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We’re excited to announce the launch of “Voices from the Hill” a podcast dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent right here in our literary backyard. As a proud member of this vibrant community, Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature believes our local authors deserve a platform to share not just their published works, but the stories behind them.
If you’re a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org.
Welcome to Voices From the Hill, celebrating the vibrant literary voices of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Jennifer Barone, along with Joseph Carboni, owner of Telegraph Hill Books. Each episode, we sit down with a local author to explore their creative process, inspirations, and the unique stories that shape our community. Today, we're joined by Gail Reitano, a novelist and essayist whose work celebrates Italian American culture and the stories of women navigating family, tradition, and personal ambition. She's the author of Italian Love Cake, set in depression era New Jersey, and has contributed to anthologies exploring the Italian diaspora including, And there were red geraniums everywhere, Women's voices of the Italian diaspora in North America.
Jennifer Barone:We're excited to hear about her inspirations, her process, and the stories behind her novels. So let's dive in. Gail Reitano, welcome to Voices From The Hill and also October's National Italian American Heritage Month. So happy Heritage Month.
Gail Reitano:Thank you, Jennifer, so much. And thank you, Joseph, for hosting me in this beautiful Telegraph Hill Books. It's the most beautiful bookstore actually I've ever been in.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:That's not an exaggeration. It's really something. Yeah. Thank you.
Jennifer Barone:Thank you for being here. I'm so excited to have you here. Your work often explores Italian American culture and experience. So I'd love for you to kick us off with reading a passage that you've chosen today and let us know why it holds special meaning for you.
Gail Reitano:Well, I'm going to read, first off from the anthology And there were red geraniums everywhere. It was published first in Italian, by an Italian publisher in 2024. And then it was so well received in Italy. There was a lot of interest in Italian American stories, which I think surprised all of us how much interest there was. They decided to bring out an English edition and so, this is truly thrilling.
Gail Reitano:And I'm going to, start the reading which kind of grounds all of my work, where I come from in the Southern, New Jersey Pine Barrens. And having grown up with farmers on one side and business people on the other, third and fourth generation. So very established here and yet very much Italian and Italian American. Growing up Italian in New Jersey Pine Barrens. We never referred to ourselves as Italian Americans, but simply as Italians, which was how we were seen by the Anglo Saxon Protestants of our Southern New Jersey town.
Gail Reitano:I was 11 years old this summer I began packing blueberries on my grandparents' farm, A checkerboard of good and poor soil and veined by irrigation ditches. The farm was located between Philadelphia and Atlantic City in a town atop a 17,000,000,000,000 gallon aquifer, the most important watershed in Southern New Jersey. Was it a coincidence that it happened to mirror the Avellino of my great grandfather with its claim to having the most important wetter watershed in the South Of Italy? Did I come from a long line of water diviners? With farmers on my mother's side and business people on my father's, I lived in two worlds.
Gail Reitano:I grew up at the harbor, a beautiful 16 acre property with a generous lake frontage, swimming pool, two docks, and a pitch and putt course courtesy of uncle, the rich businessman my father's sister married. There was never any real money in our family until Maddy Raytano married Louis Calicerdo. Uncle increased his fortune by financing everything the boys returning home from World War two needed, cars, appliances, and personal loans. When uncle bought the best property in town, a Tudor mansion built in the late nineteenth century by real English people, that house became our calling card. No matter how comfortable the homes of other well off Italians, the harbor was a further rung up the ladder, a gift in the battle to assimilate proving that we were better, and by that we meant less Italian.
Gail Reitano:Within this larger grandeur was our more modest house, the long low ranch my parents built on a smallish plot offered to them by uncle. During blueberry season, mom or dad would drive me out of the tall wrought iron gates and toward the farm three miles away, Leaving the town's perimeter as we crossed into endless fields of blueberries, barns, quonset huts, and dusty farm roads, I felt the switch into this other life. I love the hard physical work of the farm and being so so far from the social pecking order of town, but after a long day of standing on the hard cement floor of the packing house, I was full of restless energy and I long for that first sight of the harbor and the short enchanted drive down our private lane to the aquamarine of the swimming pool. There I stripped off my dirty clothes and the ladies cabana and stepping into the hot shower felt the switch back into this charmed world. Should I read another short piece?
