Blog

The Writer as Meditative Thinker

February 19, 2022 - By Jim Hicks

(Photo from Mondonuovo, directed by Davide Ferrario, produced by Movie Movie, Bologna, 2003)

This year, during the second night of January, one of our favorite writers passed away. Gianni Celati was a brilliant thinker, an innovative, experimental stylist, and an influential translator—and most of all, he cared about people, about communities, and about history. In short, our kind of guy. We were honored, a few years back, to publish Celati’s remembrance of attending the funeral of his friend and mentor, Italo Calvino, as translated by Patrick Barron.

To commemorate Celati's work, and to introduce it to those of you not fortunate enough to know him already, we offer here a three-part colloquy. First,...

Wind Taking Flight Among the Ruins

February 19, 2022 - By Anna Botta

In the “Foreword” to his Conversations with the Wind Taking Flight, Gianni Celati states that:

Writing is a conversation with whoever will read us, and conversations carry us like the wind—we never really know what the direction will be. Here the “wind taking flight” is our name for that atmospheric force that words take on, scattering them across all sorts of subjects, from cinema to autobiography.

The way that Celati’s writing moves forward—that disorienting “sense of vast horizons” (Nunzia Palmieri), that aimless wandering with an eye driven by his anxious and eternally insatiable mind, that fluid pace of face-to-face conversations—is also found in the way that Celati makes...

In Memoriam, Gianni Celati (1937-2022)

February 19, 2022 - By Patrick Barron

I came to know Gianni Celati through his writings (if knowing a person in this way is possible), beginning in the late 1990s when I found his book Narratori delle pianure (“Storytellers of the Plains,” translated as Voices from the Plains) in a shop in Ferrara, a town in northern Emilia Romagna not far from the Po River, where I was living at the time and working as an English teacher. On the cover is a photograph of Celati by Luigi Ghirri, a lone figure facing away from the camera and standing on a muddy road that curves to the left across a vague expanse of snowy land, slightly crooked and bent over something immediately at hand. I imagine that Celati is taking notes, trying to describe his surroundings—the seemingly nondescript expanse of wintry...

10 Questions for Brian Turner

February 16, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

Here is a portion of the silence we walk upon, where the stony shore of the Atlantic curls breakers of salt onto a shelf of the lithospheric dead. At our feet, ammonites in their obsidian-colored whorls.
—from "The Jurassic Coast," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As a child, I wrote a poem about the fog in winter, known as Tule fog in the San Joaquin Valley. The poem is blurry in memory, but it was a persona poem from the point of view of the fog itself. I wouldn’t have known what a persona poem was at the time, but the alive-ness of the world was very present in the poem—as the fog had its own intentions, its own volition, with a mood that lingers with me...

A Valentine’s Brewquet

February 14, 2022 - By Marsha Bryant

1
With its wild fermentation and pour,
The Framboise is a beer to adore.
It stays true to the berry
And fizzes so merri-
ly. Tongue-tickling tartness galore.

2
Malty forward, this silky Milk Stout
Shows what creamy dark ales are about.
It’s primarily roasty
(Some chocolate, some coffee),
And finishes creamy side out.

3
Liquid Springtime, this bright Éphémère
Blossoms crisply, lets in light and air.
With its fresh apple taste
And a fine Belgian lace,
‘Tis a cider-meets-wheat ale affair.

4
O the Coconut Hiwa pursues
That fruit’s dance with mocha, accru-
ing a mouthfeel so light
It...