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OpEn Doors MAnifEsto
In popular culture, Italy is frequently seen as two things: a soap opera Mafiosi video game or a picture postcard tourist dreamland of the Dolce Vita.
Let’s add more stories to this picture. Let’s look under the surface. Let’s highlight the creativity and skill of the people in Italy. Now. Today. The point is not to produce something Italy-focused. It’s to create a collection of writing and visual art that is Italy-grown.
Who do you love? What do you believe in? What do you know? These days, truth is under attack. Reality means different things to different people. While language is increasingly black and white the issues, like our hearts, never are. Art lives in these spaces between.
We are cracking open, evolving, breaking up with the old world, breaking down the new. That’s where art grows. That’s where conversations happen. There, in that space, we find our humanity when we share and connect with each other.
I challenge you to step into that place and create. Come on in, the doors are open.
Agli occhi di uno straniero, L’Italia viene spesso vista come il paese della pizza, della Mafia e della Dolce Vita.
È l’ora di condividere storie ed immagini per scardinare questa stereotipo e dare un’occhiata più nel profondo. Mettiamo in risalto la creatività e l’abilità delle persone del “Bel Paese.” Adesso. Oggi. L’obiettivo non è di creare qualcosa che sia incentrato solo sull’Italia. Si tratta di diffondere una raccolta di scritture ed arti visive cresciuta in questo posto.
Chi ami? In che cosa credi? Cosa è reale? In questi giorni la verità è in pericolo. La realtà viene percepita in maniera diverse a seconda del punto di vista delle persone. Mentre il linguaggio è sempre più categorico, i problemi (come i nostri cuori) non lo sono. L’arte fiorisce proprio in questo terreno di mezzo.
Ci stiamo aprendo. Ci stiamo evolvendo. Stiamo rompendo con il vecchio mondo e mettendo il nuovo alla prova. È qui che avvengono le conversazioni.
È così che cresce l’arte. Qui, in questo spazio, condividendo e connettendoci l’uno con l’altro, ritroviamo la nostra umanità.
Non ti resta che entrare in questo luogo e iniziare a creare. Le porte sono aperte.
Letter from the editor
Lauren T. Mouat
The word inspire comes from the Latin “inspirare” which meant, like the current Italian ispirare, to breathe. Only in medieval times did the word take on the meaning of “divine guidance.” The writer’s search for inspiration - that stimulation that urgest you toward the act of creation - can feel daunting, awash as we are in a deluge of images, flashpoints, memes, jokes, sketches, skits, cat videos, etc. But I like to remember the ancient orgins of the word - a guidance from an otherwordly, divine source, coming to you as simply as as a breath of air. We take in sights, memories, experiences, and we breathe out art.
The works in this sixth edition of Open Doors are a roadmap to the varied doorwys to inspiration. Jack Stewart takes us to the Non Catholic Cemetery in Rome in his poem of the same name while Jacky Stephenson evokes Ravello in Poesia Ai Ravellesi. Cole Henry Forster brings us to Rome in three poems and Nancy L Weber’s Luck has us contemplating the nature of chance and strategy in a beach side amusement park.
Language and form are the starting point for Emma Prunty’s The Poem, Chloe Yelena Miller’s Italian Vocabulary and Ron Riekki ’s Sonnet.
Two essays take us into the world of authors and directors in Giorgio Fontana’s Our Need for Stig Dagerman and Jack Wardynski’s Italy behind the Lens about Italian filmmakers Paolo Sorrentino and Luca Guadagnino.
A discovery in her own building of a french book of memoirs led Monica Sharp to create a delightul translation that sheds a new and delightful perspective on young Napoleon.
Throughout the issue, we are honored to display a variety of works from Tatiana Stadnichenko which reveal the artist’s connection to place both archiectural and the healing quality fo nature.
Books, poems and paintings provide a foundation for Nathanial Cairney’s I fianlly get Noah’s Ark, Priscilla Atkin’s Pierrot and Stephen Campiglio’s Daimon.
Memory seems to be the source of inspiration for Mark Anthony Jarman’s Twa Corbies, Martin Pedersen’s Clean Scan, Irene Mitchell ’s Direct Action and Useful Knowledge, Timothy Houghton’s More by Fear and Jonathan Vidgop’s Meat. Although as a fiction author myself, I wouldn’t presume that events described necessarily “happened.” The truths of fiction more often come from a story or poems vicinity to memory rather than a factual retelling of events.
In the case of K Eady’s Havaianas, it was a writing prompt at the monthly generative writing activity in Florence that was the jumping off point - a prompt itself gleaned from a New York Times experiment in which they proposed a list of words to both a real author and AI to produce a “beach read” with interesting results (discussed as a foreward to Eady’s story.)
That AI will replace and parallel many human pursuits seems inevitable but the idea that it will sideline human creativity or lead to the end of writing our own works and reading the creative work of our fellow humans to me is simply impossible. As long as we breath, we will in one way or another create and share and in sharing, create… and on and on. To breathe is to be inspired.
Florence Literary Society to bring back Publishing Day in 2025
Florence is home to a new cultural association with an aim to foster literary events and to bring back a publishing day started by Florence Writers which went into hibernation during the pandemic. Florence has always been a home to writers and creatives and The Florence Literary Society aims to create opportunities for writers to meet each other at events and lectures throughout the year.
Their flagship event will be the annual publishing day which will feature a panel of writers, editors and agents discussing the industry and opportunities for attendees to pitch story ideas to editors. Its a way to learn the industry side of getting your creative work published. It’s a mission that the Open Doors Review is proud to support.
In the lead up to pubishing day in October 2025 Open doors will publish a series of interviews with authors on their publishing journey and insights starting with the following interview with author Tiffany Parks..
To find out more about the Florence literary society and to sign up for the monthly newsletter of Florence writer events visit www.florenceliterarysociety.com
Interview with Author Tiffany Parks
In honor of Florence Publishing Day, Open Doors will be publishing a series of interviews during the course of 2025 with authors on just how they went from manuscript to publication.
Our intern Jack Wardynski sat down with Rome-based author Tiffany Parks to discuss her unusual path to publishing. From a tweet to an agent and a book deal with Harper Collins, Parks’ story reveals that the way to publication is anything but predictable.
In an age of digital communication and oversaturation of the book market, new authors often have to get creative when it comes to finding an agent and getting their book published. Tiffany Parks is a testament to this new reality for writers. Her first book, Midnight in the Piazza, was published in 2018 after she connected with a literary agent via a Twitter competition called #PitMad. In this event, aspiring authors give a one-tweet long pitch for their book, and an agent selects one to follow up with and help find publication.
“I hadn’t had any agents requesting to read my book,” said Parks. “That’s what this event was for. It’s a very fast way to see a lot of book ideas at once.”
Parks caught the interest of accomplished literary agent John Silbersack with her quick pitch. Over 17 years at the Bent Agency, Silbersack has worked with high profile clients like Dean Koontz, Charles Schulz, and the NBA, just to name a few. Having an agent with such a wealth of experience was absolutely invaluable for Parks as the pair began the lengthy process of finding a publisher and completing the edit.
“I was extremely lucky because he is not only a great agent, but he was an editor with Penguin (Random House) for the first half of his career,” she said. “The book I had at that point was good enough to get an agent but not at the point of being publishable.”
Midnight in the Piazza is a children’s novel centering on a young girl, Beatrice Archer, who reluctantly moves with her family to the Eternal City, Rome. The story kicks off when Beatrice witnesses someone steal a set of turtle statues off a public fountain that sits outside her window. Since Beatrice was the only one to witness the crime before the statues were replaced with fakes, the duty falls on her to uncover the mystery and recover the precious turtles.
Parks’ book incorporates elements of both her own life journey and the real life history of Rome. The turtle fountain in question is the Fontana delle Tartarughe, a beautiful Renaissance masterpiece that sits in the Piazza Mattei, right in the heart of the ancient city. Similar to the novel, people have tried to steal the turtles, in both 1944 and 1979, and the ones seen today are replicas. The first inkling of a story crept into Parks’ mind from living near the Fontana delle Tartarughe and interacting with a young girl she befriended in the city. Parks moved to Rome after graduating with a Masters in classical music from the Université de Montréal, but she quickly had to get over the culture shock of life so far from home. The Pacific Northwest native’s story is mirrored in the journey of her protagonist, Beatrice.
“Rome is my muse, it’s where I get my inspiration to write,” Parks revealed. “For me, it was very important for all the inspiration for this story to come from real things... You don’t need a madeup story about Rome, Rome has so many incredible stories.””
“Rome is my muse, it’s where I get my inspiration to write,” Parks revealed. “For me, it was very important for all the inspiration for this story to come from real things... You don’t need a made-up story about Rome, Rome has so many incredible stories.”
Fantasy author George R.R. Martin has said that there are two types of authors: architects and gardeners. The architect plans out their entire story ahead of time to make the writing process quick and efficient, while the gardener begins writing with the seed of an idea and eventually grows an entire story from there. Parks falls into the latter category; when she began the writing process, she did not know that it would end up being a mystery novel.
“All these elements swirled together in my mind. I had no idea where it was going... I definitely wouldn’t do that again,” she laughed. “Even looking back now, I think that’s crazy, because it’s not really how I write anymore.”
“It was an extremely difficult book to edit... I don’t think people realize how long the writing and publishing process is.”
Silbersack worked with Parks for around half a year making edits before it was ready to be shown to publishers. Another half year passed before Silbersack revealed that HarperCollins was interested in publishing for them. After another few years collaborating with the publisher, the book was finally released in March 2018 after nearly a decade of work.
“I had a very positive experience with HarperCollins,” Parks said. “It was an extremely difficult book to edit... I don’t think people realize how long the writing and publishing process is.”
Outside of writing, Parks pursues other passions as well. After moving to Rome, she reconnected with childhood friend and radio professional Katey Sewall to start a podcast called The Bittersweet Life. The show, ongoing for more than a decade now, began as a way to document the highs and lows of living in Rome as an expat, but now has broadened its scope to the highs and lows of life in general.
Parks works as a trip planner for those looking to visit Rome, Florence and Tuscany, Naples and the Amalfi Coast, Venice, Emilia Romagna, Umbria, and Sicily. Additionally, she hosts a variety of tours within Rome that give visitors a taste of different sides of the city, from the most famous landmarks to the hidden gems. Her latest tour, “Rome is for Readers,” follows
the paths of literary giants who called the city home, like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Henry James, to showcase where the inspiration for their great works came from.
Despite Parks’ success with Midnight in the Piazza, nothing is guaranteed in the publishing world, and getting her followup on shelves has proven a struggle. Initial-
ly, she wrote a sequel to Midnight that would feature the continued adventures of Beatrice, but Silbersack encouraged her instead to broaden her scope and write something totally different. This led her to Saving Caravaggio, a young adult historical fiction thriller that incorporates supernatural elements. The manuscript was awarded the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Grant for Children’s and Young Adult Novelists in 2020, a testament to its quality. Envisioned as the first of a three-part story, Parks believes that it is the best thing that she has ever written. Both she and her agent believe the book is ready for publication, but finding a taker has been challenging.
“The truth is your career is never really ‘made’ as a writer... Just because you’ve published one book doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get a second book deal,” said Parks. “It’s easy to get discouraged in this career because there are no guarantees.”
More books are being published every year than ever before, many of them self-published, and yet the percentage of people reading books is steadily declining. The era of publishing competitions on social media, like the #PitMad that gave Parks her start, is drawing to a close as platforms such as The Artist Formerly Known as Twitter become more unusable. Reputable agents like Silbersack have to be more selective with who they take chances on, while up-and-coming agents often get left behind. In the face of all these obstacles, it is easy for authors looking for their breakthrough to feel a lack of motivation to keep pushing. Speaking from her own experience, Parks attests that the best remedy to discouragement is to stay focused on the one thing that really matters: the writing.
“The best piece of advice I can give is if you love writing, taking out the end goal of getting published can help,” she said. “Write for yourself, and surround yourself with people that are encouraging.”
Despite her current publishing hurdles, Tiffany Parks is a testament to the fact that a breakthrough can truly come from anywhere. Aspiring authors can and should look to her as a testament to placing quality of literature above what they can gain from it. Because at the end of the day, telling a story is what we are all here for.
Sonnet
Ron Riekki
I only have fourteen lines to write this, so I’d better hurry up. I believe I’m supposed to tell you about love, but I don’t feel any, so I need to start feeling it, but how? I suppose I’ve loved poetry, possibly too much, alone at this age, typing at 2 a.m., hoping something will come out and connect me with a stranger on the other side of the world, the side where love is, because it doesn’t feel present here, but I have a feeling it’s blooming and booming in Rome and Milan, Naples and Turin, because here, in Detroit, there’s the feeling of freeway, of asphalt, of a moon that looks paved, and, I suppose, I love the moon, how soon the years pass, this memory of staring up at it, back when I had friends, a field, my hometown so young then too, back before corporations took it over. I’ve gone on too long. Just like my body. I love you, reader, for reading. I have to end us now.
Twa Corbies
By Mark Anthony Jarman
On the red cliffs the sun is low, so we go for a last swim, but in the shallows a jellyfish stings Eve’s pale breast. Shocked at the pain, she holds herself where my hand has held her, a sharp burn in the stingers. We must climb the stone cliffs past the big beehive oven, see if the village has painkillers or pungent ointment.
During the war a Canadian pilot died off this same shore. Shot down at Christmas, he parachuted alive into the freezing sea. A navy ship pulled him from the waves, but he was frozen blue, a body in the sea. His betrothed, asleep on Charlotte Avenue, wakes with a chill as the other pilots calmly divide his kit, his socks and tea and tobacco. They are used to this event.
On a cliff-side path Eve stares down at three men’s crow-like coats in the foaming flood, three travelers drowned in the night and now lying on the beach, strange bearded sunbathers. Other floating bodies are tied by lines to a red Zodiac bobbing offshore. Dead humans moored to ropes, Adams in a new world moving to imaginary jobs and apartments in Brussels or Berlin, to new lives in Lyon, in London, to eat Eccles cakes and curry takeaways in the new world, wanting what I take for granted: shoes, a roof, fruit and food for your small children, and a blanket to cover the girl pulled from the sea with a dripping braid. They hoped, but they are stopped. And we travel so freely in our kayaks, free to discover roan dolphins and false gods.
The divers by the Red Zodiac look like grey seals in the sea. I can’t forget the girl with the dripping braid. Did her mother braid her hair, or did she do it herself? The girl with the long braid and lovely eyelids looks asleep, but she is the same as the three bearded men, all stopped on the sand.
I move for work, my parents moved for work, my grandparents moved for work, and they all moved because of wars. My great-grandfather was an Irish cavalryman and a gifted dowser, finding underground water with a forked branch.
My grandfather left the farm to the city, apprenticing to be a cooper in Dublin, carving and charring beautiful waterproof oak barrels, working in halos of steam and flame, then dying in the Irish Civil War.
After the Royal Navy and the beaches of Trincomalee, my father was a watercolour artist and briefly, a coal clerk. As a wartime Petty Office, he must have sailed the Suez Canal to reach Bombay and the Gate of India, though the crucial canal was attacked often by Germans and Italians. He served 1939 to 1946, a long time. Why didn’t I ask my father more about his time in the war?
But all vanished, worlds of work disappearing with the tinkers and Fenians and rounders and gandy dancers, so many exiles expelled from their modest gardens. Our world rearranges and turns inside out, our world does not stay the same, old lives washed up and whooshed away like my father’s jetty broken by spring ice, or flak tearing your plane’s skin, or a skiff coming to pieces as you huddle in it, still hoping, seawater pouring over lapstrake planks and rocks revealed in their iron-green troughs, in their ocean lair where jellyfish drift upon us to tattoo burning red welts on our skin.
“They hoped, but they are stopped. And we travel so freely in our kayaks, free to discover roan dolphins and false gods.“
On free days in Ceylon, the pale British sailors body-surfed big waves, while a pet mongoose discouraged snakes in their barracks. All vanished, young sailors and pilots and grenades and trades and guilds gone, even the names Ceylon and Bombay gone.
In Eve’s new suburb by the tannery, horses and wagons once sold milk and ice-blocks cut from Wizard Lake; in the lanes roamed pickers of rag and bone, and gaunt wanderers sang out to sharpen her mother’s scissors and knives.
After the war we settle down for a suburban moment, don’t care to remember that we are nomads. We stop a while, gamble on our arrangements of patches and sticks, and ignore that our particle-board ranch houses are temporary, constructed over hidden underworlds and chasms and sinkholes. We have a door, a number; a wagon drops milk at that door.
We want to forget that we are a race of émigrés, una faccia una razza as the Italians once claimed, one face, one race, moving about our world on strange currents like Genghis Khan’s horses stepping in swift mountain rivers.
v*Twa Corbies is an ancient Scottish ballad in which two carrion crows cast their attention and their hunger on a dead knight
I finally Get Noah’s Ark
Nathanial Cairney
I built a boat in my chest to survive the flood of feeling that comes with being one of the billion broken beings limping through paradise, raging water inside demanding I be buoyant
enough to carry every damaged thing I see, that love means the snakes as well as the doves, that saving has nothing to do with salvation and everything to do with compassion.