Gail Reitano:Sure. Go ahead. I was called on to read from our fourth grade American history book, a section about immigrants. I cleared my throat and began not fully understanding the words, but when I came to the phrase an undigested and indigestible element in our body politic and a constant menace to our free institutions, I was jolted from my fog. Not that I fully understood, not that I thought our history book could possibly include anything pertaining to me, but that I caught a whiff of that something mom sometimes complained about.
Gail Reitano:That year we studied the Pompeian ruins and those beautiful bodies found in poses resembling sleep. Fulminant shock I learned was when a body was struck dead as it lived before there was time for conscious reaction. Mom said that as a teenager, my great grandmother Nicoletta would look up at Mount Vesuvius and wonder whether she would be in Italy long enough to see it explode again. As it happened, she wouldn't. She would make her way to this country escaping poverty and volcanoes, and the way she would avoid a different set of hazards once she got here was by not learning English and remaining indoors.
Jennifer Barone:That's so fascinating to me. I'm glad you continued. Mainly because my grandmother didn't speak any English and she came from the foot of the SUV. Yeah. What were the you mentioned just in that last sentence like that she escaped danger by not speaking English.
Jennifer Barone:What does that mean?
Gail Reitano:Well, I think the fear when you're well, let alone now what's happening in this country, but the fear when you're an immigrant of facing the world, going out embarrassed that you don't speak the language, you're the woman at home, it's usually the man who's out, he's doing yard work or working on the farms. She's at home and maybe she cleans houses or maybe she bakes for a living. Mhmm. But she is homebound and I think there is embarrassment and I notice it it in folks in our community, our own community, immigrants who are afraid, got got embarrassed. Think even without a government crackdown, It's just the embarrassment of not meshing in Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:And feeling that timidity.
Jennifer Barone:On the flip side of that, I feel like as an Italian American, there's also this sense of do I'm not American enough, I'm not Italian enough. And I always kind of perceive us as being this, like, hyphen in between Italian American, not belonging anywhere. But as on the flip side of that for you personally and also in your work, like, can you talk a little bit about the longing and belonging of being an Italian American? Well, I
Gail Reitano:think it's similar to anyone who's come to this country because I think what this country does, there's the American overlay of being an American and it's very much capitalism and getting on and having a nicer house and you know, having your kids be better off than you are. And I think that's true for everybody. And then you have the history that you're dragging along behind you of who you really are in your soul or who your ancestors were even if you're three or four generations removed, there is that longing. So you're always gonna be pulled apart a little bit. You're always going to be this hybrid thing.
Gail Reitano:I mean, you travel to other countries with more homogenous populations, I don't know. Maybe people feel it there too in some other ways, but I think here it's marked.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Do you feel it sounds like in your description that you feel like the burden of the ancestors like on your shoulders. There's also in your work, the inspiration of the ancestors. It's kind of like like a double edged sword in a way. I love them.
Jennifer Barone:I do love them. I don't
Gail Reitano:but yes, there is a burden in the sense that I want to honor them and drag them into my present life. And that's not always so easy because I don't really understand what their lives were like in Italy. I don't think we can understand. We were talking before about people going to Italy now buying land, where can I go? But if this is home, I don't know.
Gail Reitano:I think we're Americans now. But the Italian part, we were Italians in my small New Jersey town. We weren't and my mother kept saying, but we're Americans, but we felt Italian, we were treated like we were Italian. So yeah, there's always going to be that push pull. I probably wouldn't be a writer if I didn't have that, you know, aware of that pull.
Jennifer Barone:In your community where you grew up, I'm sure you also maybe like myself had the support of Italian culture, although it's Italian American culture like you write about in Italian love cake, it's very specific. We have our own culture, I think, as Italian Americans. Things that we've invented, things even language as well as such as the Italian love cake, like, so recipes that are ours distinctly. Ly. Did you have the support system of like let's say bakeries, cultural institutions like kind of in reinforcing this identity as you were growing up?
Gail Reitano:Oh my God. Yes. I mean the markets, all the names on the storefronts were Italians and there were the cold cuts and there were the bakeries and oh my God, it was just so funny. In fact, my husband who's from New Zealand and actually Scottish, when he first came to my town, he noticed, I hadn't even noticed, he said, There are Italian names on every shop and storefront. And I went, Oh yeah, there are because it was like one big little Italy for us.
Jennifer Barone:In New Jersey too, as well as in Brooklyn and New York and those other pockets.
Gail Reitano:Well, yes, it was particular. Yes. It was like those for sure. I mean, those neighborhoods exist everywhere, but our town was pretty committed in that. And our town was there is, maybe, it's changing.
