On Reaching to Write in Italy

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

Place, I say to my writing students. Get it right, time and place, at the beginning. Chekhov has the clock tick out minutes; the color of the sky reflects that very month and day; a street name rings familiar and strange until, in story after story, life has confines, tensions and curling roots. So after living nearly four decades in Italy, where am I, an American midwesterner, when I write? In front of a large window, facing it, whether I am writing in Parma, where I have lived with an Italian population biologist for thirty five years and raised a daughter, or on a train, heading to Florence, with a notebook on my lap, or in Rome, in a corner of my memory where typewriter keys bounce along. Read on...