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Natalia Ginzburg’s Essay “The Jews” and Its Trials

- By Domenico Scarpa

Editor's note: The full version of this essay will be published in a new collection of essays: Natalia Ginzburg's Global Legacies, edited by Stiliana Milkova Rousseva and Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). [1]

For a long time Natalia Ginzburg avoided talking openly about her Jewish origins. She interrupted her silence, or rather, her reticence, for the first time in “The Jews” (“Gli Ebrei,” 1972), an essay published on the third page of the daily La Stampa, on September 14, 1972. Her collaboration with Turin’s newspaper had begun in December 1968.[2] Whether she...


Interviews

10 Questions for Kayhan Irani

- By Franchesca Viaud

OPENING: A pair of sheer white curtains undulate as a breeze blows. They are suspended in air, floating on their own. Behind them, pitch black. 

NARRATOR
We are here, at a criss-cross of story and memory, place and time.
We are here to witness and listen, to embrace and mend the fractures.
Why are you here?

(Four options appear in orange text. TO WITNESS; TO LISTEN; TO EMBRACE; TO MEND. Choose one to move ahead.)
—from "There Is a Portal," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first full length plays I wrote was in the fourth grade, and it was a play about a suffragette who was organizing her friends...


Interviews

(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Francesco Pascuzzi

- By Franchesca Viaud

There was no Google where you could type in "gay liberation" or "trans" and find all there was to know. Even the term "homosexual" wasn't used, and to take back a title from a pamphlet in FUORI!, it was an "unmentionable practice." The first time I'd heard about it publicly was in November of 1975 after the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. News programs on TV made allusions rather than actual statements about his ascertained or presumed homosexuality. It was precisely on the occasion of the school assembly that was held after his murder that I first came out, supported by my firends in the collective.
—from "Coming Out," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated...


Interviews

10 Questions for Noor ('Ditee) Jaber

- By Franchesca Viaud

You approach and I offer
another girl's name. Curtains, velvet
and crushed, mostly closed. 

See it this way: coyote's tooth dangling
coy from my locs.
You approach (my hair draping, obscuring my face)
and it falls

Tonight, like disco lights, beckons my self
to myself. There's just enough light
for me.
—from "Of Starshine and Clay," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote a lot of poetry in high school to reckon with my enormous, overwhelming feelings. I don’t remember much from that period of my life but I remember writing a lot. The first poem I remember pouring out of me was a slam poem I wrote in college. It was...


Interviews

10 Questions for Catherine LaFleur

- By Franchesca Viaud

Passing through the yard
Choked with thirsty grass,
You might see the newest
Adults huddled in tight circles. 

Never alone.

The beast mother is
All they know. 
—from "Mother of Beasts," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Good Advice About Bears came as a result of a guided meditation memory exercise. My mentors, Kathie Klarreich (Exchange for Change), Dr Wendy Hinshaw, and Leslie Neal (ArtSpring), encouraged me to explore fleshing this out into a written story. Although I am an avid reader, never did I think to tell my own stories. Good Advice is the humorous account of a camping trip gone wrong and tells you why it's...


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