Pierrot
after a watercolor by Emil Nolde, Pierrot, all blues and whites in this world of biscuits and possibility— such sorrows!
Lilies have swallowed the moonlight and burst in your tempera sky. The flowers are a mouthful, smudged orange stamens who sing to the powder-puff buttons doubling down your jacket, the lip of your white cap spilled over orange rivers of hair. Girlboy, outlined in blue mascara, to be three things at once: happy and sad and hunger.
Prisccilla Atkins
From “Curami” Tatiana Stadnichenko
clean Scan
Martin Pedersen
After the doctor in the corridor of the Policlinico Universitario di Messina said positive the Dix-H indicated BPPV* possibly Acoustic neuroma aka vestibular schwannoma, i.e. brain tumor, I got punchy walking to the car, I joked that I could start smoking or buy furniture on the installment plan we did not drive home but went to a friend cardiologist who said new technique they can suck it out with a straw, oh really.
we went to our family doctor who called bullshit all around.
drove to a cousin in Catanzaro, Milo who kept his staff in after closing, he had just returned to work and didn’t look too good, a regular appointment could take months, and he did the MRI himself and cursed cursed the doctors -- nothing there is nothing here! -- he was spitting furious and said they should be disbarred and disgraced he yelled the good news as if it were a curse.
I thanked him profusely after my 3-day cancer scare I went home to it all, all the riches of my life while unknown to me Milo’s body had lost its own struggle and he would only work a few more months until he became too ill.
Our Need for Stig Dagerman
Essay By Giorgio Fontana
1.
In his essay The Blind Spot, Javier Cercas defines the novel as “a genre that seeks to protect the questions from the answers”: the answer to the question posed (an existential, social, or philosophical one) is the novel itself, not a more or less hidden “message” that the reader has to guess behind it.
Of course one can start making art moved by many different feelings, including outrage for social injustice or love for a political cause. This applies to the novel as well as to any artistic form: among a thousand possible examples, I think of Picasso’s Guernica or John Coltrane’s Alabama. Moreover, as Edgar Wind underscored in his masterful Art and Anarchy, didactic art has been extremely common in the past; it’s a bit of a Romantic prejudice that the creative process is damaged by knowledge or even by a doctrine, as it is for instance in Raphael’s School of Athens or Dante’s Commedia. So, Wind concludes, “there is something wrong with an aesthetics which explains why Chenavard and Kaulbach failed, but not why Raphael succeeded; which can account for the poetic weakness of Erasmus Darwin but not for the force of Lucretius or of Dante.”
Sure. But when in post-Romantic times the cause itself takes over the aesthetic reasons—and when well-defined answers come in—then the artist usually becomes a low-ranking politician or a priest: the only important thing is the moral conveyed by the work (a response to Guernica’s bombing or, as it’s alleged, to the 16th Street Baptist Church carnage in Alabama), and not the work itself. Art engagé, where the adjective is all that counts and the noun can be almost dismissed.
But evidently it is by no means enough to be outraged or moved or in love in order to produce something artistically valid: we contemplate Picasso’s work and listen to Coltrane’s song because they are beautiful; if they were ugly, they would at most possess documentary value. They wouldn’t be art.
Now the topic of commitment in literature has been addressed hundreds of times, but I would like to investigate the topic yet again from a more radical point of view. Even when they are in perfectly good faith writers have seldom acted accordingly to true engagement and its hard obligations: their very role in society has always been taken for granted. Literature in itself has been taken for granted, be it thriving or in deep crisis.
But for writers who are actually engaged in a struggle and adhere to strict intellectual honesty the problem is much harder; and no one better than the extraordinary Swede writer Stig Dagerman has embodied this conflict, to its most tragic consequences.
2.
“But for writers who are actually engaged in a struggle and adhere to strict intellectual honesty the problem is much harder; and no one better than the extraordinary Swede writer Stig Dagerman has embodied this conflict, to its most tragic consequences.”
Dagerman was born on October 5th 1923 as Stig Halvard Andersson in Älvkarleby, a small village not far from Uppsala. His mother could not afford to bring him up and left him with his grandparents, with whom he had a happy childhood that he would often regret. In 1929 he moved to Stockholm and started living with his father, a miner and an anarchist. Both grandparents died in 1940 (the grandfather in particular was killed by a deranged man) and this fact, like other mournful events for the very young Dagerman, was also artistically foundational; his entire oeuvre confronts the eternal possibility of emptiness and insignificance. (He himself recalls having written a poem for the death of his beloved grandfather, which turned out to be completely unsatisfactory: but from that shame and helplessness, his desire to write was born: that is, “the ability to tell what it means to mourn, to have been loved, to be left alone”).
In 1941, at the age of seventeen, he joined the Stockholm trade union youth club and began working with Arbataren
(“The Worker”), a trade unionist newspaper; he was also its editor for a time. In 1945 he published his first novel, The Serpent: a great success. Within four years he wrote four more novels of the highest quality, four plays, an extraordinary narrative reportage from occupied Germany (German Autumn) and several articles about politics and social issues.
Success on the one hand flattered and on the other repelled him: proletarian, he saw bourgeois lifestyle as a form of dangerous dulling, an abjuration of his origins. His tormented character and tendency towards depression gave him no respite, and he gradually felt unable to live up to the tasks he has set himself. Projects piled up without ever finding fulfillment: and so, after a few previous unsuccessful attempts, on November 5th 1954 he locked himself in his garage and committed suicide with his car’s exhaust pipe smoke. He was thirty-one years old.
Naturally, such a death casts a dark light on his biography and oeuvre, to which, in retrospect, it is all too easy to ascribe a destiny. It almost seems like a Dagerman story: here is a young genius, of humble origins and great ideals, condemned by himself to torment and death. Certainly his end must be questioned with due care, but for now we should resist, as far as possible, such temptations: for decency at least. Let’s then talk about life and not death.
3.
First of all, Dagerman was a convinced unionist and libertarian socialist. It was not an adolescent or aesthetic ardor—a mannered rebelliousness, an individualism mistaken for anarchic faith—that maturity would later quell. On the contrary: he adhered to anarchism without ever disowning it, and his work as a political intellectual remains very valuable even today—especially because it’s corrected by a “critical pessimism” (as he himself calls it): a form of anti-optimism, the inescapable memory of evil and tragic. Also, one can find extremely acute reflections about the writer’s role in our society: which is precisely what most interests me most.
Dagerman’s first novel, The Serpent, was tore to pieces by Marxist critics who considered it incomprehensible and solipsistic: it was not “workers’ literature” in the flattest sense of the term.
Indeed it wasn’t, and even today it retains a weird aura: it’s a modernist text imbued with something violent, heinous even; from the very first line we are submerged by a deluge of daring images and similes; the plot is continually broken and poised between dream and reality. Net of some juvenile extremism, it is certainly great literature, profoundly original, capable of revealing cynicism and lies. But is it anarchic literature? And what about his later works, characterized
by a clearer and more luminous style?
Of course, the problem is what exactly would make a novel anarchic or socialist—and why should it be important to label it like that. Is it its theme, for example a certain type of protagonist, or the denunciation of some social injustices, or a praise for freedom? Maybe, but then it would be a simple genre definition, a bit like crime novels. Moreover, a merely judging content completely expels the linguistic and formal question, which remains of primary importance.
There is an anarchic pedagogy, an anarchic anthropology, an anarchic philosophy—so why not a literature? The same question works for other ideological adjectives, of course; but my answer is always the same. If we read the adjective in a strong sense, as delimiting the task and purpose of the narrative itself, then no, it does not actually exist: or at least it should not, both because I believe that literature needn’t adjectives, and because giving it rigid prescriptions doesn’t seem very anarchic.
We can certainly write novels that aim to make propaganda; but propaganda is one thing and literature is another. Ingeborg Bachmann said in Literature as Utopia: “If it is true that the radicalism of all forms of aestheticism has left us with only one binding certainty, it is that good sentiments alone are not enough to make good poetry.” That’s it. Stories
must have the stories themselves as their purpose; they must be preserved in their purity, precisely because we do not seek in them easy lessons or morals of any kind.
To be sure, this doesn’t mean that novels are mere entertainment—although there is nothing wrong with entertainment as such. Again Javier Cercas, from The Blind Spot: “It not true that a novel’s sole obligation is to tell a good story and bring it to life for the reader; the novel’s sole obligation (or at least the most important) consists of broadening our knowledge of the human and that’s why Herman Broch claims that a novel that does not discover any hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral.”
I am not that certain about what are the novel’s obligations, but Cercas is right on the essential point. Literature is not harmless. Through a rigorous exercise of imagination, it says a great deal about the human being and the world around him, forcing us to face its enigmatic complexity. It can produce a shock, an act of awakening or enlightenment. It can reveal to us how boundless is the abyss beneath our feet and drive us to desperation. It can show us what individuals diametrically opposed to us think, and how they act. In this sense it is an extraordinary form of knowledge— as long as we recognize its singularity.
Lets’ explore this point. We get to know characters just as we would get to know real people: we undoubtedly learn something from them, but it would be rather cynical to consider others—be they fictional or flesh-and-blood beings—as sheer material for our education. Others should first and foremost be free subjects, with whom we interact and to whom we should pay respect. We can love them or hate them, but we cannot force them to be the way we want them to be: an anarchist should know this better than anyone else. The same applies to the characters in novels; and to novels themselves.
When one imposes a political purpose on art—for all the excellent reasons of militancy in the world—one misunderstands the meaning of art itself, and more: one devastates a space that should remain sheltered, because it offers us something that ideology cannot: namely the individual face of humanity, sometimes beautiful and moving, sometimes pathetic and comic, sometimes stupid and irritating.
In Jacques Maritain’s The Responsibility of the Artist there is a passage worth quoting in its entirety: “Poets do not come on the stage after dinner, to afford ladies and gentlemen previously satiated
with terrestrial food the intoxication of pleasures which are of no consequence. But neither are they waiters who provide them with the bread of existentialist nausea, Marxist dialectics or traditional morality, the beef of political realism or idealism and the ice-cream of philanthropy. They provide mankind with a spiritual food, which is intuitive experience, revelation and beauty: for man, as I said in my youth, is an animal who lives on transcendentals. Plato, the Plato of the Republic, held poets to be deceptive imitators of imitations, pernicious to the city, its truths and its morals. At least he was fair to them in expelling them from the state. He knew that poetry, as long as it remains poetry, will never and can never become an instrument of the State.”
But also not an instrument of socialism, nor an instrument of anarchy. The artist’s responsibility lies in not bowing to any rule outside her creative duty; and Maritain’s reference to Plato is enlightening yet slightly inaccurate: literature does not strictly imitate reality, but creates its own. How is this possible? It is. Does it disturb us? It is good that it does.
It is again a question of intellectual honesty—and also political: because an ideology that needs art to be justified is an ideology that fears the freedom of art itself. We can expect this from hardcore
communists, but anarchists should be the last in the world to defend such a conception. This, too, is where “committed literature” leads: to a list of good and bad works based not on aesthetic qualities, but on the amount of faith in some ideal. And I fear that such a list will always be written by someone with more power than others.
However, we should dig deeper. If to speak of anarchic literature is, in my opinion, imprecise (or vague, or harmful), it is undeniable that there are writers whose narrative work is imbued with a libertarian sensibility. This is the case with Camus, who was in many ways akin to Dagerman; and it is also the case with Dagerman himself, to which it’s now time to return. 5.
To think of literary creation as totally abstracted from one’s own convictions and worldview is of course unrealistic: we should therefore account for the very strong libertarian sensibility in Dagerman’s writings. After all, it is the same person who collaborated with “Arbetaren” by clarifying the concepts of utopia and anarchism and who wrote about youthful love and father-son relationship in his celebrated novel A Burnt Child.
Back to the point, then: Dagerman’s essential theme, as Lotta Lotass pointed out in her study Friheten meddelad, is freedom. He himself wrote that he hoped for a literature fighting for “the three inalienable rights of the human being imprisoned in political and mass organizations: freedom, escape and betrayal.”
Closely connected to freedom, I would add self-interrogation: there are never any squared-off certainties in Dagerman’s novels; his protagonists often aspire to a superior purity but can also be rather irritating: so is Bengt, the “burnt child” in the homonymous novel, locked in his adolescent certainties; so is Lucas Egmont in The Island of the Doomed. And also a certain omnipresent anguish, the awareness of the harsh reality of pain that no utopian dream can remove: just read the astonishing, cruel short story To Kill a Child.
So, any individual who aims to improve the world—and who is truly, concretely committed to an idea, like Dagerman— cannot help but tragically experience the split between the autonomy of art and social militancy. It is not always easy to put on the artist’s clothes and then take them off by pretending nothing happened.
Dagerman could not reconcile this contradiction: reading one of his most famous works, Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable, we can utterly feel the tragic weight of this and other struggles; one of the final lines states: “on that day when all that remains to safeguard my integrity is my own silence, then my power will have no bounds, for no axe can penetrate a living silence.”
But for being silent is the end of all writing, and possibly the end of everything. And that terrible day of November, when Dagerman killed himself, must remain as a very serious warning for anyone who acknowledges the problematic nature of writing. The dilemma between being solitaire and being solidaire (solitary or supportive), so well expressed by Albert Camus, finds radical expression in Dagerman’s life and death. Solitude is indispensable for the artist; but solidarity is indispensable for the militant. The classical move to solve the conflict, that is “engaged literature”, doesn’t solve anything at all: once we have convinced all writers to write engaged stuff, will the world really be better? I think it will only be populated with bad novels and unhappy authors.
6.
So the conflict is basically unsolvable, if taken in radical terms. In a beautiful essay, significantly titled The Writer and His Conscience, Dagerman put it in the clearest terms. After rejecting the criticism that demands from the writer “comprehensibility, active submission and harmony”—superficial engaged literature—he affirms that the writer is “apart from perhaps the executioner”, the only individual who is right in feeling guilty, because on the surface he produces nothing concrete for human beings. He feeds no one, he builds no roofs: and someone may object to him: “I wanted bread and you gave me poems.”
Once again, for a normal author comfortably ensconced in his social role, this drama does not arise; and particularly in this times it sounds almost a thing of the past, a trace of more innocent times. As I said before, writers normally don’t question the role of literature in society and happily live with the status quo. Dagerman, on the very opposite, states that “The writer must always assume that his position is uncertain, that the existence of literature is threatened. That is why he is forced to always go in search of the weak points of his defence and, with absolute ruthlessness, hunt down the fifth columns hiding within him and shoot
them without any mercy, even though he knows that it will be difficult for him to live without them.”
Yes, because this almost cruel self-criticism makes the situation unbearable. How can a sincerely engaged writer justify her work in front of a world where unhappiness and inequality still reign? How to consider literature an essential good, if one is also committed to removing the causes of human suffering? Thus the writer, “who wanted to write for the hungry, realizes that only those who are sated have the compulsory calm to realize their existence.”
One possible solution seems to use the pen to intervene: reportages, militant articles, and politically oriented op-eds. Which is what Dagerman himself did, and along with him many others. But then the author will still have to obey to external demands, and ultimately put aside all stylistic issues, choosing lightly a form of expression “just like the typographer chooses his typefaces” (to use Dagerman’s words).
But crafting a personal style is essential for any writer, and for Dagerman this is particularly true: his linguistic flexibility is astonishing, as he can switch from the avant-garde modernism of The Serpent and The Island of the Doomed to the radiant limpidity of German Autumn, The
Games of the Night or A Burnt Child. Sometimes a minimal narrative material is enough to produce memorable scenes thanks to his natural talent for framing and depicting emotions without an ounce of rhetoric; in such pages he reminds the work of young Ingmar Bergman. For all his scepticism and desperation, Dagerman’s faith in the power of language is remarkable.
Thus, again, the clash between social and artistic conscience knows no ways out. We can scream that art is a value in itself, and it is certainly so, but we can do it also because we are sated. In this light, Dagerman’s suicide is an event that should be meditated not only in psychological and individual terms, which remain absolutely unfathomable, but as an exemplification of a wider drama; one of the essential problems of our cultural history.
In the aforementioned article The Writer and Conscience, Dagerman’s only suggestion is to pitch our tents in the “forest of paradoxes”, without looking for a path out of it. And he repeats: the writer must “truly settle in the forest of paradoxes.”
Opening his eyes to inescapable contradictions, but at the same time affirming that poetry has reasons of its own and is “not a parlor game.” Two years later he
would return to the theme in another piece, The Task of Literature is to Show the Meaning of Freedom. A magnificent title—”to show the meaning” does not at all mean “to instruct the masses in its use” or “to convey a moral message that obliterates form”—and perhaps the best approximation to a concrete proposal: “The great task of the new proletarian literature will therefore be to show human beings who are halfway on the road to liberation the meaning of freedom, the responsibilities it entails and its purpose.”
