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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Travel<br />
my eyes open. I should probably have spent the time planning activities for my solo weekend but I<br />
tapped open a dating app instead. I was convinced I had used up all my bad luck for at least a few days<br />
so I changed my location to Valletta and searched for friends. In my sleep deprived state, this seemed<br />
like a great idea; who better to show Malta to me than someone who lived there?<br />
I landed a few hours later with notifications popping up from the app. Emilia, Will, Isaiah,<br />
Malaika, and <strong>To</strong>by wanted to be friends. I tapped through profiles: Will was visiting from New York.<br />
Not a contender. Emilia was busy this weekend. Malaika didn’t respond. <strong>To</strong>by’s profile gave me a<br />
prickly, unsettled feeling and I unmatched his account. Isaiah said he was free after his architecture<br />
class today and would I be interested in a walk this afternoon? His profile looked a little too good to<br />
be true, but I gave him my number. I got on a bus to Mdina and a few minutes later I got a message,<br />
but it was not Isaiah. It was a panicked stream of texts from Sofie: she had slept through her alarm,<br />
she had just booked a new flight for 8pm, she was so sorry about everything. I was surprised when I<br />
realized that I was disappointed my solo trip was being cut short.<br />
And now, sitting next to the fountain, meeting up with Isaiah seems like a ridiculous plan.<br />
The morning of traveling and exploring Mdina was tiring and as I scan the crowd I think about how<br />
easy it would be to get up from this bench, walk back to the hotel, block his number, and not meet<br />
this stranger from the internet. I smoke a cigarette and think about worst case scenarios. Maybe it is<br />
a human trafficking scheme that will end up splashed across a news headline in a few days. Maybe it<br />
will just be a painfully awkward social encounter that I would be happier to avoid. I decide to leave as<br />
soon as I finish another cigarette but suddenly he's here, taller than I expected. Or rather, he did not lie<br />
about being 6’3. His jaw is weaker than it looked in the pictures and I'm reminded that I don’t know<br />
this man at all.<br />
“Hi! It’s so nice to meet you, I’m Isaiah.” He smiles wide and kisses me on both cheeks. He has<br />
a thick accent but a slow, calm voice. My gut tells me he probably isn’t a kidnapper and I hope it's true.<br />
We walk up and down the hilly streets of Valletta, the capital. Isaiah is getting his masters in<br />
architecture, has lived here for over two decades, and knows something about every single building.<br />
This area to our right was bombed during WWII. That open air market over there has been around<br />
for centuries. The cathedral ahead marks where St John's knights pushed back the invading Turks. He<br />
asks if I am getting bored hearing about so much history and I tell him this is much better than most<br />
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