An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
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
Along with Shakespearean Sonnets, “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Edward Lear, and “Invictus” by Ernest Henley–all great warhorses or bird/cat chariots of the p’try world, students at a recent Poetry Out Loud presentation I judged in Minneapolis gave us … Continued
We hardly ever received messages on Isla. We had no cell phones then; nothing ever collapsed at home, except once, during our late February vacation, 2003. Then I returned from strolling to town and found that the “Office” at Posada … Continued
Sounds like a shipwreck, but in fact, the last survivor of my parents’ generation, Eleanora, rides comfortably in assisted living, Dover, Delaware. She’s 93, the only one in her generation with blue eyes, a rarety in Southern Italian stock, though … Continued
It’s a truth universally acknowledged (to borrow an opening from Jane Austen), that female flesh is used to sell the work and sometimes even the reputation of an artist. Case in point: at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a show … Continued
Margotlog: Hawaii, Dreaming After more years in snow country than I care to count, I’m not surprised that, mid-February, green rises at the back of my mind like an ancient ship coming over the horizon. In fact, I’ve never approached … 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