Is this then, finally, anarchic literature? Unfortunately I don’t think so, as I have already said; even this adjective annoyingly clashes with the noun. It’s just literature, quite plainly, literature that through beautiful stories and beautiful words allows us to think about the meaning of freedom; that frees us from the banality of everyday language; and in so doing offers a glimpse into another world, be it dystopian or utopian, similar to our own or very different.
Of course this doesn’t remove the friction denounced by Dagerman, and in fact merely states one thing: the tale is in itself the expression of an otherness that can conflict with yours, with which you can relate and be enriched, in the radical vision of libertarian socialism: individual freedom does not end with others but rather begins there.
7.
In fact, for all modern novels individual subjectivity is autonomous and responsible: tthere are no longer any gods to attribute to the causes of one’s actions; everything is in the hands of the characters. Nor can we erect new gods on the empty altars of the old, because this great narrative form lives on its being eternally problematic.
“Island of Transformations” 2022 video instalaltion Rome Tatiana Stadnichenko
Do you not like the way Dagerman has portrayed Bengt in A Burnt Child? You have every right to close the book and leave, but you cannot dictate to Bengt and the author that things should be different. “If you could decide on characters’ destinies,” Umberto Eco wrote in On Some Functions of Literature, “it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: ‘So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills her, or let Queequeg do it?’ Whereas the real
lesson of Moby Dick is that the Whale goes wherever it wants.”
Yes: the Whale goes wherever it wants. Good stories do not offer sermons or morals, precisely because they do not bend to preconceived patterns; they are simply told. Does this make us forcibly better? Not at all, nor is that their primary purpose: it depends on us. A Brahms symphony is not debased by the fact that it was also appreciated by a Nazi lieutenant; the fact only adds more mystery to the mystery.
For Dagerman, perhaps, the mystery became a burden that dragged him down—along with the fear that his words no longer lived up to his stern expectations, and that they were not helping to build a more just society. Adhering sincerely to two such harsh ideals at the same time is, as we have seen, lacerating. Dagerman’s wound was never soothed; in a way, it is the most authentic gloss on his work, thriving as it is on torment and shunning any simplification.
And it is also a warning that we writers of today, with all our shortcomings, must bear in mind: the only true commitment that as artists is imposed on us is an absolute responsibility towards words. The same responsibility that everyone should exercise over his or her own field of dedication and love. As for the rest, in order not to fall victim to paralysis or depression, we can remember the sobering words of Camus’s The Rebel: “Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.”
8.
Until the end, Dagerman remained faithful to his political faith and to diminish the suffering of the world. Shortly before committing suicide, he went to the editorial office of “Arbetaren” to deliver his daily satirical column—number 2067, to be precise. It was about the right of people living on welfare to possess a dog.
Dagerman knew instinctively that, again with Camus, revolt is an answer to the absurd, perhaps the only one possible; and in revolt he believed, calling himself a “politician of the impossible”: but the absurd remained too great a burden. He was too lucid and too honest to resort to the tricks or justifications to which many intellectuals stoop in order to sleep at night. In this, his anarchism was both a salvation and a danger: salvation because it kept him straight; and danger because he took his task terribly seriously, at a time and place when a revolutionary outlet was not feasible.
But I would like to conclude with a glimpse of hope. In 1951, Dagerman wrote to his publisher Ragnar Svanström complaining about his period of creative sterility, and enclosing a leaflet that would become famous because it contains a kind of testament written three years before his death. It ends with
these lines: HERE LIES A SWEDISH AUTHOR FALLEN FOR NOTHING
HIS CRIME WAS INNOCENCE FORGET HIM OFTEN
“His crime was innocence”: I would rephrase that the excess of innocence and the inability to adapt were the substance of his loneliness. And it is impossible not to practice the exact opposite of what Dagerman asks, remembering him always with admiration; and reminding ourselves that he did not fall for nothing at all.
And there’s one more thing; something that may have pleased Edgar Wind since, in the aforementioned Art and Anarchy, he cautioned that “whenever we ignore or misunderstand a subject, we are likely to misconstrue the image by putting the accents in the wrong places. Our eye sees as our mind reads.”
Now in his biography Stig Dagerman ou l’innocence préservée Georges Ueberschlag noted that the conclusion of the 1951 piece is a pastiche, a tiny imitation of Erik Blombergen’s poem in memory of some Swedish workers shot during the
strike in Ådalen twenty years before.
Nothing can destroy certain bonds, erase a truly committed person’s loyalty to the weakest; and here, in the heart of two tragedies—Dagerman’s and those workers’—solitair-e and solidaire seem to finally come together.
Direct Action and Useful Knowledge
Irene Mitchell
This is the year of our knowledge about the strange planetary fog which the telescope could not penetrate because the fog reached the stratosphere.
This is also the year of our confusion about whether or not to study that fog toward an honorary degree in letters which might only lead to a position at the post office.
Direct action is more useful, the better to fight forest fires where they are burning and save the deer and partridges.
I have shopped at London’s Selfridge’s but that store is no longer there and Coin Firenze is in a different location. This is useful knowledge.
As knowledge, it clears the density and leads to a delicious diversity, a Pitti Immagine of color and fashion, a hit-parade of clarity and confusion.
“Shifting Land” 2018 video instalaltion Norway Tatiana Stadnichenko
Jonathan Vidgop Translator Leo Shtutin
MEAT
Meat
butcher cleft
scarlet
blood-brim
slaughter-warm
live-fine-filamentous
Butcher-executioner
solemn air
razor-sharp blade
surgical cut
disassemble breathing flesh
Customer
blood orgy witness
breath bate anticipate
sink teeth
hunk juice underdone
Queue
eyes rivet all
torment quiver
still-warm slab
butcher-shop execution rite
another witness furtive
Me
boy of five
tiptoe stretch counter
chin uptilt transfix
dream be butcher dream
blade sink
fragile tender flank
meat alone rite no part
no sacrificial role
suffer not dream not transfix not
meat long dead feel not.
Illustration for the book San Salvi by Lee Foust, 2022
Tatiana Stadnichenko
daimon
Stephen Campiglio
The difference and century between us
collapsing on a dark step when he incites me to rise from the mire of my veins toward an inverse tower of the poem.
The flower of refinement that grows from the meat of the beast. A rose of smoke and ash. Peace that comes from the battlement.
* Italicized quotes from The Magi by William Butler Yeats.
More by fear
Timothy Houghton
I hear too well a quickness on the phone, dull slivers of anxiety: Promise now, tell everyone I love them and give each a hug, words a little high-pitched, thready. My reply mirrors them: “OK, I sure will”— enthusiasm false—worry worry worry my note.
There’s a long history where she lives above the Boulevard’s creek. It’s a common secret blue sky is blocked more by fear than by clouds.
A year ago, I might have asked, Do you remember, three words resembling a test. Just now she talks loud to stop me from saying too much by accident.
The sky is curving a real event. She repeats herself with the preface, Don’t forget to...
L u c k
The lime green Coach stood straight up against the glass cage, its short strap resting on a black Prada, too small to even consider. This is my shot, my best shot, Jessie thought, so she grabbed another two dollars from Manny’s pocket and fed them to the machine. As she stepped up to the window Jessie noticed that the beige Dior was bigger and might actually go well with a navy blue pantsuit, but the lime green Coach was better positioned. As the crane moved towards her Jessie saw that quite a crowd had gathered around the machine, their bodies pressed up against the glass. Manny patted her twice on the back as she placed her hand on the lever, and she imagined that they were all cheering her on, wishing her luck. Jessie guided the crane, and the crowd got restless as they watched it slowly canvass the battle-scarred designer handbags that were strewn across the bottom of the cage.
Jessie glided the crane to the right corner of the machine. It was massive - a cage the size of the bedroom in the house on North 21st Avenue that Jessie
Fiction
Nancy L Weber
and Manny had inherited from her parents, and made almost entirely of glass. A blond woman from the crowd called out from behind one of the glass walls.
“No, not that one. Not the green. Stay away from the green Coach!”
The blond was vehement, stamping out her extra-long cigarette with her right foot and snapping her head back in disgust.
“It’s okay, she got this,” Manny called to the blond through the glass, and the noise of him in her ear made Jessie let go of the lever.
The blond came around the glass and stood next to Jessie. Up close and under the neon, the blond seemed older and washed-out. Her pale legs looked wrinkled in a pair of cut-off shorts. She touched Jessie on the shoulder. “It’s a trap, honey,” she said in a low voice. “The green bag is a trap. They put it there, like that, on purpose.” The blond walked to the left corner of the machine and pointed to a red Kate Spade with a long shoulder strap. “This one.” She tapped on the glass with two knuckles.
“This is the one.”
Jessie searched Manny’s face for an answer. It had never occurred to her there was such a thing as a plan. That is not why she came, night after night, with Manny’s left pocket bulging with dollar bills. This is not what they’d discussed all summer, over late night Cokes at Mack’s Pizza or afternoon beers at the Bolero. Instead, they’d talked about the randomness of it all. You simply picked a bag that you liked, and if it seemed like it was in a good position, you fed the machine two bucks, grabbed onto the lever and hoped for the best. Manny believed that maybe a steady hand helped, but Jessie knew that it wasn’t the steadiness of the hand, the movement of the crane, or the swing of the temperamental claw. It wasn’t the tilt of the earth either. It all was luck, and Jessie knew that she had a whole lot of it. Her parents didn’t - they had the worst luck in the world. They picked wrong numbers in Lotto and then held on to the losing tickets, storing them in the glove compartment of their Buick, and in the breadbox on the kitchen counter, so that in their house there was never a proper cool dry place to keep the bread. They picked the wrong horses at the racetrack, putting big money down on busted thoroughbreds just because of their names or the number on the gate
they would break from. They picked the wrong flight for their European vacation. They picked the wrong seats on the wrong flight, seats too far away from the mid-section, so when the spark hit the almost empty fuel tank, so that when they went down they knew it, and then lingered for too long on the ocean floor. But Jessie was different - she was lucky. She met Manny less than two months after her first husband left, and the two of them turned down her parents’ offer to join them on an all-expense paid European vacation for a honeymoon. Instead, Jessie and Manny spent most of their wedding money on a Caribbean cruise, and learned the news of the plane crash during a long night of losing at blackjack in the onboard Casino. They made back all of their money at the slot machines before the following morning, when they disembarked in Half Moon Cay, and arranged a first-class flight home.
There was a bit of misfortune with the house on North 21st Avenue. Jessie’s parents bought it at the height of the market because there were plans to build a Margaritaville on the old pier, and the rumor was that there would be big offers to buy their house so it could be torn down to be used as a parking lot. But the market crashed and the Margaritaville people went away, and Jessie and Manny were stuck with a house that was worth a
third of the purchase price, and was too small to rent to families and too close to the ocean for her liking. But with Jessie’s luck they’d be back with an even bigger offer and this whole thing would turn around. Luck skipped over generations, and Jessie was sure that it followed her to the claw every time.
She took a deep breath and tried to avoid the gaze of the washed-out blond who had come up beside her. “Don’t do it,” the blond said, but the crane was already moving. It stopped over the green Coach, the metal claw swinging like a badly broken arm. Jessie lowered the crane, and the claw tugged at the green bag, flipping it on its side. For one brief hopeful moment the bag stood straight up again, and Jessie was able to grab it and lift it almost three feet off the ground. As she raised the claw, Jessie felt the dead weight of the bag as it hung in the air. It hung there limp and lifeless, just like the other dirty bags scattered on the floor. As it moved towards her, Jessie got a glimpse of the bag up close. It was in bad shape: the bag’s delicate flesh scarred by metal, streaked with machine grease, faded by the sun. Jessie guided the green bag towards the chute, but the claw folded into itself. She felt her heart fall to her feet as the bag dropped with a soft thud onto an empty space on the floor. The crowd let out a
collective sigh of disappointment, and the blond pointed at Jessie and laughed.
“Jesus,” Manny said, slapping the machine with the palms of both hands.
A round-faced teenager stepped up behind Jessie holding two crisp dollar bills in front of her. “Come on, let’s go.”
Manny grabbed on to the belt loops of Jessie’s low-riding jeans, but she stayed with one hand on the lever, eyeing the lime green Coach bag as it laid there badly positioned – its body flat on the floor, with no corner raised or strap to grab onto- just a few inches from the chute. Jessie was ready to go again, but the washed-out blond called out from behind the glass.
“Oh no honey. No, no, not you. You missed the boat on this one.” The blond motioned to the round-faced teenager, and the girl stepped up to the machine.
Manny led Jessie away from the crowd, a few yards from the machine, to an empty spot in front of a balloon shooting game.
“ Wanna get some Cokes?”
“You go ahead.” Jessie sat down in one of the yellow plastic seats. “I’ll sit a minute.”
Jessie sat facing the clown head with the wide grin. A small black pistol was perched chin-level in front of her. She
closed one eye and squeezed the soft trigger, aiming at the quarter-size hole in the center of the clown’s smile. For a moment she thought that she might try her luck, but the other yellow plastic seats were all empty and there was no one there to compete with. The tall skinny man behind the counter didn’t seem to know that she was there – he hunched over the row of pistols talking to a sunburned girl in a suede halter-top. Jessie slid around in her chair and gazed back at the claw machine. She heard sighs and groans and realized that things had not gone so well for the round-faced teenager. The washed-out blond was right by the girl’s side, shaking her head at the ground as she stamped out another cigarette.
The teenage girl turned away from the machine and slipped through the crowd. Jessie watched her as she moved out of the garish neon glare towards the deserted end of the pier, where she joined a small group of shirtless boys carrying skateboards. Jessie looked beyond them, past the shuttered arcades, over a darkened old roller coaster, then out to the black horizon. She could not see it but she could hear it – the persistent hum of the ocean.
Ever since the plane crash, Jessie couldn’t go near the ocean. She couldn’t stand the sight or feel of it, and she considered herself lucky that the man she
married didn’t like it either. They spent their summer afternoons two blocks inland at the Bolero, drinking threefor-one Bud Lights out of plastic cups. The bar was dark and airless; framed paintings of matadors hung in places where there could have been windows. They drank until the third beer was no longer free, until Jessie rested her head in both hands, then on the bar, until Manny gathered her in his arms and pulled her to his chest. Then they’d pass out back at the house for what was left of the day, and end up on the boardwalk, sobered-up and spent, with the thick black night blotting out the ocean before them.
But Jessie could hear it. Sometimes she even thought she heard the murmur of the ocean inside the Bolero as they sat at the far end of the horseshoe-shaped bar with a few pot-bellied bikers, gazing up at the afternoon soaps on the TV.
The one big thing that Jessie hid from Manny, the one thing that she could not explain, was that even now, she still loved the sound of the ocean. She loved to hear the rumbling as the water rose, and then crashed, and she would stop and wait for the soft sizzling of the broken wave. She listened alone with both eyes closed and a whirling, upside-down feeling inside her.
Jessie scanned the boardwalk crowd looking for Manny. She spotted him at
a hot dog stand quite a distance away, struggling to pull dollar bills from his bulging pocket to pay for the two oversized Cokes that he somehow held in one hand. She thought she would go over to help him, but then screams and cheers erupted in the crowd around the claw machine. As she sprang up from the plastic chair, Jessie thought that she could feel the earth as it really was – tilted to one side, but it was just the sagging boards below her feet, the loose nails popping out of warped, splintered wood, that was making her unsteady. She took careful steps as she walked towards the machine, the crowd thick around the area where the player stood.
You missed the boat on this one. Jessie stole a glance between two large women – she saw pale skinny legs bent at the knees. She edged between the two women just in time to see the washed-out blond reaching into the chute and pulling out the lime green Coach bag. Jessie walked up to the machine and stood directly behind the blond, who held the bag up in front of her, inspecting it under the neon light. The bag looked even worse than it had before – the soft leather exterior was covered in fresh scratches from the claw. The blond unzipped the bag and fumbled through the inner pockets. Jessie could smell inside it, that musty closed-up beach house smell, that stale cold smell of something that has
been trapped in a tomb.
You missed the boat on this one. The blond zipped up the bag and slipped her right arm through the short strap. She turned and walked away from the crowd towards the nearest exit on the pier, and then Jessie just knew. She knew because Manny had told her one afternoon at the Bolero. He had read it somewhere on the Internet. “The claw grabs better and holds objects tighter after a certain number of failures; you simply need to watch the players and count the number of losses.” Count the number of lossesJessie had dismissed this theory as soon as Manny had told it to her.
You missed the boat. The blond disappeared down the steps to the beach, the lime green Coach bag tucked under her arm. Jessie ran to the railing and followed the bag as the blond trudged across the sand on the dark, empty beach. It was low tide, and the Atlantic was a safe distance away, but the high tide on an eroded coastline had left a large stagnant pool of slack water under the boardwalk. Jessie sensed the water, dull and unmoving, just a few feet below her. The blond and the bag vanished into black, and Jessie couldn’t tell if it was the sky or the water that took them.
