Q1. Hello, can you please introduce yourself? Readers would love to know more about you.
Well, if we want to start from the beginning, I was born in Montreal and I am of mixed heritage, half-Italian (on my dad’s side) and half-Canadian (on my mom’s side). Because of that I started travelling from a very early age and we can say that I never stopped: I just love going off and exploring a new country or city, usually based on a book I read. And that’s the other thing – I’m a really big reader. Books have been a constant in my life thanks to my parents being readers too and I always have at least a couple of books on the go. So I guess the step from just reading them to writing them as well was quite an easy one, and I started writing short stories about animals at about the age of 7.
As for my day job, I’m an ESL tutor in Italy where I hold courses in English culture & literature and courses to sit exam certifications. I also work as a translator and copywriter (the latter just occasionally).
Q2. What were the key challenges you faced while writing your book “Winter Hearts”?
I’d say the biggest challenge was not so much in actually writing the pieces that make up “Winter Hearts” – some came to me quite naturally as I was driving or cleaning up or even working – but in deciding what pieces made the collection, what to set aside, how to arrange them. And then, really, the hardest was deciding to publish it at all. I’m a very private person and this is a personal book so there was that factor too, in addition to the fear – common to all writers, I guess – that people would hate it.
Q3. What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?
Honestly, I read so much and from so many different genres that it’s difficult to pick just a few books or authors. As far as contemporary poets are concerned, I really like Nikita Gill and Lang Leav; if we look to the past, then definitely Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath. My favourite classics are by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte – and I love Shakespeare of course. Contemporary novelists I admire are Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Kate Morton. But I always say that everything can inspire a piece – I’ve lost count of the times I found a great sentence in an otherwise bad book.
Q4. What’s your favourite spot to visit in your own country? And what makes it so special to you?
I grew up a bit “gypsy style” since my childhood was spent between Canada and Italy, then I moved to a different part of Italy for university, moved to Ireland for my postgraduate, and then moved again to Italy, living for brief periods of time in Germany, Austria, and Canada again in the meantime, and have been travelling quite a lot in the past ten years. Which means your question is a difficult one to answer! I have a few “places of the heart”, so to speak, like the woods behind my house where I used to go with my father or my great-aunts’ house where I used to spend the summer holidays – they are places that hold bittersweet memories as they are reminders of my childhood. Another place I love to go to is our beach house in the south of Italy: it’s really relaxing there, and I love sitting on a lawn chair at sunset and write.
Q5. Is there lots to do before you dive in and start writing a book?
Everything I’ve written so far – whether published or unpublished – didn’t really require any research. I know some authors draw up an outline of what the book is supposed to be like beforehand but I honestly don’t think it’s for me. Instead, I prefer to start, get everything out of me, and then go back to the manuscript after I’ve let it rest for a while and see what I think needs to be changed. Some of the pieces you find in “Winter Hearts” are pretty much the first draft; others I changed quite a bit.
That said, I’ve never tried my hand at historical fiction. Should I decide to do that one day, I’m sure I’ll spend a great deal of time reading up as much as I can on my chosen time period and on the people who lived back then.
Q6. How long did it take you to write your book ‘Winter Hearts’?
It’s difficult to tell because I wrote – or drafted – a great number of pieces over the years. I guess that the period going from the moment I thought of putting together a collection and the time I sent it to the cover designer covered about six months.
Q7. On what platforms can readers buy your books?
The book is only available on Amazon for the moment although my plan is to approach other retailers soon.
Q8. Tell us about the process of coming up with the book cover and the title ‘Winter Hearts’?
Once you read the book, you can see that the imagery of winter – the cold, ice, frost – is a recurring one, which I guess makes sense since my style is fairly nostalgic in nature. So I knew I wanted to play on that in the title and I just started brainstorming combinations of words, sounding them out to see what worked for me.
As for the cover, the merit for that goes to the designer, who read the book and came up with some artwork inspired by the content. I’m very happy with the result.
Q9. When writing a book how do you keep things fresh, for both your readers and also yourself?
I guess that’s something I’ll need to start worrying about with the next one! 😀 In general, I’ve tried to repeat myself as little as possible and when I did, to have a repetition that made sense in the “story” I was trying to tell. I guess that when you’re talking about something happening cyclically, it’s quite hard to hit the sweet spot between showing that something kept on happening and boring the readers with a new variation of what they have already read. I hope I was able to do that, and get the balance right.
Q10. What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing?
That your first draft doesn’t need to be perfect; that you can rewrite something an infinite number of times. I think that often we usually get so caught up with doing something perfectly that we get paralyzed and end up not doing it at all. And that’s the real pity.
Another one is that at some point you need to stop rewriting and put your art out there and see if it can fly – I guess that’s what I am doing now.
Buy Winter Hearts on Amazon
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