Getting Started

Last spring a journalist friend of mine dared me to write a short piece in Italian on Palermo's original fast-food, il pane ca' meusa, a sandwich filled with thin slices of beef lung and spleen fried in lard. Its better than it sounds, really. The result was surprisingly legible, so much so that his editor published it on the fly in the Repubblica. Here's a link to the original article. Before they offered me anything concrete, their competitor, the Giornale di Sicilia, snapped me up. At least once a month the paper gives me half a page to ramble on, and they put a nice big picture of me next to it. The column is called "Un'Americana a Palermo," a take off on the Alberto Sordi classic, "Un'Americano a Roma."

I never could have dreamed that I would be published in Italian before being published in English, especially since the most common reaction I get when I try to express any concept more complex than what I ate today is a befuddled huh? When I was offered the column, I thought " wow, if I can write in a foreign language I can hardly speak, than writing in my mother tongue should be a breeze!" I immediately planned on publishing a best-seller made all the more alluring by my ex-pat status.

The only hitch was, I spent days labouring over each article in Italian, but never got around to writing anything in English. Well, one person changed all that. May I present you my new muse.



That's right, I've become a mother. I spend the majority of the day nursing my daughter, Flora, and consequentially don't have time to do the dishes, shave my legs not to mention leaving the house. However, I do have plenty of time to sit in a chair and peck out a blog post with one hand while I hold her with the other.