Gail Reitano:Very conservative politically, but very Italian American, the service organizations, the Sons of Italy, the Lions Club, very strong male service groups and fantastic. And living in the Pine Barrens with its natural, you know, fishing and hunting and all those things and my father loved to fish and, you know, so I did boy things with him and it was so it was this mix of just very rural and isolated and away from the rest of the world, but leaning towards Italy that we didn't even know or understand and just at the same time wanting to be ruthlessly American. So, it was odd.
Jennifer Barone:Are there things that you miss and things maybe that you also don't miss? Because now you're living in Bolinas, which is quite far removed from that environment, but maybe the connection that I'm seeing between those two environments in your work is this being really connected to the land. Like you're describing the Pine Barrens as a very natural reserve and so is Balinas. But are there things that you really miss about that community and maybe things like, I just wanted to get away from that or remove myself from for a time?
Gail Reitano:It's so changed. It was so long ago. I miss the harbor, the property that I grew up on. I mean, it was such a wonderland and it was kind of designed to be that way by my rich uncle. And it was this special place and I think the connection to the beauty of it, the incredible beauty of it and my sisters, my two sisters and I would just be roaming around in this environment, you know, it was set me up for disappointment.
Gail Reitano:No. It was really like a wonderland, it was really kind of gorgeous. But there a lot, there were family frictions, there were a lot of family problems, there was a lot of financial stuff that was strange, rivalries, failed businesses, successful businesses, so it wasn't just perfect. But yes, Balinas and living in a rural environment and the Bay Area was so much natural land and parks. I have to be in that kind of place.
Gail Reitano:Mhmm.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. It sounds like it you're connecting.
Gail Reitano:Yeah. They are definitely connected. Maybe not exactly twinned, but I do feel, I feel that it feeds feeds something deep.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. In your last passage that you just read, you touched on this subject of it was sort of different than the way most people perceive like Italian immigrant experience. Typically, the typical idea of an Italian American experience is come here. There's economic struggle. There's like the striving to, like, establish a life.
Jennifer Barone:But you you talked a little bit about growing up in places where businesses were thriving and there was almost a little bit more of a different class or a higher class, like a wealthier environment. Can you tell me how that shaped your perspective on the Italian immigrant experience and especially the struggles of class and what it's like to build a life here in The US?
Gail Reitano:Well, that boom that I lived through because I am the age that I am was the result of World War II. So, it was a very particular time. And in the decades since as a writer, I've come to view that in a real political lens. And so, when I wrote Italian Love Cake and I placed it in the nineteen thirty's in my grandmother's generation, it's not her story, the woman and she could be my grandmother, but she's not my grandmother, she's a fictional character. But I wanted to show the depression and what they went went through, my ancestors, when they first got here, and how it was a very different time.
Gail Reitano:And if I wrote a sequel, which I'm not planning to do, although I do have a file of notes, but I'm not planning it, I don't think. It would be interesting to drag that family then into that boom that was World War II. So, you know, my Italian American family were able to take advantage of that as many American families, of all backgrounds took advantage of it. It was a different time. But politics and economics, I've become really obsessed with it and especially with what we're living through now.
Gail Reitano:And when I first started to write Italian Love Cake, I felt a creeping fascism in this country. I think a lot of Americans have. Yes. You know? And writing about that period when Mussolini was so popular and the Italian fascist movement was strong in various towns including my hometown Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:At a very vibrant Italian fascist group. And my main character Marie Genovese, one of her younger brothers is involved with the fascists and 's an anti semitic hate crime, I mean things happen in the town. But I wanted to also center women and the family and food as the glue that was holding everybody together through all the terrible stuff that was going on because I believe in that, and that's I think Italian, but it's other cultures too. I believe in the power of food and family and that nurturing thing because when people feel happy and they're well fed, they're not violent, you know, mostly. So, I wanted to mix all those elements in.
Gail Reitano:Did that answer your question?
Jennifer Barone:I love the idea of food being able to save the world. And, like, bring I wanna say, like, almost stability and grounding to chaos because living in a fascist regime or in a war torn place is chaotic. And and what I'm hearing you describe as women being this like, grounding force, like, for not only their families, but culturally, like, for the community. They're also this what I kind of feel a little bit agro about personally is they're often this kind of, like, unfortunately nameless, voiceless, quiet, as you mentioned, stuck in the house. Like, they're providing so much for, like, our lives and for a culture Yes.
