Claudia Marinelli
Author of
950 49th
Street, Brooklyn, New York
Interview by Lisa Pinckard
LM: Claudia, was 950 49th Street Brooklyn, New York your first novel, and if so, what inspired you to begin writing at that time?
CM: Yes! 950 49th Street Brooklyn, New York was my first novel, I started to write it when I was still in New York, I believe it was 1992. Actually I didn’t know by then that I would write a novel. I had just completed my first course at The Institute of Children’s Literature, and got stuck: I couldn’t write anything and found that very frustrating. This is why I gave myself "homework" to solve the problem: I decided to write about simple things, things I didn’t have to "make up" like characters or plots, and . . . what’s better than descriptions? My mind then turned to my first American apartment in Brooklyn, and I started to describe it just by using my memory. This simple job became a daily habit, and soon I felt the need to go beyond plain depiction of closets, kitchen cabinets, floors, windows, and rooms . . . so I started to describe Borough Park (the Jewish Orthodox neighbourhood in Brooklyn where I spent my first year in America), its streets, its houses with their little front yards, the Jewish Orthodox people and their way of dressing, the new friends I met. . . . Soon pieces of conversations came back to my mind as well as my feelings in discovering the New World, and I wrote them down, too. As I proceeded in my daily job, I started to think about writing a book but, probably, I wasn’t ready for it at that time. My joy and enthusiasm for writing came back, and I decided to sign up for a second course at The Institute of Children’s Literature, temporarily leaving my "book" aside. I waited till my homecoming to work seriously on the novel. I had brought with me my first "drafts" and notes, and from the other side of the ocean it was probably easier to make the right choices about what to tell. Some "ideas" about America are just "commonplace" in Italy, so very often I chose to tell whatever was believed to be specific American, but was not, and what was just different. My first year in Brooklyn was a very special year for me, filled with joys and sorrows, amazing experiences (good ones as well as bad ones), friendship, and love: a year of personal growth without which I certainly wouldn’t be today what I am. I decided to write the novel in Italian as I was living in Italy, and try to get it published in my country first.
LM:You've since written several works that have garnered numerous awards. Please, tell us about them.
CM: The
writing market in Italy is difficult. Many editors, and not only the big ones,
don’t read the humongous number of submissions they receive every day. I
thought that I should work to get a nice literary curriculum to be able to show
it to editors I was contacting for my manuscript, this is why I decided to
enter some writing contests as many unknown authors do in Italy. And, to my big
and happy surprise, I won or was selected in 14 of them in the past four years.
In March 1997 I won a special award prize for poetry in the contest "Via di
Ripetta" organised by the editor who decided to publish 950 49th
Street Brooklyn New York. I still enter writing contests, I found out that
working for a contest is very important to me: it gives me enthusiasm, a deadline I should produce for, and stimulates me to work harder and give my best.
LM: I find deadlines work better well for me as well. Tell me: you, your husband (Umberto), and three children (Anna Maria, Nazario and Noemi) lived in Brooklyn and Queens while he completed his residency. Was staying in America permanently something either of you ever considered, or was it always understood that you would return to Italy at some point?
CM: We moved to the States on a "J" visa that allows Medical Doctors to complete their residency within seven years. After that time Foreign Medical Graduates on a "J" visa, should go back to their country for two years, and then, after the two years, if they want to, they can apply for a permanent American visa. My husband asked for one year extension of his "J" visa, so we were allowed to stay in New York eight years, but we had to move back to Italy in 1994.
We lived in four of the five New York boroughs: Brooklyn,
Queens, Manhattan, and Bronx. My first year in Brooklyn and my three years in
Manhattan were really nice. We were happy in New York, and I don’t think that
we would have moved back if we could have stayed in America. We were used to
the way of living, had many wonderful friends, my husband was happy with his
job, I had started to know the writing market there.
