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

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

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