Jennifer Barone:Community in general. But we don't give them names. Like, we don't give them voices. We they're like sub characters or side characters in a book, but they're so crucial and so important. Can you talk to the importance of women in your work?
Gail Reitano:Boy, can I? I was waiting for that question. Well, that was a big reason for writing this book, Italian Love Cake, because I wanted to give a woman who was of my grandmother's generation growing up in the depression, coming of age in the depression, a big voice and have her really scream to be heard. She doesn't do a lot of screaming but she fights, she's got to fight. She's inherited a five and ten from her mother who dies on the verge of losing it constantly.
Gail Reitano:It was, you know, her father won it in a poker game, you know, it was just kind of complete fluke that she has this store. And I wanted to make her a feminist, and I did. Because my grandmother was totally feminist, I mean, didn't go around, you know, doing these rants or anything and she didn't. But my God, she knew her power, she knew how many balls she kept in the air, she knew that she was she could do anything, she refinished furniture, she was cooking all the time, she ran the blueberry farm, you know, she had her garden, she sewed beautiful suits for all of us, she would do these Chanel knock offs with Boucle, she'd buy this fabric. She was just this amazing woman and she was one of 10 kids, she was the fifth, and she ended up raising the ones who were younger than she was.
Gail Reitano:So she really had no life for ages and ages, and she did piecework in a factory and factory collapsed on her. There was a flood or something and the foundation gave way and her neck was permanently damaged. She was okay, but she was in this collar for a while. But she had this really immigrant life. But then the farm and my grandfather was very clever with his money, safe, careful with his money, they amassed a nice little nest egg.
Gail Reitano:They really, they just worked all the time. And I just wanted to revive her, but make her a feminist. And and that's what I did and I stand by that. Absolutely.
Jennifer Barone:I mean, there's also been a lot of controversy in Italy around sort of modern modern modernization of women and women's roles to the point where there's even been, I think, a national campaign to try to convince women to have children. I don't know if you've read about that.
Gail Reitano:I haven't.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. Because there's a population decrease in Italy. And so they're trying to like, increase the population. There's even been billboards and things like that around it. But can you speak a little bit about, yeah, this kind of idea of modern women, modern Italian women, and the role of childbearing that is appearing in your book?
Gail Reitano:Yes. In fact, I guess the next excerpt I'm going to read is Marie, my main character gets pregnant. Her boyfriend, her lover is married. He's a very wealthy man in town. And so it's outrageous and terrible.
Gail Reitano:And so she attempts a herbal abortion and that's the section that I'll read. I think that this is happening everywhere, this urge to have turned back the time when, women were just slaves in the home. I'm not I shouldn't use the word slaves perhaps, but unpaid labor kind of forced through economics in the home. And it's bad. It's bad and it's not what women want and we're not going back.
Gail Reitano:So, my view is I'm, you know, absolutely pro choice and absolutely for all kinds of freedoms and I'm definitely a committed feminist on that score. Should I read? Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:Should I read An excerpt from Italian love cake.
Gail Reitano:Okay. So the setup is it's 1939. Five and Marie's five and ten is failing. The depression is still lingering. She hasn't heard from her wealthy lover in days.
Gail Reitano:Her brother Gino is full in with the fascists now and listening to father Coughlin on the radio and getting into fights, and Marie discovers she's pregnant. At home, I sat in the living room enjoying the violet dusk. I delayed for as long as possible the drawing curtains, the turning on of lamps. After a while, I went to put water on for tea, and at the moment I returned to the quiet living room in the fading light, I felt a presence. At first, I thought it was Sammy, or I hoped.
Gail Reitano:Sammy is the nice younger brother, not the terrible Gino who's the fascist. Knowing of course that he was in Camden with Gloria, I waited for the sound of his door opening, his slow shuffle to the bathroom or the kitchen, a sound that real or imagined gave me comfort. But when I looked around, all I saw was the old furniture. My mother's doilies placed on thinning armrests and the fresh dusted break front minus the cut crystal bowl. That's another story.
Gail Reitano:I went into kitchen and took down the small envelope of artemisia. How should I grind it? How to disguise a gritty texture or bitterness? Mom, where are you? She was at rest in the ex voto, lying by the materia medica, That quarto of frayed leather with its sharp drying edges.
