Page 1 - Marino2005

2.3, September 2005
Nebula

Beyond Ethnicity: An Interview with Theresa Maggio.

By Elisabetta Marino

Theresa Maggio is probably one of the most interesting American writers of modern
times. Besides pursuing a career as a journalist, she is the author of two travelogues in

which her personal experience of places and people plays a vital role: Mattanza: Life
and Death in the Sea of Sicily (2000) and The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the

Hidden Villages of Sicily (2002). The first volume is focused on the ancient ritual of
blue-fin tuna fishing carried out in the Sicilian island of Favignana, where, every year,
around May or June, the tuna fish gather in order to spawn. The second volume is a

quest for the remotest and still unspoiled villages of mountainous Sicily, starting from
the place where her family came from: Santa Margherita Belice. In these two books

Theresa Maggio explores her Sicilian roots but she somehow overcomes the
boundaries of ethnicity since she seems to plunge deep into the very core of

humankind, by unearthing ancient traditions whose secrets are orally transmitted from
generations to generations.

I had the pleasure of reviewing and writing on Theresa Maggio’s volumes as a part of
my research project on Italian American literature. The wide acknowledgement of the

originality of Theresa’s perspective, together with my personal appreciation of her
writings, prompted me to ask her whether she would be willing to be interviewed. She

kindly accepted, showing the same enthusiasm, interest and vitality that the reader can
gather from her books. We leisurely started exchanging thoughts through the internet,
the globe-straddling network of communication, and we carried out the following

conversation between continents, from Italy to the USA, for several months, up until
July 2005.

E.M. Theresa, how did you decide to devote your life to writing? Did the
discovery of "writing" come along with the discovery of your "Italian side"?

T.M. You are making me think about my life … The seeds of a writer were in me but

they took a long time to flower. The Benedictine nuns who taught at St. Joseph’s
elementary school turned every subject into a writing class. Spelling, grammar and

good sentence structure counted in written assignments from religion to art. Clarity of

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