. . . Moving back was not easy,
especially for me, as my husband found a very nice job right away. I had lost
my teaching job eight years before and it was very difficult to get it back;
(I’m still "paying" for my choice of leaving my teaching job in my country in
terms of school locations for I might be teaching very far from home, and
salary). The way of living in Europe is very different and we all had to get
used to it again. Finally I didn’t know anything about the Italian writing
market, as I started to write while I was in America. But things turned out
fine: as I said my husband found a very nice job, I started to teach again, I
completed my first novel, our children were happy with their schools and their
friends, we could enjoy our relatives and our old friends (we missed them when
we were in the States) so we didn’t feel we should move back to the States in
1996, and stayed in Italy. It’s a relief though to know that any time we want
we can apply for a permanent American visa, and move back to the States. It’s
like knowing, in the back of your mind, that the option is open, and will
remain open forever. We feel that, although we left America, America didn’t
close its doors to us, and will welcome us any time if we decide to live there.
LM: What a beautiful way of putting it! And I'm so glad to hear everything worked out for you all! With regards to you children: Your third child (Noemi) was born in New York just after your arrival to America. Was it difficult for her--or Anna Maria and Nazario--to move back to Italy, or was Italy always considered home?
CM: When we
lived in New York my children considered Italy a wonderful place where they
spent many summers (during my eight years in New York I often spent the summer
in Italy with my children). They used to live in apartments in New York, but we
would go to my parent’s country house when I came to Italy, where they had all
the grandparents’ and other relatives’ love, and all the freedom a country
house could offer children. Of course they thought by then that Italy was the
most wonderful place to live in, and were very happy to move back. They had a
few problems switching schools and methods of education as they could speak
Italian, but had never gone to an Italian school. My son, who was twelve by
then, had to work pretty hard for a year, as he entered his second year of
Junior High School without having attended the first one. For my daughters, who
were younger and still in Elementary school, switching schools was easier. By
Christmas they were ok. Now that they are older, they understand better what a
great opportunity they had to have been living in the States for many years,
and they appreciate the fact that they can speak two languages and be familiar
with two different cultures, and they are grateful. I think that America is in
their hearts. My daughter Noemi was born in New York, so she has a double
nationality, and she’s very proud of it.
LM: At one point, you talk about watching a show with your children that involved puppets, actors and singing--a show that sounds very much like Sesame Street. Do you have these types of shows for children in Italy, or is television geared more towards an adult audience?
CM: The show
I wrote about in my book was Sesame Street, my children and I loved it. We do
have children shows on Italian television, but they’re different from Sesame
Street. Sesame Street aims to teach children the alphabet and the numbers,
it’s a specific educational show for very young children, and a very funny one.
We don’t have a similar show, I mean so specific, but we do have funny and nice
shows on Italian television where actors tell children fairy tales, fantastic
stories, or shows where two children teams play funny games. (Learning to read
and write in English, for a five or six-year-old child, involves a lot of memory
as English is not a phonetic language: remembering the right spelling of the
words is very important. So if children enter kindergarden knowing the whole
alphabet it’s a good thing for them, and Sesame Street helps them without
making learning stressful. Italian is a phonetic language, the child learns to
give a certain symbol (consonant or vowel) a specific sound that never changes
and that can be very different sometimes from the sound this symbol gets in the
alphabet. So it’s useless for children who learn to read and write Italian to
learn by heart the spelling of the words, because it’s easier to figure out
their right spelling just by listening to their sounds.) Also, in my country,
many parents don’t think that pushing a child to read earlier than others, is
necessarily good. Education in our Italian schools is probably slower than in
American schools in the first grades, but becomes very structured, very
demanding by High School. Teenagers have to learn many subjects, and spend a
lot of time at home, after school, to do their homework in order to pass from a
lower grade to a higher one, and finally graduate with a State exam.
LM: I found it incredibly interesting when you shared the conversations you had with your new friends about the differences in everything from everyday cultural issues to larger ones such as education. I personally agree with your view that children need to be allowed to be children for awhile before being pressed into academic competition. Did you find it difficult to adhere to your beliefs on such issues while you lived here, or were you constantly having to fight to raise them according to what you thought was best?
