Lee Gutkind

Joanna Clapps Herman

Thoughtful, poignant, and hilarious personal essays collected by the editors of Creative Nonfiction explore the meanings of Italian-American identity. In the twenty-one nonfiction narratives collected in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion, established and emerging writers with family ties to Italy reflect on the ways that their lives have been accented with uniquely Italian-American flavors. Several of the essays breathe new life into the time-honored theme of family—Louise DeSalvo honors her grandfather, nick-named “the drunk” because he spent his life of hard work drinking wine instead of water, and James Vescovi portrays the close of the stormy relationship between his father and grandmother. Other stories tackle the mystical side of Italian-American life, like Laura Valeri’s account of a summer vacation séance in Sardinia that goes eerily awry. And elsewhere, Stephanie Susnjara charts the history of garlic in society and her kitchen, and Gina Barreca offers an unabashed confession of congenital jealousy. Lee Gutkind, founding editor of Creative Nonfiction, the nation’s premier nonfiction prose literary journal, and Joanna Clapps Herman have brought together artful essays by novelists, scholars, critics, and memoirists from across the country. The pieces are as varied as their authors, but all explore the unique intersections of language, tradition, cuisine, and culture that characterize the diverse experience of Americans of Italian heritage.

New Essays by Italian-American Writers

Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

Carol Bonomo Albright

For more than thirty years, the journal Italian Americana has been home to the writers who have sparked an extraordinary literary explosion in Italian-American culture. Across twenty-five volumes, its poets, memoirists, story-tellers, and other voices bridged generations to forge a brilliant body of expressive works that help define an Italian-American imagination. Wild Dreams offers the very best from those pages: sixty-three pieces—fiction, memoir, poetry, story, and interview—that range widely in style and sentiment, tracing the arc of an immigrant culture’s coming of age in America. What stories do Italian Americans tell about themselves? How do some of America’s best writers deal with complicated questions of identity in their art? Organized by provocative themes—Ancestors, The Sacred and the Profane, Love and Anger, Birth and Death, Art and Self—the selections document the evolution of Italian-American literature. From John Fante’s “My Father’s God,” his classic story of religious subversion and memoirs by Dennis Barone and Jerre Mangione to a brace of poets, selected by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma, ranging from John Ciardi, Jay Parini, and Mary Jo Salter to George Guida and Rachel Guido de Vries. There are also stories alive with the Italian folk tradition (Tony Ardizzone and Louisa Ermelino), and others sleekly experimental (Mary Caponegro, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson). Other pieces—including an unforgettable interview with Camille Paglia—are Italian-American takes on the culture at large.

The Best of Italian Americana

Wild Dreams

A tribute to the Italian American family and its trying bonds of love.

Growing Up Italian in America

The Anarchist Bastard

In the twenty-one nonfiction narratives collected in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion, established and emerging writers with family ties to Italy reflect on the ways that their lives have been accented with uniquely Italian-American flavors. Several of the essays breathe new life into the time-honored theme of familyLouise DeSalvo honors her grandfather, nick-named "the drunk" because he spent his life of hard work drinking wine instead of water, and James Vescovi portrays the close of the stormy relationship between his father and grandmother. Other stories tackle the mystical side of Italian-American life, like Laura Valeri's account of a summer vacation se;ance in Sardinia that goes eerily awry. And elsewhere, Stephanie Susnjara charts the history of garlic in society and her kitchen, and Gina Barreca offers an unabashed confession of congenital jealousy. --Publisher description.

