Goals
The Italian Diaspora Writing Retreat 2023 aims at establishing a broad transnational perspective on the Italian diaspora through a residential writing program, that focuses on the South of Italy and on the importance of historical heritage. It is by visiting and experiencing the original locales of the diaspora that the concept of historical heritage becomes a living, breathing reality. Our programs are founded on experiential learning and on the richness of perspectives through varied lenses, such as gender, class, and ethnicity.
We will explore the experience of traveling as one that changes us and reshapes our interior landscapes. One particular area of interest that may arise in the course of the retreat is the relationship between writing and photography, since both mediums reinforce each other, in that their power is often drawn from narrative, whether hidden or obvious. Moreover, every writer and every photographer must continuously develop their observational skills and “collect” images to represent the deeper aspects of self and experience. Participants will be invited to take photographs of places and people of Calabria and to find, through their photographs, inspiration to write.
One of the most important goals of our program is to publish a book that will be the sequel to Celebrating Calabria: Writing Heritage and Memory (Rubbettino, 2020), a book that came out of the 2019 Italian Diaspora Studies Program. This follow-up book will be bilingual and will include literary pieces selected by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and translated into Italian by Margherita Ganeri, as well as fifty selected photographs of Cetraro and the surrounding area.