GoodLady, From Maremma, Tuscany, Italy, 376 Fans, 80 Hubs, Joined 15 months ago
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CyclingFitness Interviews GoodLady
A splendid Hubber shares her passion for food and life in Italy
You’ve written some fantastic Italian cooking articles. How big a part of your life is food?
It’s big. I’ve been living in Italy for most of 35 years and here, food is central. It’s so central that everyone’s mood changes to ‘really happy’ after a plate of pasta. A good, healthy, tasty, balanced meal is fundamental to harmony and happiness. I’m a Mom, so it’s very important to me that everyone’s OK. Actually, I’m a Granny too.
When I came to live in the Tuscan countryside with my two small children several years ago I learned everything I now know about food and food preparation from the local farmers' wives who were my friends and kind neighbors. They’re in tune with the seasons and eat what’s growing and fresh; they're picking it, plucking it, making it, and eating it, regular as clockwork every day 12.30 – 1.30.
I love these habits; the ritual of them and basic the good sense. The rest of the world might call ‘healthy eating’ a ‘balanced meal’ but here it’s just called ‘lunch’ or ‘dinner’. It’s delicious and I love, with all my heart, I love how this is done day in and day out. It’s become my life now too. Before August ends, I’ve made jars of pesto for the winter months and I’ve jarred up the tomatoes. One of my sons brings me 5 liter cans of extra virgin olive oil from Assisi, where his Italian wife’s family has their own olive groves. We go out foraging for wild asparagus in February, for mushrooms in winter after it rains. We glean for a small shellfish like a miniature clam called ‘teline’ along our sandy beaches in the early summer and we dive for sea urchins in June. I’m a keen octopus catcher, by the way. When the children were little and we were broke, a nicely-cooked octopus was our meal of the day. My neighbor gave me a piece of wild boar to cook up for Christmas. How Italian is that? It’s just the way we live now.
Even now, staying in Rome, I make my fresh veg up every morning, after going to the open markets and a pasta sauce too. It all goes on round food!
Italy and Tuscan life are greatly highlighted in your work. What part of Italian culture are you most passionate about?
I’m passionate about their passion, which is in their art, their food, their buildings, their furniture designs, the way they set a table… It manifests itself in the way they move their hands, the way they dress, their impeccable stylishness, in the theatre of their language with those descriptive gestures, all of their idiosyncrasies. I love listening to Italians talking. They’re completely anarchic, I’m sure! It’s incredible how they get away with it. Actually it isn’t. They’re Italian. They’re warm. That’s what moves me.
I walk over a bridge which crosses the River Tiber these days, because I’m in Rome at the moment and there are statues of strong naked men and women wrestling upwards towards God, gripping each other, entwined (They’re angels actually). The story of mankind in a marble frieze. They are gigantic scenes of passion carved out of mountain sides of marble which have been hoisted to stand forever on the bridge, to look at the Castel Sant’ Angelo by Michelangelo!!! Busses hustle by, motorinis zigzag round the busses to the left and to the right, tramps shuffle along; it’s chaotic. There’s outrageous lawlessness. The only people gawking at the works of art are coachloads of people from the East.
There’s something eternal about the scene, with that river churning underneath, the heavenly city with its cupolas, rooftop gardens, and spires in that pink miasmic Roman light on either side of the river. It’s a timeless painting. It’s beautiful.
I’m living in a small apartment in the walls of Rome’s old prison, the ‘Regina Coeli’ (Queen of Heaven) in old Trastevere for a few months (while it’s too cold and wintry at my farmhouse in Tuscany). The penitentiary cars rush by my front door with their prisoners and prison officials; the young, tanned, drivers with their black hair and black sunglasses are just like young paparazzi, or club bouncers, or movie stars. They’re breaking the speed limit in their black vans on these tiny cobbled streets. Which ones are the criminals - the ones in charge, or the ones who are caught?
At night, the wives of the prisoners come to the hill behind my apartment and I hear them shout the names of their men loudly into the night. A man’s voice shouts back, urgently, then again. Then there’s the voice of someone shouting into a speaker. I’m in Rome, in Europe, but it’s like being in another time in history and I can’t help myself. I could cry I love their passion so much and their recklessness. It isn’t good for them. It is destroying them.