Italy Behind the Camera: Sorrentino & guadagnino
Essay By Jack Wardynski
How much can we rely on cinema to teach us about any particular subject beyond our knowledge? Much of the understanding individuals have for cultures outside of their own comes from popular culture. For non-Italians, the films of directors like Federico Fellini can shape the narrative of the country. It is natural for the curious human mind to be drawn to compelling works of art like movies to learn from, but can we trust what we see on the screen to be indicative of a whole culture or lineage? Should subjective expressions of creativity be followed like a textbook definition of what Italy is?
The history of Italian film is as rich as it is extensive. Cinema was an integral part of Italian culture stretching back over a century. In the 1930s and 40s, the Italian movie industry was weaponized by Mussolini’s fascist regime to create propaganda pieces shown in schools. After the war, the neorealism movement depicted the harsh realities of a rebuilding country and produced timeless works like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). The Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s captivated audiences both within Italy and across the pond in America, the originator of the cowboy movies that Italian filmmakers were iterating on. Italian filmmaking lagged in the 1980s due to economic constraints, but rebounded in the 90s with a new generation of creatives. Italy today boasts the most Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film with 14, just ahead of France’s 12.
The mention of Italian filmmaking evokes thoughts of a handful of major players. Fellini is perhaps the most famous and influential, with masterpieces like 8½ (1963) and La Dolce Vita (1960) defining the cinematic language of their time. Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) forever shifted the prototypical ideal of an American western, despite not being produced in America. Roberto Benigni broke barriers in 1997 with Life is Beautiful by claiming multiple Academy Awards, including the first acting award for a non-English language performance. Today, a new generation of Italian directors create works that capture the minds and imaginations of moviegoers the world over. Two that broke through within the last decade, Paolo Sorrentino and Luca Guadagnino, have demonstrated the value of their work time and again by divulging their most intimate biographies to audiences. Their films provide two unique evolutions of the Italian filmmaking heritage, and two unique perspectives on the country and its people they know so well.
Paolo Sorrentino got his start in film in the late 90s as a screenwriter and short film director. His early feature-length works, like One Man Up (2001) and The Consequences of Love (2004), received critical acclaim within Italy and at foreign film festivals. His true breakout, 2013’s The Great Beauty, catapulted Sorrentino into the spotlight of the Western film world. The modern Roman epic earned the Academy Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe in their respective foreign language categories. A string of releases in the decade since has solidified Sorrentino as one of the seminal filmmakers of his time, and a defining creative voice for Italy in the 21st Century.
Self-reflection defines the works of Sorrentino. 2015’s Youth is a twohander depicting the dichotomy of a pair of old men grappling with their past in contrasting ways, set with the backdrop of the idyllic Swiss Alps. Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine), a retired composer-conductor, struggles to mend the frayed bond with his daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) after decades of neglect. His friend and foil, Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), relentlessly pursues his final, defining film project, his “testament,” despite the persistent reminders that filmmaking is a young man’s game. The Great Beauty tells the tale of a storied journalist and former author who, as he approaches the end of his life, finds himself longing for the days of his youth, when the world seemed so full of the titular beauty.
His two most recent films, The Hand of God (2022) and Parthenope (2024), present a noticeable shift for Sorrentino, as the director began pulling more directly from his own life. Hand is a semi-autobiographical coming-ofage story about a young man, Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), looking to find his way through life in his hometown of Naples. Sorrentino is also from Naples, and, like Fabietto, had to reckon with the loss of his parents at a young age to a tragic accident. In an interview with Variety in 2024, Sorrentino described how his latest film Parthenope is the logical companion to Hand; it offers “a dreamed youth, rather than a youth that (he) experienced.” The film, also set in Naples, follows the title character’s progression through the early years of her life, and the way that her seemingly otherworldly beauty brings her both strength and harm.
The self-reflection of Sorrentino’s palette connects seamlessly with themes of aging and regret. His protagonists often find themselves struck by moments of miraculous clarity of purpose far after that knowledge could be applicable. With aging comes the slightly unsettling revelation of the nature of the reality around you. Hand of God mixes horrible tragedy with the whimsy of adolescence; those defining moments of your childhood played out amidst scenes
of anguish occurring just outside your scope of vision. In Youth, the withering away of two great men contrasts with the vibrant individuals around them. The luxury spa they inhabit, a place meant for rest and rejuvenation, serves to do the opposite. The Great Beauty tears away the facade of the extravagance and liveliness of the Eternal City to demonstrate the protagonist’s lack of fulfillment in his seemingly enviable existence. In a Sorrentino film, the characters are locked in conflicts of interiority, fighting for a perspective of themself that can bring them in harmony with the beautiful world they inhabit.
For Luca Guadagnino, those internal struggles invert, as relationships between characters become longing dances of the heart. The forbidden queer romance central to Call Me By Your Name (2017) ultimately ends in despair.
The knotted and twisted love triangle central to 2024’s Challengers puts its characters through the emotional wringer. Guadagnino’s cannibals-to-lovers drama Bones and All (2022) presents a relationship between two wayward souls that the audience cannot help but envision all the horrible ways in which it can and will disintegrate. Like Sorrentino, Guadagnino melds the beautiful with the tragic, but in ways distinctly his own.
Born in Palermo, Guadagnino takes pride in the fact that he has no place that he can truly call home. He spent much of his early childhood in Ethiopia before moving back to Italy; his mother is Algerian, and his father is Sicilian, and he has spent much of his adult life in Rome and Milan. Much like himself, Guadagnino’s characters are outcasts, drifters looking for a place in a world that may not have one for them. Call Me By Your Name’s Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is caught between the innocence of youth and the anticipations of adulthood. As an American living abroad, the town in northern Italy he inhabits feels unlike a proper home to him, despite living there for years. His father’s older grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer) feels finally like a refuge for him, until the realities of life shake him to the core. Maren (Taylor Russell) of Bones and All is abandoned by her father at the age of 18 after several bouts of unexplainable cannibalism throughout her life. The horror of Guadagnino’s adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ novel comes in the seeming hopelessness of its characters’ situation; there exists no reason for their terrible urges, or any hope of a cure, yet they have no choice but to soldier on, drifting from state to state, town to town.
Challengers, Guadagnino’s most current film, is a tale of obsession, love, and ambition. While on the surface a light
and breezy tennis romp, it falls in line with the themes of broken connection present throughout his filmography. The decade-long friendship between Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) is severed by their feuding over the affection of the alluring tennis prodigy Tashi (Zendaya). When her career is cut short by injury, Tashi, consciously or not, decides to live out her dream vicariously through the boys. Buried within this love-hate triangle is the heart-rending dynamic, however, of Tashi and Art’s relationship with their daughter, as she is repeatedly pawned off on her grandmother to allow the couple to focus on their crumbling tennis dream. Challengers has hardly the time for any characters outside of the three leads, and Guadagnino weaponizes that feature to great effect to show the human toll that ceaseless ambition and a void of affection can take. Though a divergence from the relationships seen in his earlier works, this investigation of the complexities of human connection falls neatly in line with the themes Guadagnino loves to pursue.
Both filmmakers have an obvious understanding that movies, when distilled down to their barest essential elements, are at their most captivating when framing subjects in motion. The composition of an arresting image holds the viewer’s gaze and forces them into
the film’s reality. Sorrentino and Guadagnino place a heavy emphasis on the visual language of their storytelling; the enticing Italian countryside, the majestic Swiss Alps, the picturesque American Midwestern plains, all of these places hold dark secrets in the worlds of these films, but their natural splendor leaves you unable to resist their pull. A highend resort can become a nightmarish depiction of one of Dante’s levels of hells through the power of framing. The bathroom connecting Elio’s and Oliver’s rooms appears more like a window to another world. A conversation becomes a tennis match, a speedboat is a heavenly chariot.
In Netflix’s mini documentary
The Hand of God: Through the Eyes of Sorrentino, the director says that “reality is just the starting point for a story,” and both directors adhere to that idea, if in differing manners. Guadagnino constructs realities that exist almost outside of time and space as he hones in on a specific feeling. In Challengers, the world outside of tennis may as well not exist; the only real place is that which falls within the clay courts. Belligerent windstorms materialize as tensions approach their climax, and the characters’ internal strive is matched only by the comical coating of sweat they are drenched in. Guadagnino is not afraid to
stray into realms of heightened fiction, like with Bones and All’s secret underground of cannibals or the coven of dancer witches central to 2018’s remake of Suspiria. Sorrentino embraces hyperrealism willfully. Michael Caine conducts a symphony of cows in Youth, The Hand of God spotlights the Neopolitan folk tale of the “little monk” Monaciello, The Great Beauty has a disappearing giraffe. A very late reveal in Parthenope is so fantastical it would be nigh impossible to describe. Blurring the lines between monotony and fantasy is part of the fabric of Italian cinema, carried on by the modern creatives of today.
Scale is another point of differentiation between the works of these two directors. Sorrentino generally works on a grand canvas, with an array of characters moving into and out of the story. His stories are often devoid of the connective tissue one comes to expect from the film medium; scenes may begin and end with no clear driving force, and sometimes you may find yourself puzzled as to what you have just bore witness to. Some may criticize this aspect of his style, clocking it as misguided and labeling his films slow and meandering, and yet the contemplative nature of his storytelling matches with the thoughts of his characters and the worlds that they inhabit. Sorrentino’s pictures sure-
ly will not win over any screenwriting traditionalists, but he is uninterested in being economical. Guadagnino seems drawn more to small scale pieces. If Sorrentino paints in broad strokes to encompass the grandiosity of his protagonists’ interpersonal growth narrative, Guadagnino maximizes every detail of the compact frame he creates for himself. His films are often a snapshot of a singular time in his characters’ lives that can reveal everything to the audience about them. The specificity of what happened to them before and after the events of the film is seemingly not as important to Guadagnino as finding understanding of what they desire. Viewers can come to their own conclusions from there.
But what do their works tell us about their Italian homeland? If you asked them, most likely nothing at all. It would be reductive to suggest that some essential truth of the Italian experience can be attained by simply consuming and
analyzing the films of two men. Sorrentino in recent years has begun more directly interrogating his relationship to his hometown of Naples where he has lived for most of his life. The Hand of God and Parthenope both examine the deep-seated prejudices that exist between the north and south of Italy, and each film’s protagonist keeps sight of the beauty in a place that some may see as stuck in the past. Fabietto falls into conversation with Sorrentino’s mentor Antonio Capuano who tells him to forgo the glitzy allure of a city like Rome; Na-
ples has more stories waiting to be told than one could ever hope for. Guadagnino seems unconcerned with his personal identity as an Italian, instead exploring the facets of his life as an outsider and a gay man. Queer characters and elements, both subtle and explicit, permeate all of his films (his next film is bluntly entitled Queer), and they reveal more to us about him as an individual than ruminations on his origins ever could.
When one discusses the carrying of the torch of Italian filmmaking, it is important to keep in mind how Italian cinema earned such a defining legacy in the first place. The works of greats like Fellini, De Sica, and Rossellini are not preserved in the cultural canon because of their revelations about Italy and its culture. Rather, it is because of their revelations of the filmmaker’s perception of that same culture. There are no defined boundaries of cinema, no clear delineation between fact and fiction. A storyteller’s world can be stretched as liberally as needed to contain the entirety of their vision. In that sense, Luca Guadagnino and Paolo Sorrentino embody those same ideals with their filmographies. Whether they center their stories on the Italy land and lifestyle or not, their defining visions and unwavering commitment to self bring them out of the shadows of the giants that came before. Their disinterest in chasing the ghosts of
Italian cinema’s legends is precisely what will place them amongst those ranks when the cameras are finished rolling.
“Shifting Land”
Biennale Thesalloniki, Greece 2018
Tatiana Stadnichenko
Italian Vocabulary
Chloe Yelena Miller
Italian Vocabulary: Luna sul Colosseo
Easier to imagine the giraffes, elephants, and lions transported on boats to Rome than the slaves used to build the Colosseum, construct the scenes for spectators, fight, feed the caged chickens killed for snacks.
We tour the Colosseum’s underground beneath the moon, see the still water used to move the larger scenes, the reconstructed elevator, even higher walls once covered in marble and frescoes.
There’s no memorial or stone block dedicated to the builders, workers, or fighters. There’s the Door of the Dead used by those carrying them.
A car race on the road above; cars screeching to make the hairpin turn. Sounds like the earthquake that knocked down some of the walls years ago.
The living city circles the oval of arches, a monument to the ancient past, reaches into the future past Covid, the lockdowns, the deaths. Our taxi passes an ad for a funeral home with a colossal coffin repeated on the highway like arches.
Italian Vocabulary: Guardare
My son draws layers of scalloped plates on Godzilla’s back. You can only see parts of the plates in the back and sometimes none of them.
There are things we can’t see or didn’t, like the moment the man leapt or fell from the footbridge over the Tiber river. But we joined the crowd watching a firefighter being lowered in a harness onto the grassy ledge. From between the plants, the man’s arm reached out. We could see his forearm and hand before they fell back down again. The firefighter moved slowly.
Look how courageous the firefighters are to help, I told our child, while moving him away from the crowd toward the next bridge. We’re lucky to be somewhere with so many helpers. He agreed and looked away from the river where homeless tents crowded in the shade.
We didn’t stay to see the man lifted in a cot, but saw the picture in the newspaper online. Attempted suicide. This was twelve years and two days after another friend jumped further north in this country. And a few years after a friend plunged a knife into his own heart. He’d been staring into the mirror, thinking about his lost loves, the newspaper reported. The article described everything someone decided my friend did and thought.
My son knows there are more plates behind the drawn ones that he didn’t draw. They can’t be seen.
We fill in what we can’t see to understand.
We rarely know if we are right.
Italian Vocabulary: Restauro
Baptistry of St. John Mosaic Restoration in Florence, June 2024
Details, smaller than teeth, unseen for centuries, show wear, history — like my skin, yours.
Glass, terracotta, stone, marble pieces cut, maybe weighed, to consider its architectural frame, implanted to suggest the whole – stories – from below. Readers squinted colors into bodies, narratives. Instead of an eyebrow or toe nail, the brightness, reflection of the light: witnessed.
As if tending to a body, restorers use gauze, seemingly steri-strips, where the tesserae separate or fall or reveal cracks behind.
The guide describes their syringes to support what can, can’t be seen.
Sometimes select humans filled in the octagonal space with wooden scaffolding, to lift themselves closer. During WWII, some covered the surface
with newspapers, glue. Other times, they painted in missing pieces, applied substances that now need to be removed.
Restorers work, piece by colored piece, sometimes crafting new glass pieces filled with a layer of gold, in Venice, of course, the Florentine guide adds.
She points to a newly witnessed small octopus. Maybe its 8 legs, reverberating the baptistry’s footprint and Biblical stories, was only meant for medieval artists. This octopus can’t regenerate, but restorers stand on this aluminum scaffolding with toothbrushes, solutions, to try.
How far back do I have to stand –or how close –to understand how pieces make a whole?
What can I remake – or at least brighten – of myself?
Non Catholic Cemetery in Rome
Marble and Latin the rich could afford are framed by jasmine and tended weekly under a permanently exiled sky.
Tourists wander the paths, looking for those famous enough to be allowed to lie among the marble and Latin the rich could afford.
The cemetery is on an incline, the grave stones banked so runoff rain ends in pools of peonies under the permanently exiled sky.
At night, the cypresses point at the moon. No one knows how to read anymore the marble and Latin the rich could afford or dream of clover or thistles in illiterate ditches gone to seed under a permanently exiled sky.
This morning, the sky began gray as marble and Latin. Even the rich can’t afford the end of history. No one dies at home under a permanently exiled sky.
Jack Stewart
From “Curami” Tatiana Stadnichenko
Poesia ai Ravellesi
A beach lay easy before us, sand and gulls so easy on the wind– songs of love drifting from inland nooks, so we went to the mountains. And there, we looked out in the Valley towards past lives, lemon groves and I thought of penning a poem. But my tongue was caught by such faint peace.
Oh, does beauty whisper in tune with the Amalfitani–and I have wondered about her, and God and Me and where we will all meet. But in the distance, on the highest of high– there was ocean, there was Heaven, and I saw at once the Touch of a Lord as he stretched towards creation, glancing our face.
Jacky Stephenson
Left to wonder about lives not wandered, insatiable desperation to return to youth– easier days, one’s that feel like Ravello. Blank canvas.
Vino di Campania and her surmountable task, to match the dreams and wishes and memories it instigates– the way she bites lips, only in the evening, fresh pressed oranges and morning dew and fingers wrapped around tight curls, fresh from the Gulf of Napoli.
For days you feel Ravello in your weakened knees, you feel it in the darkness and you hear it, only in stillness– and this has not yet faded. What will fade with beauty gone? I pray, none of it.
Embraces above the fog– the closest to been to welcoming death and angels and unspoken agreement with a King, that there is not much else to see– it was all there, and it is all beyond me, beyond us, now.
I was so much older then, and I am younger now, and the past was the future, and I’ve gone back to the beginning. All in hopes, in search of Via Petrito, stairways to Eden, to memory– somewhere at the foot of Amalfi.
