Several years ago, my mother asked me why I wrote so much about my father. I explained that I was interested in mystery. My life, my stories, what I know: it all bores me. My father left when I was four, and my relationship with him—and with the Italian side of my family—has always been intermittent at best and at worst, as it is now, nonexistent. It has always seemed ironic to me that I won the Bordighera Poetry Prize and that I've found a home in the Italian American writing community when my closest familial relationships were with my mother's Polish relatives.
There are times when I feel like I'm faking it as an Italian American writer, insofar as I wasn't raised in a household—or even in an extended family—where the identity of being Italian mattered. No one spoke Italian. No one played bocce in the backyard.
My Catholic...