CM: Well, when you move to a different country with a family, you have to be able to conciliate your own personal culture, your beliefs, with the ones the new country is offering you. It’s a challenging job not only for a parent, but also for yourself. Besides, as a parent you know that you can only show your child a way, the way you think would be better for him to follow in order to be happy and healthy, but you can’t oblige your child to think like you and behave like you if he doesn’t feel like it. As Kahlil Gibran says so well in The Profit, "your children come from you, but they don’t belong to you." I always tried to consider different points of views for the same issue, and tell my children why I would think this or that behaviour or opinion was better than another one, trying to respect their choices if they would be different from mines. Sometimes it is very hard not just because of culture differences, but because our children live in a world that is very different form the one the parents as children and teenagers lived in, and there could be a "gap" in between generations difficult to understand and to overcome. Also, sometimes you just can’t allow some of your children’s behaviours because they are "not right". Being a parent is a difficult job, but I didn’t find very hard to conciliate my way of living with the one of the country I lived in. Finally we’re all human beings and when you take away the culture "frame", people all around the world are similar. Some values, like caring for others, compassion, honesty, respect . . . are considered good all over the world although the way of expressing them could be different. Helping your child to become a well-balanced, mature, honest adult means to teach him the correct values that will be his moral "landmarks" regardless of the culture he lives in. Of course when you live in your own country, where everybody expresses himself through the same cultural "frame", and speaks your own language it’s somehow easier. Raising my children in a different culture was more challenging though, because I had constantly to go beyond the "frame" in order to see and show my children the difference between appearances, or outward forms, and substance or essence. It was probably more difficult, but for sure more challenging, and I hope they learned to be tolerant, and understanding towards differences. Did I do a good job? Well, of course, they should be questioned on this matter, I can only say that I tried my best.
LM: After our 'conversations' and reading your book, I somehow think they'd agree that you did a very good job. Speaking of children, I understand you teach creative writing for children and young adults. Do you find children easier and more open than adults with regards to imagination, and do you prefer teaching one over the other?
CM: I teach creative writing to children and adults, some of my "students" are older than me and I feel I should always give my best. (Teaching to children involves more creativity on my side. I need to set a funny and amusing lesson in order to make them happy and enthusiastic about writing. Writing for a child should be a funny experience, a way to express his inner creativity, imagination and love for the words. I generally start with building stories with them orally, using stuffed animals or little strange and unusual boxes. They could imagine an adventure with the stuffed animal I bring to the lesson, or something coming out from the boxes: characters, animals, relatives, friends, toys. . . . Once they have invented a story they like, they have a name for their characters and a "plot" I tell them to write everything down, in order not to loose it, and show it to the people they love, and their friends. They also illustrate the stories with their pictures, as a child loves to draw. It’s very exciting to have nine or ten children with a few well written stories by the end of the program.
Teaching adults needs a more structured course. I generally break up the writing process into "pieces" allowing the students to deepen some of them such as description, point of view, character building, plot and climax… Part of the lesson is also reserved to creation. Some of my students are working people who come to the course to have time to write, so I just figured out that they would want some quiet time to be able to create a description, a dialogue, a plot. . . . The last half hour is for reading out loud the personal creations, and discuss them together. )
Are children more imaginative than adults? I really don’t know for sure. Imagination is something you have or don’t have, some people have more imagination than others, although I never met somebody with no imagination at all. Being able to use your imagination is important for a writer, and somebody who wants to become a fiction writer, should be able to imagine situations, characters, and stories that can be inspired by the real world, but become, through the magic of written symbols, creations. Very often adults forgot about their imagination, but they just need a little guidance or encouragement to get it back. Italian children nowadays spend a lot of time watching television, they are "bombed" with cartoons and super heroes who overcome their problems with super powers, and commercials that interrupt any program and break up their concentration. When you ask a child to imagine a character or a hero, they often refer to the cartoons they watch, the super heroes they like and it’s sometimes very difficult for them to use their own imagination to create their heroes, or their characters exactly like adults. But, like adults, with a little of guidance they get on the right track and can build up fantastic as well as funny stories. I really don’t know if I prefer teaching to children better than adults, the two teaching processes are very different, but both very challenging, and I would love to keep teaching both.
