Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

I grew up in Wisconsin. White drifts and perilous ice shaped our spirits until black branches gave way to tender green. Domesticated nature was a book of immense power. It cued our feelings. What was called ourselves was fed a very simple history: pioneer stories of different generations. Women were silent. African-Americans didn't have the freedoms white people had. Native Americans lived on forlorn reservations. These discrepent realities struck me deeply as a child. I knew very early that to find light as a writer, to understand with my heart, I would destroy as well as discover things.

After graduating from the University of Michigan, I lived in Oxford, England, New York City, London, Rome, Palo Alto, California and finally, Parma, Italy. When I rooted in Parma, the stories of inter-twined generations and the city's proximity to nature, albeit a grander scale, made it a close fit to my early life, in spite of radically different histories. The longer I looked, the more I saw how much there was to tell in new ways.

 Living in Italy has meant that every day is an extraordinary apprenticeship in understanding--beauty, differences, origins. As we face a period when so much is reversing itself, the need to describe and translate the world falls to voices that have grown strong by experiencing the breaks and multiplicities in worlds.  This is a time waiting for rich, contrasting stories we have not heard or imagined. 

I teach in Europe and the U.S.: Columbia University, Boston College, MontClair State, Sarah Lawrence, the Camillianum in Rome; I lecture widely, and am a founding member of the Ledig-Rowohlt International Writers Residence in Lavigny, Switzerland. There I read the work of more than 500 writers from 65 countries. There, as in workshops I have held with doctors and patients, writers using two languages, semester long classes with undergraduate students of poetry and essay, I continue to marvel at how words can change lives.

Words without Borders is an essential online magazine for anyone interested in World Literature.

Parma is an extraordinary city, whose layers speak even before the Paleolithic. It became a Roman colony in 183 BCE. Bishops started constructing the present cathedral more than 900 years ago. An order of Benedictine nuns, noble women in the city, were granted a special dispensation to be self-governing in 1187. People have worked the land on the plain and in the hills for millennia--thus Parma cheese, Parma ham. 

A very fine view of the city can be seen in this video made by MontClaire State University. It was shot while I worked with them in Parma organizing a festival on Italian life.