Gail Reitano:She was among her sweaters and books. She was everywhere. Someone wrapped her arms around me and with a stirring rattle, I dropped my measuring spoons. Guided by a strange force, I emptied the full contents of the envelope into a pot of peppermint tea. Yesterday, Ruth had casually mentioned that the doctor in Roseview was no longer seeing patients.
Gail Reitano:She was hesitant to tell me and surprised when I took it so well. Even if we had to travel to Philly or New York, she said she would help me find someone. To raise a child alone without enough to provide for that child was like baking a cake without ingredients, running a store without stock, or putting food on the table without money. Already I had spent too much of my young life doing these things, alone and in the full glare of the town, I would be shunned. I took a sip of the tea and with that first taste, only slightly bitter, I went into the x photo.
Gail Reitano:That's this little room where Marie keeps all her dead mother's things. To check on the instructions one more time, the Materia Medica fell open to the well used page. According to a doctor Trotula from Salerno, mugwort was the recommended ant idote to the result of love along with its mother herb Artemisia named after the goddess of fertility, marriage, childbirth. Artemis was also known as a protector of women and children and I saw no contradiction in her many roles which to my mind corresponded perfectly to the complicated lives of women. The book recommended the use of both Artemisia and Pennyroyal but I've been unable to get the latter.
Gail Reitano:It said the tea should be taken three times a day for five days and five days only after which you were in danger of having your kidneys quit. I took another generous sip. I went to bed early. My sleep was dreamless. Should I stop there?
Jennifer Barone:Yeah, that's perfect. What I think is really fascinating about that is like, I'm curious how much research you did to find out like some of those herbs or even the materia medica. I feel like there's a wave of young Italian American women who are getting really interested in Italian folk traditions, connections to herbalism. And I even found the last time I was in Italy, one of the oldest schools of medicine, which was around Sularno, they have a gorgeous herb garden garden that's called the Garden Of Minerva and we're talking about Greek, Greco Roman times where women were teachers, women were writers of medicine, which we don't normally feel like that in American culture. But we had Italian American, Italian women, you know, doctors back in the ancient times and also teachers, at this medical school, which is so cool to me.
Jennifer Barone:But how did you do your research around the herbal abortification
Gail Reitano:herbs? Well, was so funny because, and you're right, women have always been herbalists going back thousands and thousands Yeah. Of It's ancient. Well, it was interesting because when I first had the concept for the book and I was looking up A Board of Fashions, like kind of a long time ago, I don't remember. It came out in 2001, 02/20/2021.
Gail Reitano:And I guess I started the book in '17 or something like that, and there was very little that I could find on the Internet about Aborta Fascians. It was and I got some various books. And then as I continue to research, which I do throughout the process process and refining the book and honing and editing and going back on, is there anything I've missed? There was more and more and more and more about a board of fashions. Between like 02/1718 and it just kept going.
Gail Reitano:And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:Just on track with the undoing of Roe v Wade, So there was more more freely talked about and young women, Italian American and otherwise, discussing it in blogs and
Jennifer Barone:forums. And podcasts.
Gail Reitano:And podcasts. Yeah. And podcasts.
Jennifer Barone:And writing books now about it.
Gail Reitano:Yes. It's
Jennifer Barone:amazing. Also, I think is interesting, Ty, about mugwort. So, of course, we had mugwort in Italian folk tradition Mediterranean. But the native indigenous people here also used mugwort, you know, including the Miwoks and, you know, in in this land that we're inhabiting here. So yeah.
Jennifer Barone:Did you find anything interesting that tied to ancestral traditions for you in that research?
Gail Reitano:Not with America so much. Well, yes, fennel. My mother had this memory of these fields of fennel near the high school and she would be walking along with her girlfriends and holding hands and she would talk about the smell of fennel which of course is anise there's a lot of anise in my novel. In fact at some point someone said you should call it the Taste of Anise, but I kept it Italian love cake anyway. But yes, there are definitely echoes of that.
Gail Reitano:But I think also in doing my new book which is set in the Southern New Jersey Pine Barrens and about the ecology there specifically, I'm encountering all these herbs and rituals done by the Native American people that were the in Southern New Jersey. Well, actually in other places in New Jersey too. Maybe not even so much in the South, although they did come through. I'm reading about all these rituals having to do with various trees, leaves, leaves and twigs and fronds and burning rituals. And I haven't delved into what the women in the book did with with herbs, but it's time immemorial that this has been used.
Gail Reitano:And of course, there's the promise that there are things in the forest that could cure everything that ails us and that is always a thing in science. Absolutely.
