Feisty Women Anthology

What's an Orphans' Wheel, anyway?

The Feisty Women Anthology will launch on June 8, Women Fiction Day. It’s been thrilling to add my story, The Orphans’ Wheel, to this collection of tales of women who’ve pushed against the tide of social expectations.

The Orphans’ Wheel is the first chapter in my second book of the same name. This is an interview I gave in connection with my story.

1.    How did this story come to you and how did you get the idea for your Feisty Female Character? 

My story is based on my own family's history. Rosina was my great-great-great grandmother. When doing research at the Town Hall in Partanna, Sicily, I discovered that she had borne my great-great-grandfather out of wedlock and placed him in the orphan's wheel. It took more than forty years, but Rosina eventually reclaimed her son and gave him her family name.  

2.    What’s your writing process/routine?

For both this story and my first book, Seeds of the Pomegranate, I had endings but didn't know how the main characters, Mimi, my great-great-great grandaunt, and Rosina, my great-great-great grandmother had reached those ends. So I worked backward, using the historical record and my sense of what might be possible, to decide how to proceed. 

3.    What was the hardest part of writing this story?

Freeing myself to consider the hopes and dreams of a woman I knew only from a great distance. Rosina was my grandfather's great-grandmother. She died at age 90 in a New York City tenement fire and so I knew her only as a tragic though important figure in my grandfather's life. Knowing what I knew about her as an old woman, I had to work backward and consider who she might have been as a young woman, trying to navigate tremendous social and political changes in Sicily.  

4.  How do you select your character’s names? These were the characters' real names.

5.    Describe your writing space. Right now, I'm working in my studio in the Adirondack Mountains. For many years, though, I haunted the New York City libraries and archives, trying to get a handle on my family history, much of which was hidden from view. 

6.    Do you only write Historical Fiction or do you write other genres?

I write creative non-fiction, children's literature, and poems.

7.    What question do you wish someone would ask you about yourself and/or your story and no one has?

How much of yourself finds its way into your story?