Riding the Megabus across Virginia on the way to Maryland to see Ellen, my high school best friend. Her book group read my novel and it’s her birthday, reasons to go. The bus is cheap, $30 each round trip Knoxville…
Blog Archives
Inventing the past
Charlene Giannetti, reviewing this novel in Woman Around Town, says that Irma’s story allowed her to imagine her own grandmother’s immigration from Southern Italy, for her grandmother would not or could not share the specifics of her journey. I think…
Children in the mines
Irma is horrified by Madame Helene’s report of children in the mines of Alsace. Here is an image of a girl pulling a coal wagon. In Victorian England, she was a “putter” and the wagon a “hutchie.” Child labor in…
My grandfather’s grandmother
My grandfather was born in Ohio of a German mother and a father whose mother was Native American. He rarely spoke of her and from the tiny bits of story he let slip, I created this portrait: My grandfather’s grandmother…
Beyond Torta Caprese
The Irma of my novel lived a half-century before the probable dawn of Torta Caprese, the dense and delicious flourless chocolate cake whose link with the island of Capri is more gastro-hype than real. Most likely Irma never tasted chocolate…
Being an immigrant in Naples
My historical novel of immigration, When We Were Strangers, is set in the 1880s, when Irma Vitale leaves her mountain village in Southern Italy and comes to America. My “research” began in November, 1990, when I left Northern California to…
“Is this your first day?”
An unexpected pleasure of publishing a book is connecting with old friends. When I was 14 (see image, left, long hair) we moved perhaps 15 miles away to another New Jersey bedroom community. Fifteen miles might as well be another…
Fates of bustles and sleeves
In the 1880s, as my protagonist Irma entered the world of women’s fashion, machine-made clothes were readily available and upper class women, with money to burn sought out skilled dressmakers to embellish, over-lay, tuck and gather, creating elaborate architectures, often…
Shrinking the Golden Gate
When We Were Strangers is set in the early 1880’s. A few years later, rising immigration from Italy began to unleash what now seems astonishing, rabid anti-Italian prejudice of which this cartoon is, believe me, a relatively mild example. In…
Valley of Lost Cauliflowers
Today in the snowy valley of Canaan (locally: ka-NAN), West Virginia, Maurizio cross-country skis the miles of groomed trails at White Grass resort and I’m in our apartment with a sprained wrist, writing slowly. Cross-country seems to be a sport…
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