It has been a while. I am finishing with a semester of teaching and am facing my semester long sabbatical. I have already started research on my creative project. Yes, for my sabbatical I am dedicating myself to my creative writing, but it will involve quite a bit of scholarly research.
I am also facing another round of rejections from my poetry submissions to journals and rejections of my poetry manuscript. Back to the idea of self-publishing. Why not? It may be the way to get more of my work out there into the world.
I did receive Honorable Mention for the 2019 Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize from Bordighere Press. In addition a selection of my poems from the manuscript will be published in Voices in Italian Americana, 31.1 to be published in spring 2020. I am really looking forward to that. I will also be reading a selection of my Dawson, New Mexico poems at the 2020 NeMLA conference in Boston, MA. My plan is to add a few more poems to that series--I have a few in draft form--narrative voices from the dead.
Madonna dell/Arco has been haunting me these days. Since I learned about her I have been watching Youtube videos and staring at images of her on vintage prayer cards. The story resonates for me and in addition, she is considered one of the Black Madonnas. Perhaps because I see myself as an outcast in some ways, living in the borderlands literally and metaphorically, marginalized, and at times voiceless, La Madonna dell/Arco speaks to me.
This time of year is always difficult to get through. So many memories and so much energy spent on nostalgia and what has passed. I don't usually write a lot during the winter--it is usually my time for hiding from whatever is going on in the world. But with this sabbatical, I must start my process of creating despite the cold, and the longing to just hide under a blanket for a few months.
So I have surrounded myself with books about WW II and Italy. I am now reading Naples '44 and finding it horrifying for so many reasons--the racisim, the insensitivity to the women who were forced into prostitution because they and their families were starving to death. I have been thinking about my mother who was a young woman during that time, living in San Giorgio del Sannio. What did she and her sisters experience? It weighs on me.
My mother did not share those stories with me or any of her children. So with the cold weather settling here in Gallup, New Mexico, I am reading about the bombings, the rapes, the diseases, the death that all went on. But none of that was discussed in my childhood Long Island home. It was as if it had never happened. But it did. And now my eyes are opening up to it. This is where my creative work comes in. To bring a voice to the voiceless. Even if the sky is gray this cold, unforgiving December afternoon.
