Page 2 - Marino2005

2.3, September 2005
Nebula

expression is what they were after, I now realize. Good thing I loved words. I won the
spelling bees, diagrammed the "Our Father" on the chalkboard during recess, and I

played Scrabble instead of with dolls. I was an introspective nerd and had no social
life. As a depressed teenager, I wrote heartfelt, execrable poems late at night on the
kitchen table listening to the Moody Blues Knights in White Satin on the radio. (I

wish I could find them now!) When I was 13 and 14 I wrote long letters to an older
friend, and she encouraged me to write for a living. But I wanted to grow up and raise

horses. I never thought of writing as a career because when I walked into our small
town library and looked up the stacks – yards and yards of words between covers -- I

thought that everything that could be said must have already been said by someone.

There were no books in the house where I grew up. Poetry was superfluous. I never
could invent a plot. I never considered writing as a career option. My mother died
when I was ten. When my father came home from work (he pumped gas and fixed

cars at his own gas station) he turned on the CBS nightly news, sat in his recliner and
fixed his attention on Walter Cronkite, then America’s most famous anchor man. I sat

between my father and the television to make him look at me, to try to get his
attention, but he always asked me to move aside. Twenty years later I was accepted
into Columbia Journalism School. Before classes began, the university chartered a

Manhattan tour boat and gave a party aboard for us new students. The guest of honor
turned out to be Walter Cronkite. (See why I like non-fiction?) I specialized in science

writing because I had always liked reading about the cosmos and astrophysics in
popular magazines, and I thought it was useful writing. I got a job as a science writer

for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where I had previously
worked as a technician, making laser optics. Then I went on a long vacation in Sicily

with my father, met Piero, the fisherman of Mondello, and the rest is history. Yes, you
are right, my mature writing was born alongside my re-discovery of Sicily. My
impetus to write was to share what I was seeing, what I was living, in this beautiful,

strange, sub-tropical, pathos-filled island. Both my books sprang from that era, in
1986, when I was 33 and in love, first with a Sicilian, then with Sicily.

E.M. That's an amazing story! You somehow broke my expectations: I was
convinced you would talk to me about you being "an Italian American" but
instead you do not seem to perceive the same dilemma expressed by so many
other Italian American writers. How do you view yourself in that context? How

Marino: …An Interview with Theresa Maggio 119