What will these days, this wine, and wounds make of us yet?
I am a Man, and a Boy, and neither here. she, and Ravello, alike in all, are only beauty–The past, future and neither here.
“Invisitble
City Mixed Technique 2017 Tatiana Stadnichenko
havaianas
Fiction by K Eadie
Note from the Editor: The New York Times Backstory
Over the summer, the New York Times set up a fiction challenge: human authors vs. ChatGPT. Author Curtis Sittenfeld and ChatGPT received a number of reader-voted themes to be included in a short story that could be categorized as a “beach read”. The readers voted for “lust”, “regret” and “kissing” along with “middle-age” and “flip flops.”
Sittenfeld wrote her 1,000 word story over the course of two weeks, numerous drafts and visits to sites used in the story to observe details. She used memories from her own life and input from friends. ChatGPT wrote its version in 17 seconds. You can read both online to compare though the results become obvious pretty quickly. Sittenfeld’s story was full of details that felt eclectic and unexpected. The stakes felt higher, the character flaws recognizable and therefore real. ChatGPTs version was stale, the language cliched and the characters two dimensional. It was boring.
Last month, at a writing prompt evening in Florence, I gave these same prompts to the participants. The following story by K Eadie is the result which she combined with a second prompt, all written in the space of 15 minutes with some minor edits. I find the results both hilarious and touching and I have the memory of her reading them out loud to a laughing and thougtful group in Todo Modo Bookshop. I’m curious about how AI will change writing, but I’m personally not afraid of some machine take over. Reading for me is a great conversation. With other authors across space and time, with other readers, and with myself.
She saw them, oh, oh, oh how lovely— brand new Havaianas, perched in the section of the airport that she never allowed herself to look at, storming through on the magic granite floor, not looking left or right, steaming ahead with the luggage trolley, ignoring the solicitations from the perfume touts—beautiful young women holding out perfumes and lipsticks.
‘No, no, no, this is rubbish, this is nonsense,’ she always told herself.
But now she was standing in front of the flip-flop display unit, and the Brazilian, obviously Brazilian, shop assistant was blinking at her, and very, very interested in the Havaianas that she was staring at. The assistant could see exactly which pair had drawn her attention. The assistant with bright red lipstick and caramel looks was insanely interested in her interest; she was indecorously interested.
her time with dear old Carlos, her Brazilian boyfriend of two and a half years, now sadly—or rather, fortuitously—back in Brazil.
‘Madame— you like the Rio flip-flops?’ ‘Nice,’ she said, but not really meaning it. She was trying to pry herself away by whatever means, but it was as if she had been turned to stone.
“ The assistant with bright red lipstick was insanely interested in her interest; she was indecorously interested.”
‘Would you like to try them on?’ the assistant asked.
Oh no, she couldn’t think of anything more uncomfortable. ‘Would I have to take my socks off?’ she asked.
The assistant smiled sweetly with all her lips and teeth but appeared not to understand.
Victoria tried to take a step backwards and pulled dear old Trolley towards her, in an attempt to feel safer—this trolley suitcase, dear old Trolley who had helped her through this section of the airport so many times before, never holding her back, letting her storm on at great speed with no sense of tiredness.
But no, today Trolley didn’t move, but the shop assistant did. ‘Oh well, Madame,’ the assistant said, in strong Brazilian tones, which Victoria recognised from
However, the objects, hanging so demurely on their hook, tied together with a plastic tag, gleamed at her. The white sand Natal beach, the ice cream shop, the rough bench they had sat at under the palm trees to eat, high above the shore, azure sea twinkling below, an orgy of coloured sprinkles; and the smell of Brazil—mangoes, ice cream shops, and fried chicken—all came steaming back to her in a humid haze. And of course, the family house, bungalow, spreading out in all directions, and the endless rice and black beans, all served up to her as the fêted girlfriend of Carlos, or Federico, as he was known to his family. That name
suited him much better: he was fancy, long-winded, and pretentious, but also loving, if rather dim. But he loved her, and that was what counted.
All these thoughts flooded back to her as she looked at the shiny yellow and turquoise Havaianas, with the wonderful silver name stamped on them.
The assistant called her attention again. ‘Would Madame like this pair or this pair?’ She indicated another pair of flipflops, almost identical.
‘No, no,’ Victoria said. ‘No, thank you. I never wear flip-flops, you see. I have a very bad bunion, and I have to make sure I have an insole.’
The assistant looked at her blankly.
‘And to be honest,’ she added, ‘I’m very mean.’
‘Mean?’ the assistant asked quizzically, looking even more Brazilian.
‘I don’t like spending money,’ she said. ‘I am a drawing teacher, you see, I’m poor.’
However, her mind was full of Carlos. She could feel his presence and remember the stormy times in London, in Brazil, at the beach, in a hammock—the kissing, the lust—it was all there, despite her reservations. But not his. He had been planning to get married, or at least, he had been.
She looked at the squiggly lines of almost illegible writing, written with the blood of her brow, metaphorically speaking, and tore up the letter, and threw the bits into the waste paper bin. Ugh: she would have to start again. The reason was, she reasoned, that nobody ever writes real letters anymore. We’re so used to just chopping and changing, deleting, and rewriting until our written communications are pristine and exactly what we
“The white sand Natal beach, the ice cream shop, the rough bench they had sat at under the palm trees to eat, high above the shore, azure sea twinkling below, an orgy of coloured sprinkles; and the smell of Brazil—mangoes, ice cream shops, and fried chicken—all came steaming back to her in a humid haze.”
want to say, she muttered to herself. She was talking of course, about the phone, and the text message. Even Word documents. Possibly even Powerpoint presentations. Word documents and Powerpoint presentations were still part of her life, unfortunately.
Sitting, biro in hand, back in the apartment, she hesitated.
But the real problem was the emojis. She was so used to the ‘emoji business’, as she called it, she had got so very used to it, addicted even, that not to add them in the right place in the letter, and to choose
exactly the right one or combination of emojis to express exactly what she wanted to express—emotionally, or as she called it, ‘emojally’—was frustrating; and as her art skills were limited, even though she taught drawing as a profession, she found that the emoji she tried to recreate—a goofy tongue-out emoji at the end of her joke about the split red wine, the sick on the cushion, and then the ‘Sorry’ emoji with the sad face and the tear—both of these emojis seemed to be spitting out more sick, and the tear was so far off it looked like a ghastly sewn-on eye.
So, the letter had to be torn up: not just the lines, laboriously written three times already, but the emojis as well. It was becoming impossible. But she was determined to tear herself away from the mental cage, the trap, the horrifying tunnel of social media, and try and reinstate her analogue life—analogue being no texts, but letter writing.
Already, she had thrown her phone into the river, and she couldn’t remember the emojis—how they really were. She vowed never to use it again, nor send another text in her whole life.
Even Facebook was a bit off-limits, but not completely. After all, she had to use her computer for her work, as a drawing teacher.
She had been on Facebook about ten years previously, to look for Carlos, and she had found him thin and wan, posing with a dog, a very thin dog. She had asked him: ‘Are you married?’
But he had never replied. Poor Carlos.
‘Of course, I mustn’t give him the wrong message. He was so desperately sad and crying his eyes out when he left at last for
“He was fancy, longwinded, and pretentious, but also loving, if rather dim. But he loved her, and that was what counted.”
Brazil for the last time. I will keep it upbeat and joky.’
‘No no no,’ she cried out loud, ‘I shall not descend to Facebook -I’ve got his address somewhere, I know I have, under the sink. I shall stick to the analogue, stick to my complete and utter rejection of the digital nightmare.’
But the thought of shovelling through the mess under the sink was all too much.
And so she sent a message to Federico on Facebook or ‘Face’ as it’s known in some countries in South America, and waited: it said, ‘Hello Carlos, how are you?’ It was tiresome waiting for an answer and it reminded her of her obsessional ding-dong, boing boing relationship with social media.
‘No!’ she cried, jumping up, ‘I will find the address book! Enough of the wretched digital world, Facebook is the veritable pits of hell, I refuse to be chained to a machine like some digital slave!’
It was a Herculean task, sifting through
old correspondence from twenty years back, a huge heap, hidden under the sink, the only place available, the flat was desperately small; but after three hours, the old address book was found, the letters all stuffed back in place, any old how, jammed in, time was of the essence, and the envelope, at least, written, addressed to Federico. No emojis there. That would be childish.
But literally hundreds of message had come through- from Federico Carlos Rodrigos dos Santos Almeida, on Facebook.
“She was determined to tear herself away from the mental cage, the trap, the horrifying tunnel of social media, and try and reinstate her analogue life.”
‘Hello there, Victoria!’ the message cried, from a middle aged man with flowing curly virile locks, a tiny bit bald, yes it was still him, and he had aged, but not much, ‘I forget to check my Facebook messages—I got locked out of my account just after you sent your last one fifteen years ago! But last week, Albert help me get back in, so I answer your questions, fifteen years after!’ Several jolly laughing emojis, Facebook style. ‘You ask me, am I married? Yes, of course, I am married, yes, six children, and a gorgeous wife, Francesca, and I am the manager of a supermarket, part of the global GLOBO brand.’
There were sickening photos of all his jolly children, shiny and perfect, and the wonderfully Brazilian wife, with large, popping breasts, a manicure, and shininess, and a glistening swimming pool party to boot. And there was Albert, throwing himself in.
‘Victoria, do you remember Albert? He’s in the right hand side, throw himself in the pool with a drink in the hand!’ shouted the next message. ‘Remember he come to London to washing up in the same restaurant as me?’
Albert, Carlos’s best mate and cousin, quite a lot less dim than him.
‘Of course, I remember Albert,’ thought Victoria, feeling very ungracious. ‘He had a brain.’
‘But what about you? Are you still teaching drawing? What is your life?’ was the next message.
Victoria could now see that sending a real letter to Carlos was pointless, and in fact, rather sad.
His jolly messages came thick and fast:
‘Well, I was just think about the time we spilt red wine all over my mother’s whit sofa, and do you remember my mother’s flip flops? You weared them every day— even in my brother’s wedding—until they fell to pieces- we still laugh about it and think about you every day. Even my wife, Francesca!’
‘Well, that’s a lie,’ cried Victoria, slamming her computer shut and standing up in indignation. ‘Of course they don’t
think about me every day!’
After a good cry in the bath, Victoria pulled herself together: she would take action, she had an idea—it had come to her in the bath.
‘Right, I will send him that pair of Havaianas for his mother.’
She hurried back to the airport, that very same afternoon—it was only a short train ride away—and stormed into the duty-free area. It was completely illegal, but necessary, given her emotional turmoil. She was able to do this, as she had a friend who worked at Gatwick, who could do such dreadful things as let unauthorized members of the public into the airport. He had said to her: ‘Dear Victoria, if you lose your dear trolley ever again,’ (and here he smiled slightly, sweetly) ‘just call me up, and I’ll let you search in the duty-free area, so you don’t need to go through lost property. If I’m on duty, of course.’ She had met him when Trolley had gone missing at Gatwick Airport. So she had called Tony on her landline—and she’d copied most of her most important friends’ numbers down before throwing her phone in the Thames.
‘Come on over, we’ll get you to the Havaianas stand. Bella is a friend of mine, ’ he had replied.
She acquired the Rio flip-flops, at a discount, from Bella, and headed home again.
‘Mission accomplished,’ she cried out loud, once back in her flat. ‘I’ll send them to Carlos, with a letter, of course, to say
thank you multiple times to his mother and I might even draw a humorous emoji the laugh out loud one, with the tears. It’s almost humorous, sending these fifteen years later. The letter’ll show I have a sense of humour, no hard feelings. Open, expansive, generous, even witty.’
But there was a snag: the more she looked at the gorgeous flip flops, the more she actually needed them herself. They were, after all, turquoise and had the magical silver words on them. She had a lot of hoarding—she even called it that herself—it was just part of who she was, and this would be her latest addition. It would be a sort of marker of her ‘Carlos episodes’, past and present.
She decided to hang them on the wall, with a frame around them, next to the dancing shoes that stood for Ches, and the juggler’s fork that stood for Andy. For a little while at least, until it got too painful. Because it rankled slightly that he had had such luck on the marital front, as she called it. And then she would send them off, without further ado.
Three poems
Cole Henry Forster
Can you Capitalize?
We have reached a stalemate, you and I; my Guelphs a perfect match for your Ghibellines, our calendar an equal battlefield of days you won and days I won, red marker squeaking its bugle call across each square to reach distasteful conclusions about where we were and what we did, and pleading, just me now, pleading with the Tiber to hurry, great blond licorice king squeezing the island squeezing the history and the she-wolf misses her sons.
Rome, August 16, 2018
Borri Books, all those English classics elevated to the second floor the manager’s decision, a numb rationality: trading accessibility for status,
and the transgressive tiredness of the station–rheumatic Termini dying Termini. A reckoning at 7a.m. and the coffee could not possibly be smaller.
Rome, October 3, 2023
Work for the pharmacists
Slap me so many times, that the geologists call it erosion, taking a picture together to dispel future myths. The lie that we never exchanged love freely in the family apartment in Piazza Istria, your Etruscan fever bubbling over, bawling for antipyretics, and me stumbling across city blocks to find the green cross of the apothecary.
Rome, October 21, 2023
The poem
Emma Prunty
When I collect the girls from doposcuola, we take our time walking to the car. It’s the usual circular chatter: “where’s our snack?... no I don’t want to go to the playground...do we have to have chicken for dinner?... the teacher says we need special pencils for tomorrow... I have a sore foot”.
Halfway across the dusty carpark, Jenny takes her school bag and pulls out a book.She opens it to the poem the class have been told to learn by heart for Friday. In Italian a poem is called, rather magnificently, una filastrocca. And she starts to read it out, to her sister, and mother, and anyone who might be passing by. She says it out loud to the air.
She reads very slowly as she’s still working through all the syllables (or syllabobs, as she still calls them). These Italian teachers go on a lot about the sillabi, which are, after all, the building blocks of their very musical language.
As she reads the poem, she never slows and never stops. Molly and I are already at the car but Jenny hasn’t moved; she’s still halfway to the car, eyes stuck to the combinations of letters, not even thinking of giving up on a word. She loves the sound of the rhyme that will come out of her mouth, the satisfaction of putting the sounds together and how juicy they feel.
Colori... cuori. Letizia... amicizia.
This is a short moment in her life—where she is learning to relish making the words her own and taking her time doing it. And what lovely words these are. Lucky girl.
Soon she’ll be reading more quickly, in both English and Italian, stopping sometimes in frustration at not sounding things correctly or not understanding words. And at other moments she’ll still have that excitement of figuring out the connection between the letters and the sounds she already knows. Or just knowing, instinctively, that la mela (feminine) is the apple but il melo (masculine) is the apple tree.
And she’ll have the pleasure of correcting me and my college-level Italian, finding a word I don’t know or - even better - that I pronounce incorrectly.
And not long after that she’ll discover the big-girl pleasure of disappearing into the book with her eyes and not with her ears.
And that’s where we’ll get left behind.
Napoleon the Annoying adult Son (and other excerPts)
Commentary and Translation by
Monica Sharp
The following translations are excerpted from Mémoires de la Duchesse d’Abrantès: Souvenirs historiques sur Napoléon by Laure Saint-Martin-Permon (Nelson Éditeurs, Paris: 1831-1835).
La Duchesse d’Abrantés lived from 1784 to 1838. “After 1815 she spent most of her time in Rome amidst artistic society, which she enlivened with her sprighly converse, a monarchist on her return to Paris during the Restoration, she compuled her spirited byt somewhat spiteful Memoris with the encouragement and supervision of Balzac, her lover since 1828.
A Note from the Translator
Years ago, and well before the recent Ridley Scott juggernaut, I came across these volumes on the bookshelf on the landing of the stairs in the historic palazzo in Florence where they were shelved with a modest collection of books about religion, geography, history, and more, in Italian, French, German, and Latin. This vestigial pre-war library remained a different epoch, when the children who lived in the building did not attend school but rather were attended by a detachment of tutors and governesses who oversaw their formative education.
As a younger writer and language student I became enamored of the Flaubert translations by the writer Lydia Davis. They always spoke to me, as cultural detritus, found poetry, a zuihitsu fragment. Intrigued by these French memoirs, I began to read and was immediately entranced by the accounts. Napoléon, the boy, the man. An eyewitness account by a close family friend. After creating pages of translated text, I realized that it already exists online - the edition is so far out of
copyright. But for me, the online translation lacks the warmth of this one, borne of one chilly winter in Florence when Napoléon and his circle kept me company, never far from my imagination. The section titles are mine alone:
Napoléon Takes his Sister’s Punishment
My Mother’s Luxurious Life
Napoléon the Annoying Adult Son
The Quarrel between Napoléon and Madame Permon
of the delicate nuances that presaged the extraordinary man he would become. But that he might become the giant that would one day leave this place? No, that was not clear.
