An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
I’ve been reading James Carroll’s 1996 memoir An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War that Came Between Us. The phrase, “a child-changed father,” comes toward the end of the book, after Carroll’s three-star general father (also a lawyer) … Continued
Julia after Lennon’s song – Teenage Cat Mom This is Julia. Black and White. Came to us from Pet Smart when they still had a store in the Midway. Third cat of three. Smallest. Eating more. Rounder. Kitler, so we … Continued
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
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
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
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
An adult student of mine who grew up poor in Wisconsin (growing up poor in Minnesota is also quite possible. She just happens to be from Wisconsin), recently described her finances during four years of private, liberal-arts college in the … Continued
There he stands in the University of Minnesota’s hockey arena, not a large, nor a small man in a drape of maroon cloth, his neck and arms bare, and a plastic visor circling his balding head like a slightly errant … Continued
When my daughter was maybe five or six, we would walk out of Prospect Park in southeast Minneapolis, cross the bridge over Highway 94, and reach our side of the Mississippi. Since the river runs north/south there before it bends … Continued