AUR LitPut III Spring 2023 - From Now To Then
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria. The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced). The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta. Rome, May 2023
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is
having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria.
The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced).
The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta.
Rome, May 2023
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Memoir<br />
Tampa to Pensacola, where we had to stop at a gas station to ‘wait-out’ the tropical storm that was<br />
ripping up streetlights and tossing oak trees in our path.<br />
In the gas station bathroom, I asked my sister if she thought Dad was a good driver. She said<br />
that it didn’t matter because we didn’t know how to drive, and he wouldn’t let his girlfriend drive anyway.<br />
I was a small nail-biting know-it-all blossoming into a young woman with a full-blown anxiety<br />
disorder. Once my sister and I were the only two occupants of the girl’s bathroom, I nervously whispered<br />
to her: “You know, the reason we eat pancakes five nights a week is because Bisquick is cheap<br />
and dad is poor. If he gets pulled over they will take all the money we have left for this trip and we<br />
won’t even have any more money for Bisquick. And if he gets pulled over while he is smoking pot, the<br />
police will have to take us away.” My sister shrugged as if I’d told her the earth was round.<br />
We had already been driving 12 hours by the time we reached Texas. I let out a big sigh from<br />
the back of the car when we crossed the state line, trying to signal to daddy that I felt for him. Back in<br />
Florida, he had told me that Texas was the “driest, most miserable shithole” imaginable and that it’d<br />
be the last challenge of our 30-hour drive. I’d never been to Texas and I’d only feigned compassion so<br />
Dad would know I loved him; what I hadn’t expected was that all of what he’d said was true except<br />
that he’d failed to mention the infinity of the shithole. My dad’s girlfriend, Megan, tried to lull me to<br />
sleep, gently assuring me I wouldn’t miss anything if I slept for a couple of hours. But I could not sleep<br />
because I knew that if my eyes weren’t on the road I could not be sure that my dad’s were either. Every<br />
time I thought his head was bobbing I twisted my neck to look at his face, certain that he was nodding<br />
off and that we were going to fly into the metal barrier at 100mph.<br />
The cracking Texan land sprawled on and on in the night, the blinking lights of RV grounds<br />
and fuel stations dancing to Roger Water’s guitar solos that penetrated the otherwise silent car. I<br />
wondered about this grandma whom I’d never met before. Until I was eleven years old, I assumed that<br />
my paternal grandfather’s Scottish wife was my biological grandmother though I had probably been<br />
told otherwise. I was perplexed when my father said to me that I had another grandmother, his biological<br />
mother, in Arizona. I knew that we were visiting because her husband had just passed, and my<br />
father had offered to help clean his estate. Earlier in the drive, my dad had told my sister and me about<br />
an incident from his childhood: when he was ten years old, he returned home from school to find his<br />
mother being carried away in a stretcher after a botched suicide attempt. When she passed him on the<br />
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