LM: You're in the process of having 950 49th Street, Brooklyn, New York translated into English. How difficult is this, and do you find American publishers easy to deal with on this issue?
CM: I translated my book into English, my friend Eva Krias in New York, helped me with it. I am just so glad to live in a world with Internet! My friend and I could exchange daily letters, her advice was precious. I could never have done the whole translation by myself without her help. (Translating my book was very difficult. I write to my American friends constantly, and I watch English speaking shows and movies every day, for we do have a parabolic antenna, but writing for a possible market was quite another problem. When you write you express yourself fully and completely, but your ideas, your feelings, come to your mind in a specific language with its special rules, and sometimes it’s really difficult to express the same emotions in another language that has different linguistic rules. This is why, here in Italy, we use to say that "a translator is like a traitor" and, somehow, it’s very true. I was lucky though because I was translating myself, so I knew exactly what I wanted to say and sometimes I didn’t follow the text literally, as any translator should do in order to be truthful to the writer. I made it, and I’m very happy with it, of course my translation could still be improved, but I believe that anyone can read my manuscript and enjoy the story.
It is difficult to deal with American publishers, also because I live in Italy and many of them wouldn’t even consider an e-mail attachment or a manuscript without any SASE. I can’t find U.S. stamps over here, and I have to go to a special Post Office in Rome to find international postal coupons (I live in Bracciano, about 25 miles from Rome). Sometimes I go all the way and the Post Office ran out of postal coupons . . . besides nobody knows how many postal coupons are needed for a special weight from the United States, and this makes me put extra ones on the SASE just to be sure! This is for the "practical" part of dealing with American publishers. My book is also quite different form other books that tell stories about immigration in the States. It shows a different image of immigration in America, which is true, but not "traditional". This "untraditional" image of emigration was a winning idea in my country (my book won two literary prices one of them was the "Emigration Prize"), but I think it’s an image American editors are not used to dealing with. Finally my main character is very different from the traditional image of U.S. immigrants: she’s a college graduate, she speaks English fluently, she didn’t leave her country because she was poor, she accepts the New World with excitement and determination, she’s curious about the new culture and able to question herself on many issues, and even if her life is difficult, she accepts it as part of the challenge the New World is offering her in order to make the right changes in herself to become a better person and a better mom. . . . American-immigrant novelists are expected, I think, to be writing about main suffering characters, problems of coming of age in a different culture as foreigners, being a victim of a different culture, problems of misunderstanding about cultures, struggle and loneliness.… And editors might also dislike a novel written in the first person (like mine) that sounds very much like a memoir. Of course editors deal with money, investing in a manuscript should represent for them a success in the market, and investing in something so different from what they think the public wants is very risky. I just hope that one of them will recognize that whatever I said in my book was true and, because of its truth, liveliness, and courage in expressing my true and deep feelings, it can interest an audience who might be curious to see itself from another point of view.
LM: It's been said that the odds of a novel being published in America are about the same as winning the state lottery. Have you found this to be true in Italy as well?
CM: It is quite difficult to be published in Italy, too. Many editors, even small ones, receive so many unsolicited manuscripts every day, and they don’t read them all. I received rejection letters with my name spelled in the masculine form (Claudio instead of Claudia), or the title of the manuscript misspelled, and many editors didn’t even care to mail a rejection letter to me… This is why I decided to enter writing contests. Very often in Italy the writing contests are organised by editors looking for good novels, and new ideas. Often there is a small entrance fee that allows them to gather enough money to cover the expenses of the organization and the prize. I met the editor of my book by winning a Special Award in a writing contest he had organised.
LM: How long did it take to get 950 49th Street, Brooklyn, New York published?
CM: I finished revising my book by March
1996, and I got it published in October of 1998.
