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
Sorry, dear readers, it was Edward VIII, not Edward II who abdicated to marry the woman he loved, in 1936.
Margotlog: The King’s Speech At our book club recently, we discussed Nicholas Baker’s novel The Anthologist (2009). Though I had read perhaps only a third, I was one of two among ten with a decidedly negative reaction to the main … 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
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
World War II, and the enormous expansion of transportation and manufacturing necessary for the United States to “tool up,” brought the country out of the “Great Depression.” But what to do once peace arrived and there wasn’t as great a … Continued
The Protestant Cemetery in its own Piazalle Donatello lies outside the walls in Florence, meaning that when it was first established in the early 1800s, it could not be situated on sacred ground within the city walls. Though certainly Christian, … Continued
Old magazines fascinate me. Especially those from World War II and the 1950s recovery period. The period during which the United States transformed itself from a player on the world’s stage to one of the top two or three strutters … Continued