Madame Bonaparte brought to France with her a lady’s maid, as one so often found in our provinces. This woman - Saveria - was eager to learn about the family that brought her here, and whom she knew inside and out. Each member of the family occupied their own imaginary throne. She recounted many anecdotes to me and I remained close to her until I went to Pont-sur-Seine to complete my service.
I’ve chosen these pieces for their charm and illustration, the mise en scène of late-eighteenth century Corsica and France, the intimate tone and their glimpses into the life of Napoléon, as well as the lives of his family and friends.
Napoléon Takes his Sister’s Punishment
My mother and my uncles assured me repeatedly that in his childhood Napoléon displayed none of the singular traits that were later revealed in him. He behaved well and was a good child until the moment that he came to France. He was a good and handsome boy. He was just like all other children.
Even so, in the character of Napoléon the child there may have existed some
I remarked once to Saveria that she loved the children of some families more than others. I demanded that she explain why. As I do not now know whether or not she is still alive, I do not wish to expose her at her age, or to see her well-being compromised by my indiscretion, since she may still rely on people who would remember if her preference or exclusion had hurt them. What I can say is that she adored the emperor and [his brother] Lucien.
One day she was recounting stories from the emperor’s childhood - he lived in Corsica until he was nine - and one story in particular recounted a time he became frustrated. Saveria told me something that my mother had sworn to me: that Napoléon, even under the worst of circumstances, almost never complained. In Corsica, children of every class were beaten. Beating one’s wife there, like any-
where, is one type of roughness, but beating one’s child is the simplest of matters. Until it was finally Napoléon’s turn to be beaten, pain might have squeezed a tear from his eye, but it never lasted long, and even if he wasn’t wrong, one needn’t have said even a word to obtain his forgiveness. Here is an anecdote to that point that I have from the man himself; he recounted it to me once as an example of moderation.
Napoléon one summer was accused by one of his sisters of having eaten an enormous basket of raisins, figs, and sweet lemons: This fruit had all come from the garden of their uncle the priest. But one
must have lived within the Bonaparte family to understand the magnitude of the transgression of having eaten the fruit from the orchard of their uncle the priest. It was far worse a crime than having eaten the raisins and figs of an ordinary person.
There was a great interrogation, and because Napoléon denied it, he was believed to be guilty. He was told to ask for forgiveness, and that if he were to do so, he would be forgiven. He repeated that he was innocent but no one believed him. His poor bare ass bore the brunt of many repeated blows. I remember he told us that his mother was in that moment visit-
Published 1831-1835
ing Monsieur de Marbeuf or some other friend. The result of his obstinance was to spend three whole days eating only crusts of bread with some broccio cheese, a humble variety much loved in Corsica. He didn’t even cry. He was sad but did not brood.
Finally, on the fourth day, a little friend of his sister Marianne returned to the priest’s orchard. After she learned what had happened to Napoléon, she went to confess, explaining that it had been she and Marianne who had emptied the basket of all the figs and raisins. Now it was Marianne’s turn to be punished. Everyone asked Napoléon why he hadn’t betrayed his sister. He answered that he did not know that she was the guilty one and that he still doubted it, but that had it not been for Marianne’s friend who had made a conscious decision to not dive into a sea of lies, he would have said nothing. This was truly incredible. He couldn’t have been more than seven at the time.
Napoléon, Saveria told me, had never been a beautiful child, as was his brother Joseph. His head was always too big for his body - a common flaw in the Bonaparte family. Normally this type of deformity gives to its owner the idea of being much stronger than anyone else. Here, though, it seemed justified and moreover, one might have concluded there existed no advantage of those with big heads nor an advantage enjoyed by those with small heads. Who had a smaller head than Voltaire? I have an army of nephews and nieces with the heads of Goliath on the
bodies of pygmies, and nothing further came of it than just a big head on a small body.
The charms of Napoléon became evident as a young man, in his looks and especially the sweet expression that he knew how to time to the perfect courteous moment. In truth, his temper was alarming and, even if I were boy-crazy in my day, I never found him attractive, even when he was angry and inflamed. His smile was equally captivating, and that disdainful twitch of his mouth would make your knees weak. But for all that, for the big head that bore the crowns of the world, the hands of which the most coquettish of women would be proud, and whose soft white skin covered muscles of steel, bone, and diamonds - all that was indiscernible in the child, and barely evident in the adolescent Napoléon. Saveria told me, in truth, that Napoléon, out of all of Laetitia’s children, was the last one whom she might have suspected to come into an unexpected fortune.
My Mother’s Luxurious Life
My mother [Madame Permon] was raised very humbly in Corsica, completely unaware of the existence of the luxurious items that then formed a lady’s toilette. She remained more or less in a state of delirium after her arrival in France. Our father was deeply in love with her and showered her with sweetness and charm, surrounding her with everything
that might flatter her tastes. He took so much joy in spoiling her with his surprises and it pleased him to pile them on. My mother therefore lived in a state of continuous enchantment, and my father saved her from the dreary boredom of having to keep house. He took care of everything, asking only that she be happy and amuse herself. Until she arrived in France, her ignorance of French language and customs rendered her useless for anything she might have been able to do as the lady of the house. Later on that became another matter.
Given that my father managed all the business of the family and wanted to protect his fortune, he talked to her about money as a matter of confidence. My mother took his confidence for what it was but she understood nothing. Upon his death, she felt certain that my sister’s dowry was paid in full and that an honorable fortune remained in our hands, but since she herself had brought no dowry into the marriage, she did not count at all when my father’s inheritance was apportioned to his survivors.
“Children,” she would say to us, “your father married me when I was penniless. I owe him everything. So everything is yours. Only,” she would add with her typically charming smile as she warmly embraced us, “you will give me a place at your hearth, won’t you?”
This was easier said than done. The creditors who deserted us had disappeared. My mother would not have been provid-
ed for had she not kept a huge hoard of items that would be unidentifiable now but for the catalog of knickknacks that today we would call collector’s items. For, having moved to France at the end of the reign of Louis XV, my mother began a new life in the bosom of luxury which became for her needs of a second nature. The French were never more creative than in that time. Never had every type of pleasure been so multiplied in order to surround a woman with a bespoke elegance. We believed we had thoroughly won this game but we understood nothing. A woman who had forty thousand pounds a year fifty years ago lived better than a woman today who has two hundred thousand pounds a year. I couldn’t even tell you everything she had. There were so many silly little things that not only do we still miss, but whose purpose itself is lost, and which have never been replaced.
A lady’s respectable service consisted not only of at least two chambermaids but also a valet taking care of duties within the house. A salle de bain was de rigueur because an elegant woman could not go more than two days without bathing. And also abundant perfumes, embroidery, the finest cloth, and the most expensive lace in each season were at her dressing-table, in golden baskets scented with Spanish leather, or peau d’Espagne, to hold everything she needed as might benefit a woman of taste. Everyone paid attention to her presentation.
The furnishings were an equally im-
portant and curated aspect for anyone with an eye to a woman’s expenses. The rooms were fresh, sweetly perfumed with flowers in summer, and welcoming and cozy in winter. As soon as the cold arrived, the Aubusson rugs were rolled out and put down, many inches thick. A lady returning to her bedroom to sleep for the night would have found it well-heated by a warm fire in a vast hearth, with long drapes falling over double windows, and the bed surrounded by generous and thick covers was a refuge where she might prolong her evening without risk of the following day’s light interrupting her rest.
Other objects were needed for the everyday. Silver, porcelain, linens, all just as lovely and made for people who understood the importance of quality. Perhaps they are [now considered] less stylish, without a doubt, but what a difference! Moreover, my opinion is constantly confirmed that everything from the last century is coming back into style, to the point of replacing soon, I hope, all the faux Greek and Roman décor, which is fine for all those people who live under the wide blue skies over Messina or Rome but which don’t go with our Parisian gray skies and cold winds that blow nine months a year. A bit of tissue paper, hung on an ugly rod covered in gilt paper? Useless. This only gives the illusion that one is behind curtains. The same with these thin rugs and walls only six inches thick that protect you from neither summer heat or winter cold. I can’t stand a cheap dressing room and cheap furnishings. Let
us hope that customs will soon change, and return the forms of good taste to all those people with bad taste. We are on the right track. It is simply a matter of continuing on.
Napoléon the Annoying Adult Son
When the Greeks were forced to abandon Paomia and to flee the persecutions of the Corsicans in revolt, they established themselves momentarily in the fortified villages that were loyal to the Republic of Gênes, or Genoa. But later, to compensate and secure the Greeks against their immense losses, Cargese was given to them to form a new township and some families maintained a house in Ajaccio. My mother thus divided her time between Ajaccio and Cargese. It was there that she became a close friend of Signora Laetitia Ramolino, the mother of Napoléon. They were the same age and both ravishingly beautiful. However, they were beautiful in different ways, and so between them there existed no jealousy whatsoever.
Madame Laetitia Bonaparte was gracious, pretty, and charming, but without any filial conceit, I can say here that I have never met another woman in this world whom I remember being as beautiful or as pretty as my own mother who, at fourteen, was the best, the most thoughtful, the sweetest young woman in all the
colony, and with the sole exception of Laetitia Ramolino, one could have said on the whole island of Corsica. Laetitia Ramolino was of course a beautiful person. Those who met her when she was older found her somewhat harsh but back then she wasn’t like that. The slightly severe expression that she habitually wore came, on the other hand, from fear. She was a person accustomed to being well above all others in her position, in both good times and bad. Her son finally brought her a tardy justice. He himself brought her to error, and if he did make amends later, the impression had already been made.
We know that, before entering into negotiations with the Republic of Gênes, France sent troops to bring the Corsicans to heel. Among the French who formed the administration, it is worth noting the presence of one young man of about twenty with an agreeable flair, whose violin playing was to die for, who had all the manners of a man of quality even though he was a mere commoner. But this man said to himself: “I will make my fortune and I will succeed.” No one could resist his wishes because his wishes yielded to no one. In addition, he carried an honorable fortune that he offered to the woman whom he would marry. He dared not choose the second-best pearl. He asked for and received my mother’s hand. This man was my father, Monsieur de Permon.
My parents left Corsica and came to France for my father’s business. A few years later he received a commission for
an important position in the Army in America and he left, taking my brother, who was then just eight. My mother returned to Corsica with all her young children to be closer to my grandmother, and to wait there for the return of my father.
I hadn’t been born yet. After my father left for America, my mother resolved to remain in Corsica for as long as my father was away. It was then that she saw baby Napoléon, still in his mother’s arms, playing with an older sister whom we later lost in the most disastrous manner.
Napoléon had an incredible memory and often, during his idle years in Paris after having dined with our family, he would sit in front of the fire, cross his arms over his chest, legs stretched out toward the hearth, and say, “Signora Panoria, let’s talk about Corsica; let’s talk about my mother, Signora Laetitia.”
He always called his mother that, but only when he was with people who had known him for a long time, with those who knew that that name could only mean one thing for him.
“How is Signora Laetitia getting along?” he would ask me every time he saw me.
Or even, to his mother herself, “Well! Signora Laetitia, how are you doing these days? Aren’t you bored? You know what the matter is - you don’t invite people over often enough. Look at your children! They have remained where they were born. I gave you a beautiful residence, a lovely piece of property, a million pounds a year to play with: and you live the unimaginative life of a middle-class woman
on Rue St-Denis. You really ought to invite people over, and then invite more, for example, the Clary family, and the Clermont family, the ones from …”
The Quarrel between Napoléon and Madame Permon
memory of it.
Bonaparte told my mother that he wished to unite our two families in marriage.
“I mean,” he added, “that of my sister Paulette and your elder son Permon.”
My [widowed] mother’s mourning was profound. The custom of the day demanded complete solitude, which made each day even more difficult, given her delicate health. Finally Monsieur Duchannois told her that, given the circumstances in which she found herself, custom might indeed demand that she no longer leave the house, but that she needed to do so in the name of distraction. As a result, he recommended that she rent a box for some performances and discreetly attend to listen to quality music from the corner of her box, surrounded by friends, well cared for, and at least for a few hours her soul would find rest and permit her to forget her grief. My mother therefore rented a box at Feydeau and attended for an hour or two every evening. Bonaparte never missed a chance to come. He didn’t like French music and honestly, the voices of Madame Scio and that bigmouth Gaveau gave him no pleasure.
Bonaparte once had a very strange conversation with my mother - so strange that I myself can’t help but smile at the
We believed that my brother had some fortune, not knowing yet that we had received nothing upon the death of my father. Napoléon continued, “My sister has nothing, but I am well-placed to obtain handsomely for my family, and I can get a good position for her husband. Such an alliance would please me enormously. My mother is a family friend. So! Say yes, and the entire affair will be arranged.”
My mother remained noncommittal, saying that my brother was very much the master of his own destiny, over which she had absolutely no influence at all, and which relied solely on him.
Bonaparte noted that my brother was such a remarkable young man that, even though he was only twenty-five, he possessed a maturity and skill that would soon make him employable. Up until this point, everything that General Napoléon had said was normal and agreeable, addressing the issue of the marriage of a young girl of sixteen with a young man of twenty-five. Again, we thought at the time that my brother was set to receive two thousand pounds a year. He was handsome, he combed his hair just like Vernet, where he had been a student, he played the harp far better than his teacher Krompholz, he spoke English, Italian,
and Greek as well as French, he wrote poetry like an angel, and with his aptitude for work, he displayed a skill at conducting affairs that distinguished him from all who had served with him in the army in the Midi of France. Such was the man that Bonaparte demanded for his ravishing sister, and, true, she was a good girl, but his praise for her ended there. One might add to everything that I have said here about my brother that he was the best of all us children, and a remarkable man in acquitting his duties as a member of society and, among all his friends, as both a brother and as a family man.
One might accuse me of writing too much from my heart and paying him too great an homage. Non. I am immune to charm and keep my own counsel. I speak of my brother only in terms of the strictest truth. For his many friends, parents, and relations, he was a sort of second coming. They agree with me, and respond to the questions of those who have not met my brother wishing to know if my praise is true. They would have all praised my brother too, and unceasingly, but for the foolish and ridiculous vanity that so often prevents us from saying, “Here is the man to whom I owe everything.”
Such was my brother that, since Bonaparte was speaking to my mother on the subject of uniting his sister Mademoiselle Pauline Bonaparte, known to her family and all her friends as Pretty Pauline, with my brother, he then suggested that we double down on the alliance by marrying me to either Louis or Jerome, his
own brothers.
“Jerome is younger than Laurette!” my mother said, laughing. “In truth, my dear Napoléon, you’re quite the priest todayyou’ll unite the whole world in marriage, even children!”
Bonaparte was laughing too - but he seemed embarrassed. He swore that when he woke up that morning, a breeze of marriage had wafted through his window. To prove it, he added, kissing my mother’s hand, he had decided to begin the union between the two families with a marriage between him and her, as soon as the demands of her mourning would permit that she do so.
My mother so often recounted this incredible scene that I know it as though I myself had been the protagonist. She looked at Bonaparte for a few seconds in astonishment and surprise, then began to laugh with such abandon that we all heard her in the adjoining room.
At first Bonaparte was shocked at the manner in which his proposal was received, a proposal that seemed so natural to him. My mother, when she realized this, hastened to explain herself, and to tell him that it was she, in fact, who was playing a perfectly ridiculous role, at least to her eyes.
“My dear Napoléon,” she told him, as soon as she had finished laughing, “let’s be serious. Do you even know how old I am? I don’t think so! You have no idea. I won’t tell you, because I’m vain. I will only
tell you that I am old enough not only to be your mother, but also the mother of your older brother Joseph. Let us leave this subject. It disturbs me, coming from you.”
Bonaparte repeated that he was very serious, from his point of view, and that the age of the woman whom he would marry mattered to him but little, if she, like my mother, looked barely thirty. He said he’d thought very seriously about what he had just told her. And then, incredibly, he added:
“I want to marry. I would like a woman who is charming, good, and sweet, with a bit of fashion about her. My Parisian friends want this marriage. My old friends want this marriage. As for me, I want to marry, and my proposal to you comes with the greatest of support. Think about it.”
My mother broke off the conversation still laughing, telling him that his thoughts were all valid, and moreover, as far as my brother was concerned, that she would speak with him and return with his response on the following Tuesday (this was on Saturday). She shook Napoléon’s hand, repeating while still chuckling that even her vain pretensions did not go so far as to presume to conquer the heart of a twenty-six year old man and that she hoped that their friendship would not be troubled by this trifling matter.
“At least think about it!” Bonaparte beseeched her.
“Certainly - I’ll think about it,” my mother responded, laughing harder than ever.
I was too young to have been a part of this conversation at the time that it took place. It wasn’t until the day of my own wedding that my mother told me the story I have related here. My brother noted that, had the desired effect of his capricious proposal actually occurred, Napoléon would have never been what he became.
