An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
Nerves and blood vessels closer to the skin–that’s how I see Italians, compared to the WASPS who surrounded me in Charleston, South Carolina when I was a girl. (There were African-Americans, of course, but I did not go to school … Continued
I’m reading James Carroll’s memoir: An American Requiem which won the National Book Award in 1996. Sometimes when a friend passes along a book found in the “used bin” at 2nd Hand Books, it’s a keeper. Carroll grew up in … Continued
The Minnesota Saints ballpark in Saint Paul is nestled among railroad tracks, the wreck of a building where the fire department trains its novices to quench fires, and the viaduct that lifts Snelling Avenue over Bandana Square. Not a great … Continued
I’m just getting around to reading one of the finest works of history written in the 20th century–Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. It crossed my attention, probably from a New York Times Book Review, in 1978, when it was first … Continued
When I took apart my nest of Russian dolls, painted red and white with touches of pink for the lips and green for leaves on their cloaks, I wanted each face to be different. But each doll, which held the … Continued
I did not go to Dachau that first time in Germany. When I entered the air-conditioned office in the Munich train station, the clerk informed me with great solemnity: “Madame, Dachau is closed on Monday.” I felt as if I … Continued
When my beautiful, German-American daughter agreed to guide me to Germany the first time I would set foot in the country, we decided to contact her former host-mother in Nuremberg. This was “the other mutti” who had befriended Gelsey on … Continued
For years I didn’t want to acknowledge that I’m a quarter German. Had I ever been to Germany? No. But I knew my mother’s dictatorial tendencies. These two words–dictatorial tendencies–cancel each other out, I know, but perhaps they should because … Continued
Before I married my current husband, I had no Chinese relations. I knew hardly anything at all about China, except its enormous size, the ink-drawing characters of its language, and its “great wall.” Then I met Fran and eventually his … Continued