Earlier this month I had the transporting opportunity to interview Frances Mayes on stage as part of the National Geographic Traveler Conversations series in Washington, DC. I actually met Mayes in the early 1980s, when I moved to San Francisco. I had told my creative writing graduate school poet-mentor that I was moving to the Bay Area, and she told me that I should be sure to look up the poet Frances Mayes. I did and Mayes helped introduce me to the cultural riches of the city. This was years before Under the Tuscan Sun catapulted her into the kind of best-sellerdom poets can only dream of. That passionate, transformative memoir has spawned many subsequent books on Italy, including her most recent and delightful work, "Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life." In our conversation, as in her books, Mayes was passionate, articulate, and electrically alive to the senses and seductions of Italy. Here are five of the many Italy-inspired insights I took away from our talk:1) The rhythms of Italy: Poetry, Mayes said, was all she ever intended to write. But something happened after she bought and moved into Bramasole, her house in Cortona:
It's fascinating to me how the rhythms of a place can infiltrate us and change the way we create, even how we move through the world. This phenomenon has certainly been true in my own life. In the hard Grecian sunlight, I'm more decisive and my writing is brighter. More vivid. More clearly etched. In France, my sentences are more languorous, more nuanced, more apt to while an hour or two away over a café crème, watching the perfumed passersby from a windowside seat at a café by the Seine. In Hawaii, I surrender myself to sun, sand, and sea. In Japan, I'm attuned to intricacies, shadows, the larger meanings of little things."I started writing longer lines and lines didn't any more want to be cut at where the line break goes in a poem. I started keeping notebooks and it just started expanding, and I found myself writing prose. I never intended to and I think that it's just mysterious that sometimes the rhythms in your brain change and your genre follows after that. It wasn't a conscious choice, but I did start writing prose because I was writing out of excitement at living there and leaning a new language, meeting people. It was very spontaneous and in fact all of my books about Italy have been written out of just spontaneity and fun."
Continue reading Why I love Italy: five inspiring insights from an evening with Frances Mayes
Why I love Italy: five inspiring insights from an evening with Frances Mayes originally appeared on Gadling on Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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