The Year in Writing & Crying (2023)

I considered 2022 a terrible year in writing for me so I suppose 2023 couldn't help but be better.

As it turns out, 2023 was quite a year for publishing my writing but almost certainly one of the worst years for me personally. That means I am going to report what I accomplished but skip some of the editorializing and grandstanding that normally comes along with this task. Accomplishing a lot in the writing world doesn't bring anyone back from the dead.

It didn't keep me from writing about the dead -- but that was back before I knew those ranks would swell.

In any event, in brief, here's what I published:

For The Millions, I wrote an essay about reading my father's books in the wake of his death. It's called, "The Books that Made My Father":

https://themillions.com/2023/01/the-books-that-made-my-father.html

As I've mentioned, I always aim to land work in new journals (see below). I also sometimes want to deepen my relationship with a publication by publishing work in a different section. I was thrilled this year, for multiple reasons, to publish a book review in the Boston Globe of a book by the Italian author I am translating. The book, Lost Bread, which was translated by Gabriella Romani, revisits her childhood and, of course, the worst moment of her childhood: deportation by the Nazis.

I also managed to publish a scholarly essay (maybe scholar-ish, no footnotes and I didn't include any digs about other scholars) on what women writers can tell us about surviving the Holocaust. It's called "The Forgotten Writers of the Shoah," and it was published by the American Scholar in September. I began work on it when I had a short fellowship at the New York Public Library in 2021.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-forgotten-writers-of-the-shoah/

I also managed to publish travel writing, which is rare for me (who doesn't want to write about his or her travels? So it's very competitive). This was a first, too: publishing an article about Italy that intersects with my translation work. It's about commemorative stones that have been laid in cities around Italy to mark the homes or points of arrest of Nazi-fascist victims, many of them Jews.

https://www.nextavenue.org/stepping-stones-reveal-italys-dark-history/

It was the first time I'd published something with Next Avenue, a PBS site. In addition to travel writing about Italy, I also published an article about Montreal for the site:

https://www.nextavenue.org/visiting-montreal-for-the-culture/

Didn't do much in the way of other reviews but I did write about Modiano, a personal passion. 

I read just about whatever he writes, and this year, I decided to pitch a book review of his latest, though I don't think it's his best.

Let me put this out there: who's the Italian Modiano? (Note: Italian surname, but French author) I should know, but I don't so help me! Who's the Spanish Modiano? Who's the ...

While I don't feel like celebrating my writing this year, I can celebrate my translation work since that benefits someone else. I published one of the stories from the manuscript that won an NEA literature grant in translation: “Silvia.” The story won the Hunger Mountain Translation Prize and was published in Hunger Mountain in February.

https://hngrmtn.org/issues/hunger-mountain-27/translation/

Last but not least, I published a story 30 years in the making -- exactly. An article that in my drafts folder I dubbed, "How Italy Ruined My Life." Sophia, my editor at The Millions, went with a different headline.

It was a good year for writing for me. But now I know a good year for writing can do nothing to diminish my sadness when it's been a bad year for living -- and the living. 

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