You Can Go Home Again!

I just returned from Wales, land of my birth, where I visited family and friends, something I try to do once a year. Sadly, one of my three cousins died since my last visit. The remaining two are in their 80’s, so these visits become more important to me each year.

My daughter, her husband and their six-year-old son accompanied me. We stayed on a sheep farm between Cardiff and Newport. I’m not a nature guy, but seeing how carefully my grandson bottle-fed this motherless lamb filled my heart with joy.

At Tintern Abbey I met up with friend, former student and colorful twin from Atlantic City, Tammy Lindsay, who’s been living, writing and teaching over the border in England for twenty years.

At The Big Pit National Coal Museum we took the lift down 300 feet and wandered through the damp dark wearing helmet lamps to learn what it was like to be a miner. What I suspected is true. The only thing worse than being a coal miner was being a coal miner’s wife.

On the left is The Windsor Castle in Newport, the pub where my parents met and fell in love during WW II, and where I lived for the first three years of my life. We stopped in for the Sunday Roast which is superb. And a three minute walk from The Windsor Castle is THE CAB, home to Reality Theatre which hosted a reading I did from my memoir, A Tipsy Fairy Tale.

I read and answered questions, read and answered questions, read and answered questions. And then I got excited reading this bit about my father on D-Day. The book includes pictures of him on a cliff at Normandy.

Some old and new friends turned out at The Cab to hear me read. It seems none of them had ever come across a book in which Newport was featured so prominently.

It was extremely moving to read from my story in the place where it began. I am grateful to all who attended and to Juls Benson (wearing red), founder of Reality Theatre, for hosting me.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa had this to say about A Tipsy Fairy Tale:  “This poignant memoir accentuates through a love of poetry, nature, and human nature which the speaker cannot help but honor.”

Enjoy this book-tease for A Tipsy Fairy Tale created by Michael DiGiorgio.

Here are some upcoming events you might be interested in.

May 3 – 9:15 am - 4:00 pm – Memoir Workshop Facilitator – Writing in the Pines, Stockton University, Galloway, NJ

June 1 – Reading and book signing with Joel Dias-Porter, Karen Duffy and Moneeba Khan, Watershed Literary Series, South Orange, NJ

August 10-15 – Memoir Workshop Facilitator – Live Free & Write, A New Hampshire Getaway for Writers, Sunapee, NH

August 28 – Memoir Workshop Facilitator – “Writing About Wales…And Yourself,” North American Festival of Wales, Ottawa, CN

October 2 – Reading and Interview at the Collingswood Book Festival, Collingswood, NJ Details TBA