Jennifer Barone:Most medicines are coming coming from that. Yep. Yeah. Like most, you know, over the counter or even medications are coming originally from that. Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. I mean, with well, right now, we have Italian American heritage month and oftentimes, you know, people are upholding images of like Columbus, you know. But you're writing about like indigenous like culture of the pine barons. Like, do you see some kind of parallel there? Like, what what inspired you to get into that subject matter?
Gail Reitano:Well, just living there, being grown up there, and also there's a big fire element there. The the Pine Barrens burn, they always have every summer. Spring is the worst time actually, starting like late March, April, May except there's no really bad time now. It's happening all the time like it
Jennifer Barone:is here. Is that because of climate change?
Gail Reitano:Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. And the book is very centered centered along that. And Indians of course, Native Americans had burning rituals in the Pine Barrens.
Gail Reitano:In fact, they do still do burning rituals. And I'm just scratching the surface of this because they have historically burned to prepare the land to clear it, so the hunting was easier, so they could get animals for food, going back thousands of years. So, their relationship to fire is very healthy and very medicinal and very purposeful. So, I've been doing a lot of research about that. And, the people growing up in the pines who call themselves Pineaese, not non native Americans, just you know, English, Scottish, Irish, Huguenot, French Huguenot, a whole kind of melt because people would go to the pine berths to hide.
Gail Reitano:I mean going way back like Revolutionary War time, people would straggle off and they would end up in the Southern New Jersey pine barrens because it's a 1,100,000 acre pine forest with towns in it like the one where I grew up, but it is a very special hidden unique ecology. In fact, it's a biosphere, it's a UNESCO biosphere, it was one of the first to be named in 1976. So that means it's worth studying geographically, its soils, flora fauna, its social customs, its folklore. So it is a complete system. It sounds mystical and
Jennifer Barone:magical. Some
Gail Reitano:people think it's boring because you you enter it, it's all flat and it's pines as far as the eye can see and they think, okay, this is probably dull. But it is just, the more you get to know it, the more incredible it is.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Have you had that experience of finding the mystical and the magical and the nature of Italy as well in your travels there?
Gail Reitano:Oh, God. I'm worried about this question because I want to, I want to and I have on various holidays, I most definitely have, but I'd be lying if I said I knew it well and embarrassed to say despite the fact that two sides of my family come from Naples and Sicily, I've really mainly traveled in Central Italy. So I you know, I come from, my ancestors come from Genoa, Rome, Naples, and Sicily. And we would just, when we lived in England, my husband and I were in London for twelve years, we would just go running to Tuscany whenever we could. And now, I'm more adventurous.
Gail Reitano:We're older and now the South, I want to know. I want to get down there and I so I'll be calling you for lists
Jennifer Barone:of Oh yeah.
Gail Reitano:I'll come meet you. Come meet me and you can order. Yeah. You can order in the restaurants, please. Yeah, I'm a little far removed in three generations, four generations we ditched the language.
Gail Reitano:I mean my grandmother was really good at languages and some of the people that worked on the blueberry, on their blueberry farm spoke Spanish, and my grandmother could rattle it off, my grandmother could speak Italian, but really she only spoke English. And my mother made sure that she only spoke English and they were just, they ditched it. They ditched it.
Jennifer Barone:I kind of You're bringing me to this topic that I personally feel like our grandparents had shame around not speaking English, but I feel as an Italian American, like, a strange shame for not speaking Italian. So I've had to actively learn it, and I feel like language opens these kind of mystical doors to connecting to the ancestors. And it's very important for Italian Americans to sort of regain that language. But then also for us to go back to Italy and explore our heritage, we really have to be very active, actively invested. We have to spend time, money, like, journey there, really try to use language to connect, either reconnect to family.
Jennifer Barone:It's a lot of effort. Have you had that experience?
Gail Reitano:Well, yes. I think in general, the way I like to travel anyway is to be immersed and stick in one place for a bit and watch people go by and talk to people in a very real just one to one way. Not the Instagram photos of the Trevi Fountain and all that, you know. So, I find traveling hard these days because there are so many people traveling, but I think it's probably very easy to pick your little fishing village or someplace off the beaten track and that's kind of traveling I need to do. But for me to learn the language, I'll have to be there for a period of time.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah.
Gail Reitano:I won't be able to just dip in and out. I've taken lessons here and they've been very competitive the groups I've been in and I just was like my great grandmother who thought I'm not learning English, I'm staying home. I felt a little intimidated. I have to be there. I have to be with the person speaking
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. I in
Gail Reitano:a real situation.
