An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
Along today’s roads through rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, one-room school houses remind us that once rural people walked or rode in horse-drawn wagons and buggies to school, town, or relatives’ houses. The school houses held perhaps 30 pupils–most of whom … Continued
“Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” begins Milton’s sonnet 23. It was a dream that had resurrected her, this second wife Katherine whom he married in 1656 when he was already blind. What magical murmurs of delight dreams whisper … Continued
For someone born nostalgic, language almost immediately acquired tactile, scenic compatriots. I’m sitting under my mother’s ironing board, listening to her sing to the slap-hiss of the iron above my head: “Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly, Lavender’s green.” I’m probably two … Continued
My photographer friend Linda Gammell recently told me about a winter week she spent in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. Her work usually focuses on prairie plants–rose hips, gamma grasses, staghead ferns. What was she doing in all that … Continued
In memoir writing, where the pen reaches deep into the past and draws up strands of honey and excrement, a life’s array, with its tassels and flotsam dances around the well. Finally to have achieved expression, life beyond the tortured … Continued
My oldest living relative Eleanora links me to her grandmother, also named Eleanora, who came from Sicily to New York, then Scranton, then Pittsburgh to marry the husband left with a small boy when her older sister died. Of course … Continued
In our house we dislike war. My husband Fran spent seventeen months in federal prison during the Vietnam War for refusing to accept even alternate service. A thorough-going pacifist, he virtually insisted that his Iowa draft board send him to … Continued
Growing up in The Old Citadel, during the 1950s, we could very well have been inhabiting a medieval fortress, with its foot-thick walls, sixteen-foot ceilings, deep window wells, tall windows, and dark cavernous halls. My friend from across the courtyard … Continued
The first book I published, The Story in History (Teachers & Writers Collaborative 1992), demonstrates to students and writers–would-be and already accomplished poets, novelists, dramatists, memoirists–how to go beneath the statistics and dates of history to vivify what happened. I … Continued
Growing up as an outsider in Charleston, South Carolina, cut two ways: into myself when I recognized how divergent I was, how odd, how embarrassing, how ultimately unrecognizable. But also outward, toward the movers and shakers, toward the society that … Continued