On Writing: Teaser from Book-in-Progress

"I know, though, that if I don't write I will die; I will shrink down into nothingness and disappear, and the only originating place I can imagine for this, my desperation to write, is the inability of my female ancestors to do so. They were readers, thinkers, wanters of much more than their motherhood relegation. The intense power of my need to write pumps through my veins as if, from the spirit world, each of those women cries out a call to rise, speaking to the replications of their own cells that now live in my body."

-Jessica Marsico

Matrilineacide: A Poem

“Words wreak havoc when they find a name

for what had, up to then,

been lived namelessly.” –Sartre

    My great grandmothers are lost to me; lost too are all the mothers who came before. Their last names have been taken, removed from the memory of centuries. Whole families disappear that way - truth and story and knowledge, too. This loss deserves a name, that I might speak my sorrow. And the grace of graces, one they were never shown: the choice to adopt it  (to keep or discard it) is yours and yours alone.

-Jessica Marsico

“Their [the descendents of Italian immigrants] italianità - where it has persisted at all - resides in the humble details of everyday life, not in the glories of any nation or its state.”

Donna Gabaccia, historian

Italian America and its Woeful Lack of Female Role Models

OK: forget role models. We definitely don't have those, but we also don't even have any pop culture icon or character or anything to identify with.

That being said, I've determined that Daniel Franzese is our most succinct, poignant, vivid point of reference.

Yes, it's funny. I know. But it's really not funny at all.

Within mainstream American culture, Italian American women do not feature prominently anywhere: literature, film, television, politics; the more you think on it, the more disturbing it really is.

So I suppose it's time for me to address us collectively: the over 10 million Italian American women in this country: we make up almost 6% of the population. With all the ethnicities represented, and the split in numbers because of gender, that's a much larger representation than it may seem. It's time for us to give one another something that America herself will not give.

As the saying goes, "You're Italian - do it right!"

Art and the Written Word: Camps for Girls 8-16

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