Jennifer Barone:I love trying to speak Italian but I know I'm always making mistakes but like I have to really fight through this fear and shame in order to speak it because I'm Yes. It feels awkward to be an Italian American and not be able really speak Italian fluently. But we had that break Yeah. In generations where in one generation we lost our language. Yes.
Jennifer Barone:And so, it's a kind of a burden. We really have to be active about reclaiming it. But when you say you wanna go off the beaten path these days, because I find that yeah. Everyone's first trip to Italy is always Rome, Venice, Florence. But then what's the what's off the beaten path for you now?
Jennifer Barone:Like are there places in Italy where you're just like, I really wanna explore this kind of
Gail Reitano:Well, South. Yeah. I really wanna check out the South.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:And I will definitely go back to Rome and I would like to do sort of the more touristy Amalfi Coast kind of places just to eyeball them. Yeah. I'd like to go to Milan because I love fashion and Milan was always and I worked in fashion in New York and I think, okay. I'd love to go to Milan. Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:If it is still the fashion capital, I don't even know.
Jennifer Barone:What did you do? What did you do in fashion?
Gail Reitano:I worked for Women's Wear Daily and W Magazine.
Jennifer Barone:I worked for Conde Nast.
Gail Reitano:You did? Okay. Here we go. We'll have to take this. We'll have to do a deep dive at some point.
Gail Reitano:I mean Italians have to talk about clothes. Yes. That has to happen. Right? Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:Yeah. So, there are a lot of places I wanna go to. But I'm usually just at my desk writing and it's
Jennifer Barone:Have you written in Italy when you go?
Gail Reitano:Only in my diary. Yeah. You know, never on a project. Okay. But that would be cool to to spend a chunk of time, wouldn't it?
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. I wanted to talk to you a little bit too about Italian American writing communities because you're you're being asked to be on panels. You're kind of flying around reading around the country. Is is there a difference that you find in Italian American writing groups, let's say, on the East Coast from where you're from as opposed to the West Coast?
Gail Reitano:Well, yes. And I wonder if it's because I'm not as immersed in I'm just getting my foot into what's here and I'm now the West Bay Area representative of the National Organization for Italian American Women. Excellent. Which was started twenty three years ago by Geraldine Ferraro and this doctor, I'm gonna not get her last name correct, I think her last name is Sisley, Sisley, S I s l e y. Anyway, two really great women who saw a need and that's based on the East Coast, I do see a difference.
Gail Reitano:I think that there's a big group of Italian American writers in and around Boston and I'm in touch with them in New York. And they just have a more intact ethnic culture if I can put it like that. Maybe because the California Italians are older, were here longer, arrived earlier, maybe more assimilated, maybe Swiss Italians, there might be a difference. The East Coast feels more like where I grew up in Southern Jersey. It feels more well, a Southern Italy concentration for sure, not Swiss Italians so much.
Gail Reitano:So I wonder if those regional differences influence the assimilation once everybody got here. But I'm loving it because it's so proud. Yes. And I was raised to like, You're not Italian, we're really your rich uncle's living in this English Tudor house and you're living on this estate, you're not an Italian. And then I go back and they're having these huge family meals and everybody's talking really loudly.
Gail Reitano:We did that too. We did that too. But I don't know, it just feels like home. And it's great. And I feel a little bit like I'm hanging out here, but I'm really determined to because there are Italians here and I want to believe that Italians are Italians are Italians.
Gail Reitano:If there'll be some connection and it's happening, it's starting, it's starting to happen.
Jennifer Barone:Do you consider yourself like a pioneer in this world of Italian American literature? Well, that's I
Gail Reitano:mean, I'm just gonna sound like I'm completely full of myself if I say yes, but I do a little bit. Good. I do because that's very much in my nature to want to be a pioneer. Hope I aspire to it. Yeah.
Gail Reitano:I do a little bit. I do a little bit.
Jennifer Barone:That's wonderful. Yeah. Do you see do you see maybe some resources like burdening also on the West Coast in this fashion or do you think it would take some work to get us there? No.
Gail Reitano:I feel like it is it's being kick started. The East Coast is pushing. Cool. And they're pushing me and others. And at first I was going, No, I'm a writer, I'm writing.
