Toward the end of my time in Italy (August 1992-January 2000), I joined the nascent International Women’s Forum Bologna, designed the logo, and for a short time took over the newsletter layout after designer Ann Rathkopf of Maiarelli Studio swapped Bologna for Brooklyn.
It was a full-circle moment when some friends from those days got in touch and asked to write about my experiences in vox@bo, the IWF’s journal. The article on pages 10-11 is followed by my flash fiction piece, “His Bones,” which was shortlisted in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize in 2024 and anthologized in Transformations.
Rekindling contact with the IWF was fortuitous because it led to forming a writing group with one of my friends from that time, Ann Gagliardi, whom I’d originally met in high school. Our five-strong group of novel writers now meets online every three weeks.