Writer and Illustrator
Lonely Voyagers
Illustrations by Simon Blake
Text by Dalt Wonk
Hardcover, 10 x 12 1/2 inches, 56 pages
26 images
Published by Luna Press, 2019
“Word and image combine seamlessly to bring to life a fantastic world. An alluring journey. A beautiful sense of bewilderment.”
— David Gordon Green
“New Orleans publishing company launches books of art, short stories”
Susan Larson, The New Orleans Advocate, January 7, 2019
Like many good ideas in New Orleans, Luna Press began over drinks on a French Quarter balcony. Photographer Josephine Sacabo and her husband, writer Dalt Wonk, recalled a visit with Mexican guests, during which discussion turned to founding a publishing company.
“But what we would call it?” Wonk asked.
“One of the women pointed up at the moonlit sky and said, ‘La Luna,’ ” Sacabo remembered. A fitting name and serendipitous beginning for the publisher of such dreamy books as “Nocturnes,” with Sacabo’s moonstruck images and Wonk’s distinctive poems. And with that book, Wonk added, “We knew we could do it.”
[Read more…] about Dalt Wonk and Luna Press profiled in “The New Orleans Advocate”
“On Ursulines Street, a haven for a pair of French Quarter artists to write, create images, dream”
R. Stephanie Bruno, The New Orleans Advocate, December 27, 2018
When Dalt Wonk and Josephine Sacabo moved back to America from France in 1973, they chose to settle in the city that would cause the least culture shock. That was New Orleans and, specifically, the French Quarter.
“The Quarter was a wonderful place to live in the early 1970s,” Wonk said. “There were writers and artists and musicians, a creative scene, because it was a cheap place to live. Rents were as little as $10 a night to $100 a month. It was the most European of American cities, and it’s why Josephine and I have been so happy.”
[Read more…] about Dalt’s French Quarter home featured in “The New Orleans Advocate”
Author Dalt Wonk’s Spiritual Gifts.
Karl Lengel, WWNO, November 29, 2018
“The French Quarter has been a cultural crossroads of the world for centuries. Its streets, alleys and buildings have provided a background for multitudes of stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that have chronicled the passages of time, lives and spirits. New Orleans’ writer Dalt Wonk, a French Quarter icon, has lived there most of his life and offers a brand new volume of stories that reflect the neighborhood’s unique charm, appropriately titled, Spiritual Gifts: French Quarter Short Stories. WWNO’s Karl Lengel sat down with Dalt to talk about the book.”
“Our 2018 Book Recommendations” by Chris Turner-Neal
Country Roads Magazine, December 2018
“One of the most important skills any person can develop is to eavesdrop well. If you can gaze vacantly at a paperback while skimming the conversations around you like radio stations, you’ll seldom have a dull flight. (The paperback is essential; the last thing you want to have happen is that someone you’re trying to eavesdrop on actually addresses you.) If you can master this feat, the world is your Scheherazade; prison stints, miscarriages, failed loves, alcoholic binges, dramatic resignations, ashtray-throwing breakups, and any other human drama you can imagine will be described within eight feet of you if you but look nonthreatening and hide behind a novel.
[Read more…] about Spiritual Gifts featured in Country Roads Magazine
Please join us for a launch party and book signing celebrating Luna Press’s Fall 2018 releases, including Dalt’s new collection of French Quarter short stories, Spiritual Gifts. Refreshments will be provided. We hope to see you there!
Luna Press Fall Book Launch and Signing
Saturday, December 8, 2018, 4 – 7 pm
Nadine Blake
1036 Royal St., New Orleans, LA 70116
Please join author Dalt Wonk and illustrator Simon Gunning for a book signing of Spiritual Gifts.
Wednesday, November 28, 6 – 7:30 pm
Garden District Book Shop
(The Rink Shopping Center)
2727 Prytania Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Luna Press is excited to be exhibiting at the Louisiana Book Festival again this year, where Dalt’s new book Spiritual Gifts, will be for sale. Don’t miss this wonderful celebration of all things literary!
Saturday, November 10, 2018, 9 am – 4 pm
Capitol Park, Downtown Baton Rouge
701 North 4th Street, Baton Rouge, LA 70802
Click here for more information
Dalt is honored to be participating in the 2017 Louisiana Book Festival as a Featured Author. He will be presenting his latest book, The Laughing Lady, with a book signing to follow.
