An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
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
I’ve finally entered the older generation. Not the oldest, mind you: my cousin Eleanora at 93 is the oldest and dearest. But according to what I’m learning from my current crop of education students, I’m older. Sometimes wiser, sometimes, in … 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 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
What makes a perfect motel get-away? On our family jaunts when I was a kid in South Carolina, the family car deposited us on the edge of turquoise pools and my sister and I raced into the motel to change … 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