Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

I grew up in Wisconsin well before climate change. The landscape cued feelings. Long winters and treks in freezing conditions gave us a sense of sturdiness. Spring brought a rush of desire of all sorts and we uncovered our skin. Nature was a book of immense power beyond the domestic conformity that limited life. Women were silent. African-Americans didn't have the freedoms whites had. Native Americans lived on forlorn reservations. These social and psychological realities were solid oppressive presences, as determining as extreme heat now and catastrophic tornados and floods.  I knew very early that I would speak out. Not in one or two years, not always consciously, but in a long dialogue with experience, beauty, loss, injustice, I claimed a self that was a poet, a writer.  I still resonate to the name for this --"a calling".

After graduating from the University of Michigan, I lived in Oxford, England, New York City, London, Rome, Palo Alto, California and finally, Parma, Italy. By disposition, I was not one to shed pasts, to seek novelties.  Yet that's what my choices and actions led me to do. Writing as a reason to live has usually been precarious. It offers a challenge that lies outside of secure solutions.  All along the way, I experienced an unstoppable interest in voices that had been supressed or not listened to. I kept discovering huge spaces where narrative could be filled in. When I rooted in Parma, I found stability that made writing possible and bourgeois limits that made creativity ever more necessary.  I could never find permanent work in the city, so I taught and worked elsewhere.

I began to be fascinated by listening, by narration and how many ways a story could be told. I started  workshops that encouraged people to use writing to voice their stories.  I have listened to the stories of illegal immigrants and legal ones, priests and nuns in foreign lands, doctors who have no time for patients, cross cultural transplants. The longer I listen to people who do not even wish to be writers but wish to make distinctions, to revive memories, to witness, the more hope I feel for how many people have inner strength. The longer I live, the more I see how many new ways there are to tell things.

 Living in Italy has meant that every day is an extraordinary apprenticeship. The rough gravel in culture, the impossibilities of ideology, the richness of multiple viewpoints are part of expression and truth-telling.  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 time is waiting for rich, contrasting stories we have not heard or imagined. Yet as people, women, aboveall,  find their voices, others with powerful interests find ways to repress those same voices. It seems truth and lies, slogans and half truths are racing for people's trust. Using words, finding the right ones, should make us poets and meditators, rather than communicators hypnotized by analytics and strategizing. 

I teach in Europe and the U.S.: Columbia University, Boston College, MontClair State, Sarah Lawrence, the Camillianum in Rome; I lecture widely, and was 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, I continue to marvel at how words can and do and will change lives if they give us courage and vision.

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.