Some of your more recent Hubs have focused on growing old gracefully. As the age of Internet users in many societies is rising, do you see this as an area that could develop in your future writing?
I certainly think it is worth developing yes. I should think more about this, thank you Liam. Every time I write an article about growing old, I’m wary initially. Some part of me is thinking, ‘this isn’t going to interest people’ because there’s this notion that online writing is for the young. Invariably though I have an interesting response from older readers who share with such sincerity. I think, ‘hmmm, you and I are from the same time and mold…. you are interested in reading about ‘us’ and what we do, feel and think today, half a century on’. I also have such warm response from younger readers too.
I’ve finally found and enjoy Hubbers Angie Jardine who write from their ‘growing old gracefully’ selves. She encourages me to think that writing for people like ourselves is very timely. We do exist, after all, and all the statistics prove that lots of us have lots of money to spend. But that’s beside the point here.
I’ll get back to what I really wanted to think about. Until recently, we were the “Grannie” market. This gives you the idea of knitted pink socks and lavender hand creams. It’s all wrong. That was the image of the generations before us, of my own Grannie. Times have changed. I may very well be a granny, but that image of the pink socks doesn’t fit me very well, or my friends. I’ve always been a writer with a view of my own. I once had a column in a magazine that was called, ‘A View of My Own’. By writing as a person growing old today, I think we can change that outdated image and bring it in line with who we are today. The ‘baby boomer’ market is what the marketers call us…
You recently completed the Apprenticeship Program. How do you feel that it has helped your writing progress and has it led to inspiration outside of HubPages?
I learned how to be an ‘online writer’ as opposed to a script writer, poet, feature writer or novelist or whatever. Online writers provide information that people are searching for. I’d never done that so strictly before. I’ve always written opinion pieces or ‘stories’. I learned something I should have learned years ago in the Apprenticeship Program and that is how to be succinct, how to give information directly to readers looking specifically for this or that. It was an invaluable lesson.
I wished I could say that the SEO aspects of the course had become my forte. I need to work very hard on that (I still have all my notes!) because to answer the second part of your question, I’m inspired to go back to my other kinds of writing and write a book now – which I hope to promote through the internet. SEO will be essential then. I’d like to build and cultivate a readership through the new web.
Every Hubber has their own story- What drew you to writing on HubPages?
I was drawn to HubPages by the prospect of being able to immediately publish my work. I wanted to once again publish more than anything else. Gone are the old days. The editors I’d known when I was younger had obviously moved on, or out, or the magazines closed. Without an agent, it’s very hard to get anything published. If you are not publishing, then you probably won’t find an agent. Online publishing sounded possible. HubPages was so easy to write for, easy to learn what works and what doesn’t. I gave it a shot and got hooked. I’ve read that HubPages is addictive and I believe it is.
What question have you always wanted to be asked in an interview? How would you answer that question?
To be interviewed at all is a huge honour, thanks! The question would have to be “What book are you working on now?”…….I’d say, “I’m working on a Memoir of my life and times in the movie business in California in the 70’s”. And it would be absolutely true.
You seem to be someone that had her fingers in so many pies over the years, yet writing seems to have taken an almost ever-present role. What has your biggest writing challenge been and how did you overcome it?
Yes, I am always writing something. My biggest writing challenge is writing that memoir. I had cancer a few years ago and whilst I was on chemo and RT for the months following the treatments, my mind wandered back time and time again to those times, those movies, to my twenties. I feel obliged to write about it because they were incredible. I’d gone on to earn an MA in Scriptwriting in 2005 because I wanted to learn how to write a script, because I love story telling, but I now realize that need was a stepping stone to this one, which needs a lot of courage. Writing a memoir about those days feels as though I’m fighting with a fierce lion (Myself of course). Writing is about meeting lions head on. I haven’t overcome my challenge. It’s roaring at me. When I do though, you’ll see my book in print.
What does the future have in store for GoodLady?
Millions of readers of my memoir of course, meanwhile more Hubs and many more dishes of spaghetti (I do believe though, that ‘all you need is love’). Thank you Liam, so much.
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