@winberry

I've loved getting to read some of the Get To Know Me $BETR casts that have come through thanks to @bradq's prompt, so... I'm doing a quick one. here we go. - I come from a loud, mostly Italian family in NJ. last year my mom and I did DNA tests that told us her dad isn't her real dad. we still say we're Italian because sometimes how you're raised and by whom holds more weight than hard facts. and because heritage is a somatic experience. - growing up, I spent most of my summers living with my cousins at the Jersey Shore. they're Korean by birth and they are the fiercest Italian-Irish family members I know. - once upon a time I rode bicycles professionally. what this means is that for 14 years I got to ride in circles all over the country and sometimes in other countries with people I now call family for very little pay. it was awesome. - I have one book of poetry out in the world. it was published by a queer, indie press out of brooklyn and it's about the performative complexities of female embodiment. I'm currently working on a memoir—it's going v slowly. - I belong to the dead dad club. - when my dad left his body, not for the first time but for the last, my husband and I were holding him. there was a full hunter's moon and he waited until my mom left to run errands to finally let go. life is fucking wild like that. - please don't feel sad or bad about any of this. that's not the point. - when I was 29 I had major surgery to remove cancer from my foot. thankfully the plastic surgeon was a top boob doctor in town known for his superb work. everything healed nicely and now I have the mark of Zorro across my right arch. - I have no kids and I don't want them. that doesn't mean I'm not a mother. - among other things, my dad was a photographer who also repaired cameras. before he had to go on disability, he worked for Hasselblad. during high school, he taught me how to shoot on a Nikkormat 35mm SLR using things like aperture and shutter speed and ISO. in college, I used to develop film in the dark by feel. I still have a collection of his old Hasselblads and Nikons and the weight of one of them in my hands is a balm. - James Baldwin once said that “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.” - I think he was right.

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