascades from the freeway.

Big-rigs speed.  Families rush,

the weary hurry to quieter shores.

Over a rocky place

below the asphalt of the 210

empty flatbeds thump,

bounce over that stubborn place

where tough globs of granite

lay miles deep

and three inches too high.

This morning, inside the loudness,

I see a cat’s mouth

meowing a silent cry

that forms from my memory.

Heard only in my mind

is the call of mourning dove

and the sigh of breeze.

In my thoughts

I can hear the plodding of beetles.     

(c) by Marlene Hitt

Italian Pine in Sunland Tujunga, Photo by Maja Trochimczyk