Interview with Featured Artist
Tatiana Stadnichenko
by Luca Misuri of Studio 124
Italiano
Cortile di Palazzo Pucci nel cuore di Firenze, ad un passo dall’ormai satura Galleria dell’Accademia. Mi aggiro tra le colonne in pietra serena in cerca di preziosi dettagli ma come al solito non c’è tempo. Scorgo la “vetrina” dello spazio espositivo della LdM (Lorenzo dei Medici), una delle tante università Americane di stanza a Firenze. Alcuni studenti mi passano accanto veloci. Scorgo di sfuggita delle serigrafie all’interno dello spazio espositivo al piano terra del Palazzo gestito dalla LdM. Forme di foglie, erbe, fiori. Scoprirò a breve che si tratta dello “spirito” delle piante curative impresso su carta a mo di serigrafia. Ci sono foglie appese al soffitto basso, un faretto proietta la loro ombra sul muro (che sia una idea platonica?). Conosco ben poco, meglio non dire niente di compromettente. Ho appuntamento con Tatiana Stadnichenko. L’artista russa invitata da Open Doors a confrontarsi con il sottoscritto, quello dello Studio 124 (riguardatevi nel caso l’intervista di Silvia Serenari nel quinto numero).
Ci vediamo al Caffè Ricasoli, uno degli angoli più trafficati dal turismo di massa, complice quel blocco di Marmo che tanto sembra appassionare le masse o per lo meno le smuove. Il David è a qualche centinaio di metri, noi ci beviamo il caffè e ci incamminiamo dalla parte opposta. Rieccoci nel cortile manierista. Lei, senza troppi giri di parole, appena varcata la soglia dello spazio espositivo e salutato le ragazze al welcome desk, mi spara la frase più adatta per colpirmi al cuore (senza saperlo). “Siccome il mondo sta crollando…”
English
In the courtyard of Palazzo Pucci in the heart of Florence, one step away from the now saturated Accademia Gallery, I wander among the pietra serena columns in search of precious details but as usual there is no time. I see the window of the exhibition space of the Istituto Lorenzo dei Medici, one of the many American universities located in Florence. Some students rush past me as I glimpse some silk-screen prints inside the exhibition space on the ground floor. Shapes of leaves, herbs, flowers. I will soon discover that it is the “spirit” of healing plants imprinted on paper as a silk-screen. There are leaves hanging from the low ceiling, a spotlight projects their shadow on the wall (is this a platonic idea?). I know very little, it’s better not to say anything compromising. I have an appointment with Tatiana Stadnichenko, the Russian artist invited by Open Doors to discuss her work with me.
We meet nearby at Caffè Ricasoli, one of the busiest corners for mass tourism, thanks to that block of Marble that so fascinates the masses... or at least mobilizes them. With the David a few hundred meters away, we have a quick coffee and set off in the opposite direction to return to the mannerist courtyard in Palazzo Pucci. As soon as we corss the threshold and Tatiana has greeted the girls at the welcome desk, she pronounces a phrase that immediately hits me: “Since the world is crumbling...”
Italiano
Continua Tatiana: “…dobbiamo tornare alle radici. Le piante sono curative, nutrienti, purificatrici. Questo è un mondo che ora più che mai rasenta l’abisso della sempre più probabile apocalisse. Durante il Covid ho sviluppato questa idea. Cosa saremmo in grado di fare senza gli strumenti tecnologici che costantemente supportano le nostre necessità?“
La prima stanza allestita da Tatiana presenta fogli serigrafati con tecnica a gel raffiguranti le silhouettes di foglie e fiori, l’effetto è di osservare i negativi delle foto di un compendio di Botanica, poi Tatiana interviene in mio aiuto…
Tatiana: “Dobbiamo tornare ai nostri pensieri originari. Domandarci “chi siamo ? Quali sono le nostre origini? Che cosa sappiamo fare ancora oggi a livello pratico? Che cosa succederebbe se in caso di necessità dovessimo fare ricorso a queste risorse?”
“Siamo in grado di curarci da soli? Saremmo in grado di sopravvivere grazie a questi elementi naturali che ci circondano ma di cui abbiamo dimenticato il prezioso apporto curativo e nutritivo? Alcune piante hanno la capacità placare l’agitazione costante che pervade le nostre menti. È un altro modo per rallentare le nostre vite frenetiche.”
Luca: “Evoluzione tecnologica e la conseguente dipendenza da essa è certamente la causa principale dell’oblio di tecniche del passato un tempo fondamentali alla sopravvivenza.
“Siamo in grado di curarci da soli? Saremmo in grado di sopravvivere grazie a questi elementi naturali che ci circondano ma di cui abbiamo dimenticato il prezioso apporto curativo e nutritivo?”
“Sicuramente l’altro elemento di disturbo per una vita equilibrata è dato dalla costante frenesia che quotidianamente ci mette di fronte all’impossibilità di prendere decisioni ponderate. Ne conseguono ansie e nevrosi non di certo nuove in questa società moderna. Ma come poter provare a reagire a tutto questo ? Dire risolvere suonerebbe eccessivamente ottimista. Quale percorso risolutivo proponi?”
Tatiana: “Dobbiamo calmare questo stato di agitazione globale. Alleviare i nostri mali. Rallentare i nostri ritmi. Prendersi cura di un altro e di se stessi è il più grande e complesso atto di amore attuabile nella quotidianità, un atto catartico che incoraggia a comunicare attraverso le vibrazioni più sottili dell’anima.
English
Tatiana: “Given that the world is falling apart, we have to go back to the roots. Plants are healing, nourishing, purifying. This is a world that now more than ever borders on the abyss of the increasingly probable apocalypse. During Covid I developed this idea. What would we be able to do without the technological tools that constantly support our needs?”
The first room set up by Tatiana features sheets screen-printed with a gel technique depicting the silhouettes of leaves and flowers. The effect is to observe the negatives of the photos of a compendium of Botany. Tatiana helps me understand...
Tatiana: “We must return to our original thoughts. Ask ourselves “who are we? What are our origins? What do we still know how to do on a practical level today? What would happen if we had to resort to these resources in case of need?
“Can we cure ourselves? Would we be able to survive thanks to the natural elements that surround us but whose precious healing and nutritional contribution we have forgotten?
“Can we cure ourselves? Would we be able to survive thanks to these natural elements that surround us but whose precious healing and nutritional contribution we have forgotten? Some plants have the ability to calm the constant agitation that pervades our minds. It’s another way to slow down our busy lives.”
Luca: “ Technological evolution and our consequential dependence on it is certainly the main cause of the loss of past techniques that were once fundamental to survival.
“Surely the other element that prevents us from having a balanced life is the constant frenzy of modern life that makes thoughtful decision-making nearly impossible. This results in anxieties and neuroses that are certainly not new in this modern society. But how can we try to react to all this? To say “solve” would sound overly optimistic. What solution or path do you propose?”
Tatiana: “We need to calm this state of global unrest. Alleviate our pains. Slow down our pace. Taking care of another person and oneself is the greatest and most complex act of love that can be accomplished in everyday life. It’s a cathartic act that encourages communication through the subtlest vibrations of the soul.
Italiano
“Vengo da Tara, vicino ad Omsk, città della Siberia della grandezza di Pistoia, circondata da boschi, prati, natura e quindi piante, quelle che ho raccolto con mia madre ed ho utilizzato per queste stampe a gel. Tirando il gel sulla superficie del foglio riesco a trasferirvi lo spirito curativo della pianta. Questo non è un semplice elenco di piante curative. Il gesto artistico trasforma il tutto in uno strumento per curare i nostri problemi attuali. Io sono un’artista, tutto questo si tratta di una metafora della. “somministrazione visuale” di queste piante curative.”
Luca: “Possiamo considerarla come una medicina naturale somministrata visualmente. Un messaggio subliminale nobile. Questa idea nasce in Siberia ma prosegue in Toscana dove vivi. Quanto questo cambiamento di luogo ha influenzato la tua ricerca artistica?”
Tatiana: “Il tema della mia personale migrazione alla scoperta di paesi e culture diverse è parte integrante della mia ricerca artistica. L’adattamento ad un nuovo posto viene da me spesso analizzato attraverso video istallazioni in cui il costante flusso di immagini (che creo disegnando su fogli o attraverso l’uso del pad e digitalizzando il tutto) provenienti dal mio vissuto in svariati paesi quali Russia, Norvegia, Italia per citartene alcuni, viene proiettato su teli dalla superficie irregolare o vere e proprie architetture immobili (spesso create con la carta o tessuto) la cui superficie variegata rende lo scorrere delle immagini ben più dinamico.”
Luca: “Aggiungerei se mi permetti, in maniera meno banale di un monitor o una superficie piatta. La tua idea di dinamismo viene dal connubio tra superficie fisica immobile (ma irregolare e non piatta come uno schermo) sulla quale viene proiettata l’immagine dinamica.”
Tatiana: “E’ il risultato dei miei anni di studio culminati col periodo dell’MFA di Bergen (Academy of Art and Design). Ho incontrato docenti ed artisti che hanno influenzato le mie ricerche stilistiche. Il professor Kjersti Sundland è stato il mio mentore durante gli studi per il master a Bergen. Prezioso anche l’apporto di Peter Geschwind del Royal art Academy di Stoccolma e Brandon LaBelle. La ricerca della connessione tra il flusso di immagini e quello sonoro sta alla base della mia espressione artistica.
“Prendersi cura di un altro e di se stessi è il più grande e complesso atto di amore attuabile nella quotidianità, un atto catartico che incoraggia a comunicare attraverso le vibrazioni più sottili dell’anima.”
English
“I come from Tara near Omsk, a city in Siberia the size of Pistoia that’s surrounded by woods, meadows, nature and therefore plants, including the ones I collected with my mother and used for these gel prints. By pulling the gel onto the surface of the sheet I can transfer the healing spirit of the plant to it. This is not a simple list of healing plants. The artistic gesture transforms everything into a tool to cure our current problems. I am an artist, this is all a metaphor for “visual administration” of these healing plants.”
Luca: “We can consider it as a natural medicine administered visually. A noble subliminal message. This idea was born in Siberia but continues in Tuscany where you live. How much has this change of location influenced your artistic research?”
Tatiana: “The theme of my personal migration to discover different countries and cultures is an integral part of my artistic research. I often analyze themes of adaptation to a new place through video installations showing the constant flow of images inspired from my experience in various countries such as Russia, Norway, Italy to name a few. I can create these by drawing on cloth or through the use of the digital drawings that are projected on sheets with irregular surfaces or even on the architecture of a space itself created with paper or fabric whose variegated surface makes the flow of images much more dynamic.
Luca: If I may, I would add that this is less banal than a monitor or a flat surface. Your idea of dynamism comes from the combination of an immobile physical surface (but irregular and not flat like a screen) on which the dynamic image is projected.
“ Taking care of another person and oneself is the greatest and most complex act of love that can be accomplished in everyday life. It’s a cathartic act that encourages communication through the subtlest vibrations of the soul.”
Tatiana: “It’s the result of my years of study culminating in the MFA period in Bergen (Academy of Art and Design). I met teachers and artists who influenced my stylistic research. Professor Kjersti Sundland was my mentor while studying for my master’s degree in Bergen. The contribution of Peter Geschwind of the Royal Art Academy of Stockholm and Brandon LaBelle was also invaluable. The search for the connection between the flow of images and the sound is the basis of my artistic expression.
Italiano
“Adesso ti faccio vedere la seconda sala espositiva.”
A questo punto entriamo nel secondo ambiente e mi trovo innanzi ad una vera e propria cascata ascendente di immagini disegnate dall’artista su di un rotolo digitale di circa 20m e proiettate su di un telo appeso al soffitto. Ha la forma del fianco di una montagna o di un fiume che da essa scende a valle. Sulla superficie del telo scorgo forme stampate di felci, quelle non si muovono, rimangono fisse inondate dal flusso di immagini. Tatiana mi racconta che secondo una leggenda Siberiana, quando si trova una felce fiorita nel periodo estivo questa genera dei poteri in colui che l’ha scoperta, permettendogli di comprendere perfino il linguaggio degli animali.
Penso che la ricerca multimediale, e quindi moderna di questa artista così originale si contrapponga alla sua ricerca essenziale, improntata sulla riscoperta di leggi ataviche insite nel nostro DNA. Mi sembra di intuire che il suo obbiettivo sia quello di risvegliare una parte della nostra essenza andata dimenticata a causa della progressiva accelerazione dei ritmi di vita così innaturale e così opposti alla nostra natura originaria. Ed infatti prima di continuare il nostro dialogo, mi fa accomodare in un ambiente architettonico unico. Mi chiede di rimanere per five minuti immerso in un costante flusso visuale e sonoro quale completamento del percorso espositivo.
“Moving City”
Silkscreen print, 2019
Tatiana Stadnichenko
English
Now I’ll show you the second exhibition room.
At this point we enter the second room and I find myself in front of an sascending cascade of drawn images on a digital roll of approximately 20m and projected onto a cloth hanging from the ceiling. It has the shape of the side of a mountain or a river that descends into a valley. On the surface I see printed shapes of ferns on which the flood of images flow in a continuous motion. Stadnichenko tells me that according to a Siberian legend, when a fern is found flowering in the summer, it generates powers in the person who discovered it, allowing them to even understand the language of animals.
Stadnichenko’s modern multimedia research is juxtaposed with the primary aim of her research based on the rediscovery of primordial laws inherent in our DNA. I sense that her objective is to reawaken a part of our essence that has been forgotten due to the progressive acceleration of the rhythms of life that are so opposed to our original nature. And in fact before continuing our dialogue, she has me sit in the room for five minutes in front of the cloth on which her images cascade, immersed in a constant visual and sound flow.
Italiano
L’immersione: La cascata guaratrice
Le campane tibetane sonorizzate da Tommaso Ferrini mi aiutano a distaccarmi dal flusso costante di pensieri connettendomi con più facilità all’opera visiva. L’ascesa di immagini proiettate di forme vegetali e linee digitalizzate collide col suono della caduta di acqua; anche se ad un certo punto, l’inversione del flusso visivo porta lo spettatore verso la caduta gravitazionale naturale dell’immagini associabili alle cascate che Tatiana ha potuto contemplare nei bellissimi paesaggi scandinavi. Lei la chiama la cascata guaritrice.
La sensazione è quella di avere una media nettamente inferiore di pensieri per la testa. Sento la necessità di sedermi a terra in contemplazione. Sto forse rallentando?
Poi la porta si apre, Tatiana rientra ed allora torno al cuore della questione.
Luca: “Se fai tutto questo vuol dire che pensi ci sia la possibilità di salvarci? Di guarire?”
Tatiana: “Potremmo mettere tutti questi politici confusi in una stanza come questa, inserire l’odore delle piante curative, i suoni, il flusso, visivo, chiuderli per un giorno intero dentro e sperare che uscendo si ristabilisca un equilibrio che possa essere trasmesso velocemente al resto del mondo.”
Luca: Aiutarli a ricordare? E non dimenticare di nuovo. Guarire con la bellezza. E magari educare a questo anche le nuove generazioni? I bambini?”
Tatiana: “Sicuramente! Anche se in questo momento dobbiamo pensare a quante persone stanno morendo a causa di queste decisioni sbagliate a loro volta causate da questo squilibrio. Non c’è tempo da perdere. Dobbiamo provare a fermare queste persone, queste decisioni che generano azioni scellerate. Poi educare le nuove generazioni completerebbe l’opera.”
Luca: “Una domanda da Italiano ad un’artista che ha un termine di paragone con altri paesi. Quale è la situazione economica di un artista che cerca di dedicarsi interamente ai propri obiettivi artistici?”
Tatiana: “Molto spesso mi chiedono come sopravvivere da artista nel 2024? Posso dire onestamente che è ancora piuttosto difficile. Il nostro mondo sta diventando sempre più materiale, veloce e superficiale, basato su infiniti contenuti diffusi dai vari
English
Immersion: The healing waterfall
The sound of Tibetan bells (set to music by Tommaso Ferrini) help me detach from the constant flow of thoughts and connect to the visual work in front of me. The rise of projected images of plant forms and digitalized lines collides with the sound of falling water; although at a certain point, the inversion of the visual flow leads the viewer toward the natural gravitational fall of images associated with waterfalls that Stadnichenko has been able to contemplate in her beautiful Scandinavian landscapes. She calls it the healing waterfall.
The sensation? I feel a significant reduction of thoughts in my head. I feel the need to sit on the ground in contemplation. Am I perhaps slowing down?
Then the door opens, Stadnichenko comes back in and then I return to the heart of the matter.
Luca: “If you have created all this, does it mean that you think there is a possibility of saving us? To heal?”
Tatiana: “We could put all these confused politicians in a room like this, insert the smell of healing plants, the sounds, the visual flow, lock them inside for a whole day and hope that on the way out a balance will be re-established that can be quickly transmitted to the rest of the world.”
Luca: “Help them remember? And not to forget again. Healing with beauty. And maybe educate the new generations about this too? The children?”
Tatiana: “Definitely! Although right now we have to think about how many people are dying due to these bad decisions which are in turn caused by this imbalance. There is no time to waste. We must try to stop these people, these decisions that generate wicked actions. Then educating the new generations would complete the work.“
Luca: “A question from an Italian to an artist who has the experience of of comparison with other countries. What is the economic situation of an artist who tries to dedicate him or herself entirely to artistic goals?”
