A Legend of Four Sisters: Memories of #Greek #Matriarchs… #Booktrope #flashfiction #Greekculture #family
Someday soon they will find their way into a novel of their own, someday soon I will immortalize them with my prose. It’s only right to share the tale of those four sisters: Catherine (my maternal grandmother) Mary, Iphiyenia, and Caroline. A beautiful quartet who immigrated to America from Greece and took their new home […]
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Won’t You Stay Forever? On Long Lost Relatives, #Greek Village Life, & #Flashfiction
Last week’s blog on kindness and hospitality in the Greek culture–from the time of Homer, in which Odysseus often relied on the generosity of strangers to find his way home, to modern day Greece where natives welcome both tourists and refugees with the same open-heartedness–got me thinking about a particular adventure I had with my […]
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A #Greek Bearing Gifts: On #Kindness, #Homeric Epics, and Culture. #MondayBlogs
“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” a phrase once commonly heard amid the every day lexicon of collective American vocabulary dates back to a time when just about everyone read and studied the classics. The quote is, of course, a reference to Homer’s Iliad, and the Greek army who hid themselves within a giant wooden horse […]
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Being Icarus: On #Halloween, Book Releases, & #GreekMyth. #MondayBlogs #Booktrope #writer
I’ve got my wings, the apparatuses fitted to my back with wax, and I’m armed with the wise advice to avoid soaring close to the sun. And still I lose momentum, unable to resist the gravitational pull, my biggest danger not that glowing orb in the sky but the firm ground below it. I can’t […]
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The official WINGS OF WAX cover is here!!! #Booktrope #debutnovel #comingsoon
Hey friends, I’m so excited to share with you the official cover for my novel coming soon from Booktrope, Wings of Wax. The immensely talented designer Shari Ryan created this concept, a vision of a drawing table belonging to the story’s aspiring artist of a protagonist, Angelo Koutouvalis. The “sketch” of the Bay Bridge behind […]
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Room For One More. #community #friendship #GreekAmerican #culture #booktrope
Digging into the archives for this post on the importance of community and friendship. Seems appropriate after we all, hopefully, enjoyed a nice weekend with people we care about. Let’s enjoy a beverage together. You are my guest, my friend. Follow me into the banquet room of polished hardwood floors and high ceilings, and tall […]
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Crossed Signals: On being #Bilingual, & The Bloopers of a #GreekAmerican Boy in #Greece. #flashfiction #MondayBlogs
The lessons were informal, though they served as instruction nonetheless. Reminiscing now, I realize that in all likelihood they served as fodder for those early childhood outbursts when I deemed my father a “Greek olive,” a delicious insult in my young mind (those of you who read my previous blog exploring the origins of that […]
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Plight of the #Greek #Fishermen. #MondayBlogs #flashfiction #Greece #culture
It’s an iconic image, that of the classic Greek fisherman: burly son of Poseidon, heir to the sea God’s kingdom; eyes fierce beneath his crown in the form of a sturdy-brimmed cap, grasp wielding not a trident but a net cast into the indigo depths of the Aegean. Many a postcard features images of these […]
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Papa-Who? On #Greek Surnames, #School, and #RollCall. #MondayBlogs
Ah, it’s that time of year again. Kids return to school, as do teachers and tutors. We have all been there, no matter whether we inhabit the role of instructor or student: early September, shuffling into a classroom different from the one we left behind back in June, greeting familiar faces and introducing ourselves to […]
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You #Greek Olive! Delicious insults, #immigrant households, and #culture gaps. #MondayBlogs
He’s done something to make me mad–exactly what I don’t recall, though the affront occurred only moments ago, so caught up in my anger that details quickly lose importance. All that matters is that I’m angry now, mad enough to stomp my little foot, clench my tiny fists, curl my lip back in a snarl. […]
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