Diary

Never can say good-bye….
I’m back home after 33 days of if not total bliss, daily doses of beauty on the Italian riviera, the part known as the “levante.” We all know

Paradise almost lost….
In a few days we will be leaving our beautiful temporary home, where even on stormy days the seascape that surrounds us is sublime. Now, after what seemed

Reading the signs in Bogliasco, continued
It continues to rain and the sun remains an iffy prospect, but there have finally been signs of spring. On the passeggiata there are buds and leaves where

Reading the signs in Bogliasco
Walking to and from the passeggiata, in and out of the tiny alleyways between the main road and the sea, I encountered these interesting examples of graffiti. The

La Passeggiata
The high point of the day for most of us at the Fondazione, as well as for the inhabitants of the town of Bogliasco, is its famous passeggiata

Bogliasco
After a long, long plane trip—including 3 hours sitting in the plane on the ground at JFK as we waited for de-icing, and 4 hours in Roissy airport

The Conversant
A few years ago, when Jeff Williams was the editor of the Minnesota Review, he interviewed me about my journey as a feminist critic. Recently, Andy Fitch, founder

Girls Write Now
This past Saturday, I took myself down to the journalism workshop at Girls Write Now. This month’s topic was travel writing. Since I like to travel and report about

Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books, the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need now, in my eighties, to imagine what new writing might be.