Today’s Swerve Magazine, the weekly magazine found in The Calgary Herald, includes a profile I penned about Wayne Skinner. Skinner is caretaker of the most marvelous collection of books I’ve ever seen. Over the past twenty-five years or so, Skinner has collected about 14,000 books. Almost all of them Canadian and almost all of them […]
Wall: A Monologue
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Writer David Hare has penned a marvelous and beautifully written essay about the West Bank Wall. The monologue was originally performed on stage at The Royal Court Theatre in London and now appears – slightly shortened – in the New York Review of Books. Find it here. (And thank you to Andrew for pointing this […]
Writing off the streets
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
This week, I held a writing workshop for the Servant’s Anonymous Society, a Calgary non-profit that advocates for former sex-trade workers. I first heard of SAS after reading a copy of their regular newsletter, Cry of the Streets, which contained some poetry from SAS participants. I contacted the society and offered to hold a workshop […]
The Final Stretch
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I just past the eight month mark of my residency here at the University of Calgary. I can’t believe that I only have two months left before I have to abandon this office, this view and the monthly paycheque. I warned the higher ups here that come June they might have to call security, because […]
The new swastika?
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Author and blogger Judy Mandelbaum recently quoted from my ‘Nakba of Olives‘ post (which is itself an excerpt from my book-in-progress) in her piece called “Is the Star of David becoming the new Swastika?” Mandelbaum writes about instances when Israelis have defaced Palestinian property with spray-painted Stars of David. She quotes the part in my […]
Rules and loyalties
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Recently I broke one of the cardinal rules of nonfiction writing: I let someone I was writing about read what I had written. The person, ‘Katerina,’ was a Greek-Cypriot I met while doing research for my walls book in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. I learned a lot about the Cyprus Conflict from Katerina […]
Welcome to the new ‘Elsewhere’
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
After much consideration, I’ve decided to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I love this new layout. I’ve added a little bit more of a bio on the ‘About Me’ page, and my writing resume on the ‘Curriculum Vitae’ page. for editors (and anyone else, I suppose). Every posting, comment and photo from my […]
The City and the Dogs
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I found a wonderful article on the Huffington Post today. The posting is from the blog of Ir Amim, an Israeli non-profit that works to examine issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within Jerusalem. When I was last in Jerusalem, I took a tour of East Jerusalem with Ir Amim. The author of this story, Yizhar […]
Life through a new lens
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
A short piece a wrote for the University of Calgary’s Alumni magazine has just been published. In it, I talk a little about my walls project and my own origins as a writer. You can find it here. I just finished a first draft of half of my walls book – I will need to […]
A Nakba of Olives – an excerpt
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
[What follows is an excerpt from my Walls book-in-progress. This is from my chapter about the West Bank Wall called ‘A Nakba of Olives.’ Most of the chapter is about my time in the Palestinian village of Jayyous, and this excerpt is part of a longer account of an anti-Wall demonstration I observed there last […]
Elsewhere 