Gail Reitano:But now, you know, I'm stepping out a little bit more. There's something at the Italian athletic club right around the corner here, in and I'm not gonna I I really should give them a plug, now I'm not, okay. Just landed in my inbox, so I don't know what it is. So I'm not gonna say it, but there is an event and Is it coming up soon? Yes.
Gail Reitano:Yes. And a writer that I wasn't familiar with, but I need to start plugging actually. She's going to be interviewed by Christina Pelosi.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm.
Gail Reitano:And I'm going to be there. And so, it's these events are to happen Great. And that's really good. And it's really in its infancy. And then I'm going to the East Coast in early November to be on a panel at Moncler University to talk about Italian diaspora women.
Gail Reitano:Yes. And I'm not an academic. I'm a writer only. Not exclusively.
Jennifer Barone:It's wonderful. It's so great to hear that these things are happening. It's really inspiring. I guess I want to land our interview with this last question, which is, what do you wanna leave people with with your work, the way you're heading towards? But then also, do you have any advice for, like, young up and coming writers, especially in the Italian American community, also women writers who are trying to find community, trying to maybe approach these topics of their heritage even though it's a struggle, it's an effort to get into that space, to reclaim it in some way for themselves in a in a way that's authentic.
Jennifer Barone:But, yeah. Do you have any kind of advice that you'd like to give to young writers who are coming into the space? Italian American writers? Sure.
Gail Reitano:Read us, you know. Read the literature. Come to this fabulous bookstore. Just read. Read it.
Gail Reitano:My publisher for Italian Love Cake, first novel, Bordeguera Press, that's a good place to start. It's published the old greats like Helen Barolini and who wrote Christ in Concrete. They published a lot of the old classic, Louise DeSalvo, but all new voices. So many new voices and so, and a lot of poetry. So if that's your thing, but I'd say read us because we're all writing about the same thing and that was a surprise to me to discover.
Gail Reitano:I thought I had this unique story that was so incredibly unique. And then everyone's book I pick up, go, you too? Really? That happened to you? That's what you think?
Gail Reitano:And it was comforting. It was great because I felt so alone in it like this is weird, full of shame. This might be very Italian. We could do a whole other program on Italian shame.
Jennifer Barone:We think we're alone, but really we're connected. We're all connected
Gail Reitano:and we're all doing the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. So that was comforting.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. Love that so much.
Gail Reitano:So do read us because we have had we have been sometimes a little ghettoized in our, in fact, Bordeguera Press, the way they started thirty four years ago was in need because Purdue University, the founders were teaching there and so many of their literature students were saying, Italian American students were saying, I've got a letter, I got a note from this agent turning me down saying, put some food in your book mafia and we can sell it. Oh my goodness. I mean that's on the nose and they just got fed up with that kind of very lazy cultural shorthand for, you know, leave me alone. So that's different. That's different.
Gail Reitano:That's, you know, that's changed. Mhmm. That's changed. But we do need a readership and we need some mentors. Yes.
Gail Reitano:Very much so.
Jennifer Barone:And I think you're you're one of them. Right? You're coming into that space.
Gail Reitano:No. I'm looking for one.
Jennifer Barone:I love it. Well, you know, always I think what I love about your writing and what I see coming forward from the Italian American community is we might be touching on these kind of tried and true subjects, but you're putting this new spin on it. And there's always evolution of how we're perceiving ourselves as Italian Americans, how we're perceiving also our ancestry and in the past too. So I love that you're bringing that perspective forward in a new light Thank you. Writers and readers alike.
Gail Reitano:So Lovely to hear.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. Thank you, Gail. Thank you. I just wanna thank you so much for sharing your words and your process with us, your perspective, your your heritage. It's been just such a pleasure to hear your work and to
Gail Reitano:Great questions, Jennifer. Thank you.
Jennifer Barone:Thank you. And to speak with you today, feel so honored. For listeners who would like to learn more about Gail Reitano and her work, you can visit gail reitano dot com and find her books at your local independent bookstores, including right here at Telegraph Hill Books. Thank you, Gail.
Gail Reitano:Thank you.
Jennifer Barone:This podcast is brought to you by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review. Visit TelHiLit.org to find out about our local events such as author talks, writing workshops, and more. Consider making a donation to support our public programs. If you are a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we'd love to hear from you.
Jennifer Barone:Reach out to us at submissions@telhighlit.org. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Jennifer Barone along with Joseph Carboni at Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. And this has been Voices from the Hill. Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, stay inspired, and come visit us at Telegraph Hill Books in North Beach, San Francisco.