An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
My North Dakota cousins had one of the most beautiful churches I have ever entered–an outdoor cathedral in the pines. Air and sunlight fell down upon us. Breezes blew. Music and text, belief and sustenance rose into an immensity tempered … Continued
It is quiet now with the snow. Streets, sidewalks muffled. A dog barks. We are too far for church bells. In Charleston winters when I grew up, we often had windows open to the clack of palm fronds and … Continued
“Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather’s house we go” meant traveling three days and two nights on the train from Charleston, South Carolina to Hankinson, North Dakota. Grandfather’s house was a glorious, gingerbread affair set on a … Continued
“It is a truth universally acknowledged… So begins Jane Austen’s divine novel “Pride and Prejudice.” Austen’s satiric pen turns like a double-edged knife toward the reader and the characters in her novel. Let’s try that tactic: It’s a truth universally … Continued
Since I seem to have born with an academic calendar in my head, mid-May to Labor Day is a season out of time and work. Especially in the last five years since I’ve declared verboten any teaching during the summer. … Continued
You could tell my mother was fading because she became pale. She no longer remembered visitors’ names as she walked the porch across her South Carolina house. She slept and slept. Eleonora, my 94-year-old second cousin, is fading too. But … Continued
Back in the days before the transcontinental highway system and the plethora of family cars, we took the train. Almost every summer with our North Dakota mother (who didn’t drive), we boarded the Seaboard Air Line or later the Atlantic … Continued
They were never just young. Not the disaffected youths with cigarettes dangling from their lips: James Dean and company whose coolness had to do with disaffection, disengagement, a superior stance that would not grub nor lord it over. This … Continued
I don’t mean white-washing atrocities or making up glories that never existed for the sake of local pride. This is a far more personal, individual venture–person to person, reader to reader. In the last twenty years, let’s say, there’s been … Continued