More Personal Stuff about Me

I started writing novels just after my mother died because I decided I didn’t like the world anymore and I’d just make up one of my own.

I know that it was against cultural norms among poor people in Italy. But I also know that going from a description of a culture to the implied belief that every member of a culture lives by its norms, is just describing stereotypes. Insisting, in spite of proof to the contrary, that those stereotypes are true of every member of a culture, is bigotry.

My mother was raised by Sicilians, a people not known for being literary (This idea comes from ignorance—there has been a highly respected Sicilian literature, in the Sicilian language, since at least the 1200’s.), but she gave me my love of reading and writing.

The summer I turned six, just before I started school, my mother taught me how to write my name. It was pretty long—Rose Sorrentino. I spent the whole day writing my name over and over again. I said “Let there be Rose Sorrentino.” I wrote it and there I was—I existed. I still consider it the most exciting day of my life—and my life hasn’t been boring.

Every Saturday night, my mother gave me and my brother our Saturday night bath and washed our hair. We put on fresh pajamas and the sheets were all fresh. We were allowed to stay up late, until my father came back from the corner candy store at midnight with a copy of the Sunday newspaper. He gave the funnies to my mother and we all sat in the big bed, me on one side of my mother and my brother on the other side, while she read us the funnies, including the sound effects. It was total paradise and I learned then to associate reading with feeling good.

She also made sure I had a library card, before I started school, and that I used it.

After my mother died, my Neapolitan family, who didn’t read and didn’t see why anyone else should, while they didn’t encourage my reading, they didn’t really seem to me to disapprove of it. In any case, I had long since concluded that adults should be seen and not heard. So when I walked into a room with my book in my hand, and found the aunts talking, and they would all turn to me and say, disdainfully, “And this one here, always with her nose in a book,” I just ignored them. Besides, I was allowed to have a membership in a children’s book club, one of the few things I was allowed to have even though it cost money.

I started writing poetry when I was fourteen years old. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and I had no reason to trust the adults around me to give me any useful advice. I’d write up something, read it, think about it, and toss it into the trash. I’ve always loved language and I tried to make what I wrote as good as I was able. Pretty soon, I noticed that I was writing poetry, so I decided that, as long as I was already writing poetry, I might as well do that with my life, and I started keeping the poems.

I first came across Emily Dickinson when I was about ten years old. The nuns had given us a little book of poetry for children which included Dickinson’s poem that begins, “I like to see it lap the miles, / And lick the valleys up,” which I thought was a really dumb poem. Who cares about a stupid train? And she used the word Boanerges, which sent me to the dictionary where I discovered that it’s a kind of horse. So why didn’t she say horse, like a normal person?

I’ve read that Italian-Americans, belonging to a culture that doesn’t value literature, have to go to school to learn to appreciate reading. For me, it was the other way around. And there are a lot of people who feel that many schools discourage a real love of learning and literature.

When I was sixteen years old, one evening at the Brooklyn Public Library, I was desperate for something to read. I just couldn’t find anything I wanted. Finally, I heard, over the loudspeaker, “Ping, ping, ping. The library will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please bring your books up to the checkout counter.” I panicked and grabbed the first book I could reach, which happened to be a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, and ran with it to the checkout counter.

When I got home, I just tossed the book onto a shelf and went back to working on a poem which I had been trying to write for days, but just couldn’t get it right. All I knew was that I wanted to write about the light on winter afternoons and I all I could think of to say was that the light was slanted.

Frustrated, I put the my poem aside and took down the book of Emily Dickinson’s poems and began to read. I decided that some of them were okay, but I wasn’t really impressed so much. Then I read a poem that totally blew me away. It begins “There’s a certain slant of light / On winter afternoons.” I was astonished and in love because that was the poem I had been trying to write.

When I read her poem that begins “Unto my books so good to turn / Far ends of tired days; / It half endears the abstinence, / And pain is missed in praise.”, all I could think was, How does she know so much about me?

The first line of the last stanza of this poem is “I thank these kinsmen of the shelf,” and that was when I decided to try to get my poetry published. I wanted to be kinsmen of the shelf with Emily Dickinson.

In other words, I had been writing for eight years before it even entered my head to try to publish anything.

I’ve heard of people who write because they want to be published. I don’t. Although I like being published and I appreciate it when people, who know how to read, like my work, that’s not why I’m writing. I write to be writing because writing gives me the energy I need to live. I always feel like crap if I haven’t written for a long time. When I’m not writing, little problems become big and big problems become hell. When I’m writing, the little problems melt away and the big problems get little.

I learned too late that Dickinson, after having a few things published, decided it wasn’t worth it and that she should write but not publish. By the time I read that, I’d had a few things published and I was hooked. At this point, seeing what some people have written about my work and me, I sometimes think that Dickinson was right. But I love being published. If I never published again it would be a big disappointment, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Not writing anymore would be the end of the world.