LM: Between teaching and everything else you have going on in your life, do you have to set aside a certain time each day for your writing, or do you write as the inspiration strikes?
CM: I try to write everyday even if I have very little time. If I’m not teaching (summer vacation, holidays . . . ) I usually get up very early to work: the house is quiet, the telephone doesn’t ring (and with three teenagers in the house it rings all the time during the afternoons), nobody comes to visit (my sister, who lives next to me, and many friends often come to say hallo), so I can concentrate. When I teach, during weekdays, I don’t have all the time I wish I could have, but I try to work on my writing everyday, for I feel very unhappy if I don’t do so. It doesn’t have to be something new, I could also spend time revising, correcting, rereading what I wrote, and I generally do that in the afternoons, or very late at night when everybody is asleep. I spend an incredible amount of time revising my work, making little or big changes. When I am satisfied with my job I go to my very own and special literary consultant, my aunt who was an Italian Junior High teacher. Together we read out loud what I produced and discuss possible changes. It’s very nice to have somebody close and trustworthy that reads my work with an open but critical mind. I also have friends who write like me, and I ask them too to read my work and express their feelings. Sometimes, it doesn’t happen often, I have a very strong idea, and I have to write it down, no matter what. When this happens I put my writing first, and whatever I can leave behind, I just forget about it. I feel that I should write the whole idea or the whole story as it comes, without worrying if it’s badly written, and will need lots of rewriting. The important thing is that I have it on paper, or in the PC. Then, it can take many working days, even months to revise it, and make it suitable to be published, but that kind of job, as I said, can be fit into my daily organization.
LM: What would advice would you give to someone who was just starting to write and facing great odds?
CM: Never to
forget that you write because you answer to a very special and personal need,
you write first for your own pleasure, for yourself. When you have written something
that you really like, you have spent hours, days and months to put on paper
what is in your heart, sincerely, with courage, without wanting to appear
different from what you are, and you have worked to give your creation a
beautiful, enjoyable form, you will have done something really great, no matter
if this "thing" will be rejected by magazines or book editors.
You’ll be able
to face critiques and rejections, and disappointments only if you’re conscious
that you did your best, that you gave what you are, you gave yourself. So I
would just advise someone who started to write to "arm" himself or herself
with: hard work (writing is a very hard job), courage in expressing always what
they are without wanting to appear different (every single person on this world
is interesting), patience and determination (often recognitions don’t come
right away), carelessness about money, just a few writers can earn enough money
with their writing not to have a regular job, and you might invest an
incredible amount of energy, time and also some money (Xerox®
copies, envelopes,
stamps to mail your work to editors or magazines), and get nothing back in
terms of money income. It’s also important to be open to critiques, and if you
know you gave your best, you were true to yourself and your possible readers,
you’ll be able to recognize an intelligent critique from a silly one, and will
want to reconsider your work and make some changes, eventually.
LM: What, if anything, do you miss about New York, and are you still in touch with any of the friends you made while there?
CM: I miss New York very much, it’s a very special city, a very unique place in this world. I miss all the cultural opportunities a city like the Big Apple could offer: Broadway shows, movie theatres, musicals, art expositions, concerts, big book stores (I used to get lost for hours in Barnes & Noble), museums … I also miss being constantly in contact with people from around the world. New York is really a "melting pot", and I love confrontation with cultures that are different from mine. You could go shopping one day and talk to ten or twenty different persons coming from ten or twenty different countries, I loved it. The friends I had (some of them are characters of my book) were American, French, Iranian, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, Pakistani, Polish, Russian, Greek, Chinese . . . it was such a great opportunity for me, not only to meet all kinds of people, but become friends with them and be challenged by the differences. I kept many friends, they are scattered now all over the U.S. (because in America people move so easily), many left New York, but I’m glad I met them and that we still love each other, care for each other, and write to each other. When I go to the States I try to meet as many friends as I can, and, to my great pleasure, some of them came to visit. I just hope that our friendship will always last.
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