Tatiana: “Very often I am asked how I survive as an artist in 2024! I can honestly say that it is still quite difficult. Our world is becoming increasingly material, fast and superficial, based on infinite content spread by various social channels, including the currently most used Instagram and Tik tok. An artist has the priority of going
Italiano
canali social, tra cui i più utilizzati attualmente Instagram e Tik tok. Un’artista, ha la priorità di andare in profondità e mettere in discussione i vari processi dell’essere umano. Serve tempo per maturare un concetto prima che possa essere diffuso e non è detto che il pubblico sia disposto ad investirci del tempo.”
Luca: “È normale che tutta questa frenesia si rifletta nei canali social e conseguentemente nello scrollare impulsivo (italianizzazione a me cara del verbo to scroll = scorrere su monitor touch screen) a velocità sempre maggiori su contenuti social tra cui immagini di opere inserite per esempio su Instagram. Ciò non permette l’adeguato, direi neanche minimo, assorbimento di uno dei possibili significati, concetti o, esagerando, sensazioni che tale opera è in grado di emanare, superficializzando drasticamente il tutto.
“I Social sono certamente utili a fini di marketing pubblicitario ma poi serve la fruizione fisica, diretta vissuta della stessa. Abbiamo forse ricreato tecnologicamente il concetto di riflesso delle idee platoniche ? Come poter allora sopravvivere economicamente artisticamente a questa era confusa?”
Tatiana: “Nel mio caso combino circa 5-6 lavori, tutti collegati al campo dell’arte: insegno diversi corsi come pittura classica, disegno, schizzi, pittura con pigmenti naturali, pittura al caffè e pittura al vino. Lavoro come grafico, come traduttore di corsi d’arte, amministratore in un’accademia d’arte privata e illustratore di libri. L’illustrazione di libri è uno dei miei processi preferiti. L’anno scorso sono stati pubblicati 6 libri per bambini e adulti con le mie illustrazioni. È molto soddisfacente tenere in mano il libro, stampato con le tue immagini.”
C’è tanta qualità artistica, perizia, ricerca e sostanza in queste creazioni, anche se ciò che maggiormente mi colpisce dopo queste parole è la sua nobiltà. Ecco che esce quel prendersi cura del prossimo quale atto supremo diAmore che ha fatto vibrare la mia anima e per questo mi sento di dire che prometto di fare tesoro di questa lezione di vita ancestrale e provare a diffondere il più possibile questo messaggio.
English
in depth and questioning the various processes of the human being. It takes time to mature a concept before it can be spread and it is not a given that the public is willing to invest time in it.”
Luca: “It is normal that all this frenzy is reflected in social channels and consequently in impulsive scrolling at ever greater speeds on social content including images of works of art inserted for example on Instagram. This does not allow for the adequate, I would say even minimal, absorption of one of the possible meanings, concepts or sensations that such a work is able to emanate. It drastically superficializes the whole absorption of art.
“Social media is certainly useful for advertising and marketing purposes but then the physical, direct lived fruition of a project is needed. Have we perhaps technologically recreated the concept of the reflection of Platonic ideas? How can we survive economically and artistically in this confused era?”
Tatiana: “In my case I combine about 5-6 jobs, all related to the field of art: I teach different courses such as classical painting, drawing, sketching, painting with natural pigments, coffee painting and wine painting. I work as a graphic designer, as a translator of art courses, administrator in a private art academy and book illustrator. Book illustration is one of my favorite processes. Last year 6 books for children and adults were published with my illustrations. It is very satisfying to hold the book in your hands, printed with your images.”
There is so much artistic quality, expertise, research and substance in these creations, even if what strikes me most after these words are their noble objectives. What matters is taking care of others as a supreme act of Love that made my soul vibrate. After seeing Stadnichenko’s work, I for one promise to treasure this ancestral life lesson and try to spread this message where I can.
Author Bios
Fiction
Nancy L Weber
Luck
Nancy L. Weber’s work can be found in Evergreen Review, Brooklyn Rail, Fringe Magazine and upcoming in Thieving Magpie. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Writers Foundry at St. Joseph’s University. Nancy is the Education Director at Teachers & Writers Collaborative, a literary non-profit based in NYC. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. From cover letter: “My mother was Italian, and in a previous life I was in the Italian food and wine business in NYC, so my connections to Italy are strong. I continue to travel to Italy and am working to spend 2 months a year a Florence in the future.”
K. Eadie
Havaianas
K. Eadie grew up as a child in Germany, Genova (Quinto) and Holland, but as an adult, tired of the rat race in London, moved to Italy in 1998, initially to teach English and paint:, but now instructs study abroad students in intercultural Communication, Drawing and Graphic Design, and writes whenever possible, under the trees, outside.
Visual Art
Tatiana Stadnichenko
Various pieces
Tatiana Stadnichenko Tatiana Stadnichenko was born in Russia, possesses her Master in Contemporary Arts in Norway and Sweden and is currently based in Italy. Thanks to the interconnection of two broad fields as classical and contemporary art, her practice is based on a combination of various graphic elements, drawings, collages and video projections. Tatiana works with mixed media from large size drawings, prints, sketches, to public-art sculptures and big scale video-installations. For the last few years her projects have been shown in Sweden, Norway, Canada, USA, Russia, Finland, Italy, Greece. https://www.behance.net/windin-cherry
Non Fiction
Mark Anthony Jarman
Twa Corbies
Mark Anthony Jarman’s Burn Man, his Selected Stories, was a 2024 Editors’ Choice with The New York Times. He edited Best Canadian Stories 2023, and is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, 19 Knives, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. Published in journals across Europe, Asia, and North America, he is a graduate of The Iowa Writers Workshop, edited fiction for The Fiddlehead for 25 years, and now co-edits a new illustrated magazine, Camel.
Giorgio Fontana
Our Need for Stig Dagerman
My name is Giorgio Fontana and I am an Italian writer and essayist. I have published nine books translated in eight languages. With the novel “Morte di un uomo felice” (“Death of a Happy Man”) I won the prestigious Campiello Award 2014, and my vast family saga “Prima di noi” (“Before Us”) was awarded in 2020 by the Bagutta and Mondello prizes among others, and will soon be adapted in an international tv series. I have contributed to many magazines such as “The European Review of Books”, “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, “Politico”, “Public Seminar”. My last book is an extensive essay on Franz Kafka.
Jack Wardynski
Sorrentino & Guadagnino
My name is Jack Wardynski and I am a journalism student from Aurora, Illinois. I attend the University of Missouri and am spending this fall semester studying abroad in Florence. I have dreamed of seeing Italy ever since my Italian language courses in high school, and the chance to do so while continuing my education at Open Doors Review is an opportunity I cherish. I am excited to contribute to Open Doors Review and help create a platform for writers to express themselves and share their work!
Emma Prunty
The Poem
My name is Emma Prunty and I studied Italian in university in Dublin and Florence many moons ago. I had the privilege to return for several years to Florence with my young family in 2015. My experiences there are slowly forming into a memoir, of which this piece, a vignette is an excerpt. These days I’m a tech/marketing editor and maintain a nerdy interest in language at my blog washyourlanguage.com. I’m back in Dublin after 25 years away - as well as Florence I’ve learned to be a local in Oslo, Brussels, New York, London, Toronto, Vancouver, and maritime Canada. Mix them all together and you’ll get my ideal place to live.
Poetry
Ron Riekki
Sonnet
Ron Riekki’s latest book is We Look Down at the Body (Egregious Pulp Press). Right now, Riekki is listening to Cliff Martinez’s “Our Usual Deal” from The Knick score. He flew into Naples, but never got off the plane as they just dropped passengers off. At one time, Riekki thought he might be part Italian, but it turns out he’s actually part Greek. Pretty close. Twitter: @RiekkiRon.
Nathanial Cairney
I finally get Noah’s Ark
Nathaniel Cairney is an American poet who lives in Belgium and who visits Italy frequently. His chapbook Singing Dangerously of Sinking was a finalist for the 2021 Saguaro Prize in Poetry, and his poems have been published in Midwest Review, The Cardiff Review, Broad River Review and other literary journals.
Priscilla Atkins
Pierrot
Priscilla Atkins has lived many places in the U.S., including ten years in Hawaii. She studied Eugenio Montale intensely in graduate school. Her current tastes run to contemporary Italian poets, Patrizia Cavalli’s “My Poems Won’t Change the World” in particular. She is the author of the book “The Café of Our Departure” and many journal publications.
Martin Pedersen Clean Scan
E. Martin Pedersen, originally from San Francisco, has lived for over forty years in eastern Sicily, where he taught English at the local university. His poetry appeared most recently in San Antonio Review, Danse Macabre, Neologism, Quail Bell Magazine, and California Quarterly, among others. Martin is an alumnus of the Community of Writers. He has published two collections of haiku, Bitter Pills and Smart Pills, and a chapbook, Exile’s Choice, from Kelsay Books. Martin blogs at: https://emartinpedersenwriter.blogspot.com
Irene Mitchell Direct Action and Useful Knowledge
Irene Mitchell’s latest collection, My Report from the Uwharries, was published in 2022 by Dos Madres Press. She is the author of seven other collections including Irene Mitchell: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2021). Formerly poetry editor of Hudson River Art Magazine in New York, Mitchell is known for her collaborations with visual artists and composers. She was a recent Associate Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Mitchell’s grandparents hail from Bari. After the Italian diaspora, the Milo family came to New York and their progeny still live there. Mitchell speaks some Italian by dint of hearing the language spoken around the table.
Jonathan Vidgop Meat
Jonathan Vidgop is a theatre director, author, screenwriter, and founder of the Am haZikaron Institute for Science, Culture and Heritage of the Jewish People in Tel-Aviv, Israel. Born in Leningrad in 1955, Jonathan was expelled in 1974 from the University “for behavior unworthy of the title of Soviet student.” Having worked as a locksmith, loader, and White Sea sailor, he was drafted into the army and sent to serve in the Arctic Circle. Leading Russian Publishing House NLO published Vidgop’s latest novel about life in Trieste, the city in Italy that Jonathan loves. Vidgop’s stories were published by Los Angeles Review, Pembroke Magazine, “Nomads” recently won Meridian’s Editors’ Prize in Prose. This poem was translated from Russian to English by Mr. Leo Shtutin and never published in English.
Stephen Campiglio Daimon
Stephen Campiglio founded and directed for 12 years the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series at Manchester Community College in Connecticut, and more recently, co-edited and contributed to Noh Place Poetry Anthology (Lost Valley Press, Hardwick, MA: 2022). Others poems and Italian translations have appeared of late in Aji Magazine, DASH, Gradiva (Florence, Italy), Hole in the Head Review, Italian Amercana, Journal of Italian Translation, The Octotillo Review, SLAB, and SurVision (Dublin, Ireland). His current project, with Elena Borelli of King’s College London, will
result in the first complete translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s volume of poems, Canti di Castelvecchio.Campiglio is a full descendant from the Italian region of Abruzzo (where his correct surname is Campilii): his mother and all four grandparents were born in the vicinity of Pescara, and he grew up in the Little Italy of Malden, Massachusetts. Recent work can be found at: https:// www.holeintheheadreview.com (Volume 4, No. 4) and http://www.survisionmagazine. com/magazine.htm (Issue 13).
Timothy Houghton More by Fear
Timothy Houghton’s The Internal Distance (Selected Poems 1989-2012) appeared in a bilingual (Italian/English) edition from the ITALIAN PRESS Hebenon/Mimesis Edizioni (Milan) in 2015. The book was presented in FLORENCE at the Museo Casa di Dante. He has worked at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and Hawthornden Castle. His recent book is Where the Lighthouse Begins (Salmon Poetry, 2020). His work has appeared in numerous journals in England, Ireland, the U.S., and elsewhere. He is a field trip leader for Audubon and lives in Nebraska, USA.
Chloe Yelena Miller Italian Vocabulary
Chloe Yelena Miller’s poetry collection, Viable, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books (2021) and her poetry chapbook, Unrest, was published by Finishing Line Press (2013). Miller is a recipient of three DC Arts and Humanities Fellowship (Individ-
uals) grants. Along with Shasta Grant, she’s a co-founder of Brown Bag Lit. She studied Italian in college and has spent five plus years living, studying and working in Florence. Her maternal family’s origins began in Sala Consilina (SA.) Contact her and read some of her work at www.chloeyelenamiller. com / https://twitter.com/ChloeYMiller
Jack Stewart Non Catholic Cemetery in Rome
Jack Stewart was educated at the University of Alabama and Emory University and was a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology. His first book, No Reason, was published by the Poeima Poetry Series in 2020, and his work has appeared in numerous journals in America and Europe, including Poetry, The American Literary Review, Galway Review, Poetry Salzburg, and others. He has traveled in Italy and been inspired by the culture.
Jacky Stephenson Poesia Ai Ravellesi
Jacky Stephenson (he/they) is a queer, native Texan, writer, educator and MFA candidate at Western Washington University in the United States. Stephenson has spent the last six years living interchangeably between New York City and Rome– their work primarily addresses just that, the relationship between movement and place. Undeniably, Stephenson’s years living and working in Rome impacted their artistic voice and vision. The youthful atmosphere of Trastevere, the echoes of voice and laughter and Bar San Callisto, shaped the idea of what Italy feels
like beyond the tourist guise. They specialize in creative nonfiction, but deploy poetics to investigate how identity can traverse location and memory, heavily influenced by Italo Calvino, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Ocean Vuong.
Cole Henry Forster Borri Books and other Poems
Cole Henry Forster is a poet living between Ottawa and Montreal. He spends, however, an unreasonable amount of time in Italy. If cornered he would say his work is an attempt to expel some of the suffering from modern life. He has published poems in journals and magazines in Canada, England, and the United States. His most recent chapbook, Western Love Songs, was released last year by Cactus Press in Montreal. “I have a boomerang relationship with that city, but in the end I guess I always end up holding the boomerang.”
Staff
Lauren Mouat Editor in Chief
I’m Lauren T. Mouat. I was born in California but since 2010 Italy has been my home, first Rome and more recently on the Tuscan coast in Livorno.
Reading and writing are an essential part of my life. When I write, I think. When I read, I grow. In my time in Italy, I’ve written for numerous publications and I’ve sought to bring writers together in a series of writing groups to share our work and ideas. I’ve also worked for many years as a tour guide and, in discussing Italy’s art and history, I found myself wanting to explore and share more of the contemporary writing and creative endeavours that are growing in and around Italy today.
Open Doors is a way to share enthusiasm and encourage the exchange of ideas that only art can bring to the surface. My aim is to connect writers and artists to reveal another side of Italy, a country that is so much more multifaceted than we are used to seeing in mainstream culture. The world is going through vast changes and I believe that what we create now and the conversations we have today, will decide our future.
Monica Sharp Poetry & Fiction English Editor
Monica lives in Florence, Italy. Her writing has appeared around the world in Fiction on the Web, Impspired, Across the Margin, Writer’s Block - Amsterdam, Mediterranean Poetry, The Florentine, Rome-ing: Firenze, the Bosphorus Review of Books, Fevers of the Mind, Adamah, and Synapse. She edits poetry for Open Doors Review. Author website: sharpmonica.com
Luca Misuri Art Editor
Luca Misuri is a visual artist and musician living and working in Livorno. He is the creator of the “Crumbling World” project and curator of Studio 124, an artist collective located in Livorno. Wendepunkte (“turning points” in German) is his sometime alias for visual and musical projects. www.lucamisuri.com
Morgan Chiarella
Italian Editor
Leaning into a childhood passion for phrasal verbs and run-on sentences Morgan has published two novels, some short stories and is currently balancing teaching at university in Rome and feigning indifference toward the impending fall of civilisation.
Jack Wardynski
FUA Intern
See Bio in “Non-Fiction”
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Do you have a connection with Italy? Do you live here? Do you travel here? Do you dream of here? Whatever your connection to Italy (even if it’s just enjoying Open Doors), we invite you to submit to the next issue of The Open Doors Review.
We accept literary fiction, poetry and thought provoking essays. Content is up to you. We are NOT looking for things that are specifically Italy focused. If your work happens to be about Italy, that is fine, but Italy is by no means a theme. We accept work in English or Italian.
Make us think. Make us laugh. Make us cry. Make us question. Make us uncomfortable. Make us feel.
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Hai un legame con l’Italia? Viaggi o vivi qua? Leggi semplicemente Open Doors Review? Ti chiederemo di raccontarci del tuo rapporto con l’Italia nell’email di presentazione del tuo lavoro.
Ci interessano la narrativa letteraria, la poesia ed i saggi stimolanti. Il contenuto dipende da te. Non stiamo cercando componimenti basati specificamente su tematiche “Italiane.” Potete mandarci i vostri lavori anche in più di una categoria e anche in combinazione (per esempio racconto + arte visuale). Accettiamo lavori in inglese o in italiano.