Can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? “My ancestral Italian village in America was in Waterbury, Connecticut.” In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Clapps Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs. Sometimes the Italian part of her identity—her Italianità—feels so aboriginal as to be inchoate, inexpressible. Sometimes it finds its expression in the rhythms of daily life. Sometimes it is embraced and enhanced; at others, it feels attenuated. “If, like me,” Clapps Herman writes, “you are from one of Italy’s overseas colonies, at least some of this Italianità will be in your skin, bones, and heart: other pieces have to be understood, considered, called to ourselves through study, travel, reading. Some of it is just longing. How do we know which pieces are which?” “In When I Am Italian, Joanna Clapps Herman asks, ‘Can a person born outside of Italy be Italian?’ Scholars have long been interested in how ethnic identity is constructed within specific historical contexts. In this collection of evocative essays, Clapps Herman illuminates the complex process of ethnic identity formation as she takes the reader on her life’s journey starting with her girlhood ‘up the farm’ in rural Connecticut with her extended Italian family. Stops in her ancestral home in Basilicata, and Torino—‘the opposite of Southern Italy’—reveal that being an American of Italian descent in Italy poses its own challenges.” — Nancy Carnevale, author of A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945 “A beautiful book. It takes us through the decades of the last century and into this one to ask what it means to be Italian long after one generation’s arrival, and to consider how deep and elemental the facts of that are. This is a subtle, moving, and original piece of work—to read it is to see the world around us differently.” — Joan Silber, author of Improvement: A Novel “When I Am Italian, Joanna Clapps Herman’s exquisite new memoir, begins with her rich, cocoonlike childhood inside an extended Italian American family in Waterbury, Connecticut. With its all-encompassing rituals of food, talk, and work, her family has transposed the rhythms of southern Italy to the new world. It’s only when Clapps Herman leaves home—to escape the restrictions and claim her own life—that she realizes that this part of her identity does not necessarily reflect how the rest of America sees itself. With beauty and insight, When I Am Italian gives us Clapps Herman’s fully lived understanding of the complex interweaving of culture and finding self.” — Lisa Wilde, author of Yo, Miss: A Graphic Look at High School “A vital voice in Italian American literature, Joanna Clapps Herman sings the subterranean stories and voices of her community. Steeped in archaic rituals, The Anarchist Bastard resonated with the echoes of ancient bards and cantastorie. When I Am Italian continues her exploration into the heart of cultural identity as it has survived and mutated in the country to which her ancestors migrated, yet with a difference: here the narrator visits more private, intimate selves. Traversing the genres of memoir and essay, Clapps Herman brings to the page a woman whose gestures, language, and memories are filtered through the sieve of being Italian, an identity she understands as inherited and chosen, fixed and fluid. Anyone who has inhabited the ‘liminal space’ of an ethnic community—not only readers of Italian descent and persuasion—will be seduced by the exquisite writing and will relish the tenderness and vulnerability with which this splendid book pulls us into a world where everyone can be Italian.” — Edvige Giunta, coeditor of Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora

When I Am Italian

Stories of small-town life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The stories in No Longer and Not Yet look at the ways our lives are lived in the split seconds between what is no longer but is still not yet. Most take place on Manhattans iconic Upper West Side, in the shops, hallways, and parks that reveal this well-known big city neighborhood for the tiny, even backwater village it more often resembles. An Upper West Sider herself, Joanna Clapps Herman draws her characters honestly yet tenderly, revealing them as much through how they movethe slope of a shoulder, a vocal inflection, the weight of a footballas by what they do, as though their bodies speak the truths they cant express. Here, Hannah Arendts ghost haunts the building where she once lived, a hawk carries the apparition of a lost loved one, a homeless woman becomes Demeter. Small moments and intimacies of life weave together to form a bigger picture: the squeak of the hotel bed, a leaf on a saucer, the quality of light in the therapists office, the doormans familiar jokes, the open cupboards, the unspoken words. These stories show that, although we may think of ourselves in larger mythic narratives, our days are set in the terrain that is the opposite of the vast. Time and the city are the subjects of these beautifully connected stories: children are born and become themselves, marriages take shape, a handsome doorman opens the lobby door, snow falls on a man who lives in a box outside. Like Tolstoy, the writing is both exquisite and transparent, and everything is bathed in feeling and light and intelligence.  Myra Goldberg, author of Whistling and Other Stories and Rosalind: A Family Romance No Longer and Not Yet is a moving and funny collection of stories. Translation always reveals the weaknesses in a text. Joannas writing doesnt have those weaknesses. She is a very accomplished writer.  Lazare Bitoun, translator of American writers into French, including Grace Paley and Janet Malcolm Joanna Clapps Herman is both Saint and Bard of the Upper West Side. She illuminates the human spirit pulsing through its vibrant buildings, portraying neighbors linked by history and geography, by shared love and loss. On Riverside Drive, the imposing ghost of Hannah Arendt, a former inhabitant, is as strong a presence as a small boy who covets a corner of the elevator after his sister is born. Herman discovers the human connections that warm the asphalt and brick of New York, delivering benediction along with a healthy dose of humor.  Pam Katz, screenwriter of Hannah Arendt

Joanna Clapps Herman

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