Saturday, October 28
701 North 4th Street
Baton Rouge, LA 70802
Presentation: 3:15-4:45 pm
State Library, 5th Floor
Booksigning: 4-4:45 pm
Bookseller Tent on the Festival Ground
Click here for more information
Dalt will discuss his latest book, The Laughing Lady, with three other local authors of children’s books at Jefferson Parish Library. Dalt, along with Yvonne Perret, Bob Bruce and David Cuthbert, will discuss the processes and the unique challenges of writing literature for children. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of The Laughing Lady will be for sale. Hope to see you there!
September 14, 7pm
Jefferson Parish East Bank Regional Library
4747 West Napoleon Blvd, Metairie, LA 70001
DALT WONK
THE RIDDLES OF EXISTENCE
(LUNA PRESS)
You can choose to take playwright and poet Dalt Wonk’s latest, The Riddles of Existence, at face value and treat this oversized deck of cards as a literal game, where a short verse and illustration lends clues to each card’s depicted costume, to be paired with an index on the last card that includes titles like “The Worm,” “The Atom Bomb,” or quite vaguely, “Metamorphosis.” “The Light Bulb,” for example, is depicted as a bearded fellow with a tightly wrapped torso, accompanying filament crown and the verse “Fashioned like an ornament / although intended for a use, / I valiantly combat the dark, / but shatter at the least excuse.” (Though all the costumes aren’t so easily deciphered.) I find this collection works best with the “rules” dismissed entirely and treated as its own tarot deck, each card a hint at some invented mythology or divination, like a prop out of a Borgese story. The release of The Riddles of Existence is well-timed for Mardi Gras season, as it could be the perfect post-parade party game, to be enjoyed by a well-juiced crowd—like a poet’s charades—or even alone, where one can simply keep occupied with each expressive image (and its equally spry verse) until carnival’s excesses wear off. —Dan Fox
Link to source: http://www.antigravitymagazine.com/2014/02/reviews-february-2014/
“THE FROG AND THE LIZARD,” ONE OF MORRIS’ FAVORITE TALES IN DALT WONK’S FRENCH QUARTER FABLES.EDITOR’S NOTE
Pelican Bomb continues our ode to summer reading with Benjamin Morris on Dalt Wonk’s French Quarter Fables.
Time, it is often said, slows down in the summer. As the days lengthen, bodies go slack in the heat, and busy, driven locals take off on vacations to parts unknown. For those otherwise in need of relief from these long, languid days, then look no further than a book in which time seems not just to slow down but to stop completely. French Quarter Fables (Luna Press, 2012) is an illustrated collection of 37 tales of wisdom and woe, drawn from Dalt Wonk’s decades as a resident of the Vieux Carré and observer of all that neighborhood has to offer. Written as well as illustrated by Wonk, published in a large-format folio, and bound as an art book with illustrations to accompany each tale, the collection would on its sheer size and weight qualify at first glance for a coffee table book.
But woe indeed to the reader who treats this collection only as such and leaves it on said table unopened. For French Quarter Fables has much to offer all readers, no matter their age or level of experience in New Orleans. Hewing closely to the traditional form—short tales, with morals or bons mots at their end and peopled exclusively by animals in clothes (Wonk’s self-proclaimed delight)—their chief concern dwells on what Faulkner would have called “the old verities”: greed, lust, revenge, anger, pride, sorrow, and desire. If it is through pain and loss that we gain the most wisdom, then what Wonk has done here is collected enough wisdom to last a lifetime. In other words, throughout the book, we are given the opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes.
Despite the many mistakes committed by their characters, the fables’ poetic form lends the desired air of whimsy that prevents any one reading from taking them too seriously. With only a few minor exceptions, Wonk pairs his representatives from the animal kingdom nicely, and sketches them both in words and images in such a way as to reveal the full range of their emotions. Among the best are “The Minnow and the Pike,” a jibe at the hubris of a bloodthirsty king (the pike, a thinly-disguised Louis XIV), or “The Hippo and the Egret,” a satisfying tale of just desserts. But it is those tales in which the tragedy arises from no particular character flaw, as in “The Frog and the Lizard,” that ring the most true for the average reader—who among us has not tarried too long in one place, only to find what we’ve waited for has already fled? Some even approach the sublime: “The Young Tree and the Hurricane,” for instance, speaks of a beautiful young tree seduced by a visiting storm. In language as sensitive as it is passionate, Wonk describes how “He whirled her, swirled her, arched her, pressed her tight, / amidst a darkness, total as a cave, / except for the sporadic thunderbolt / that flickered like a light-struck jewel, / revealing a chaos of things torn loose and flying — / as though the world had risen in revolt.” With superb pacing and rhythm, and just the right metaphor for the situation, here the work shines as brightly as anything in the book.