An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
It was my mother’s term, the snooty, smalltown mayor’s daughter from North Dakota–riffraff. Whom she meant, years ago when I began to hear her choice of words, I don’t know–maybe some of my teenage friends. But now it pops up … Continued
Not at all heavy because they cover bodies of light bones that want to rise. When my father died, it was the first death of the older generation. He had declined slowly, and I had seen him only intermittently. He … Continued
Poet Jim Moore endeared himself to me years ago with a little poem in which he mused/amused himself with a tiny series of life notations, circa seven years old, ending with the remark that his mother had no idea that … Continued
In the mid-1990s, when the U.S. signed another trade agreement (I now realize it was NAFTA, a regional agreement among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada) I was driving into Wisconsin. The MPR newscast announced this new freedom granted to U.S. … Continued
I’m borrowing a title from Phebe Hanson and Joan Pride’s travel memoir because it applies to all kinds of motions–teeth, bows, feet. Item: in the last two weeks, I’ve been visited by two performances of Bach that were too fast. … Continued
When I published The Story in History in 1992, the idea of using historical material to inspire creative writing was far from new–there was, after all, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 1869, not to mention the Shakespeare plays about all those … Continued
When I first read Fathers and Sons by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, I hadn’t been prepared first by Isaiah Berlin’s essay on the Russian intelligentsia. This time around I read Berlin’s essay which serves as an introduction to … Continued
Before I was forty, I didn’t take trees seriously. They were there, older and taller than I was. But I noticed them and asked their names. Tall stately magnolias in my parents’ first South Carolina lot, Mount Pleasant, north of … Continued
Round Pegs in Square Holes. They don’t work, or so we should have discovered first hand in kindergarten. It’s a very primary lesson BUT not much help in politics. I could have started this mumbling with a more dramatic flair: … Continued
I Looked the part. Heavy hair that framed the sides of my face like spaniel ears, large dark eyes which by third grade would peer through blue-rimmed glasses, and a rather heavy gait since I wore orthopedic shoes. How could … Continued