Last week, writer Mona Abu Sharekh toured me through the Shati Refugee Camp, or ‘Beach Camp,’ in Gaza City. “I can’t imagine how anyone can live away from the sea,” Mona said as we walked along the road edging the shoreline. For Gazans, the sea provides the only glimpse of a horizon. Hemmed in by […]
November
01
Gaza Dispatch: “Maybe your legs. Maybe your heart.”
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Last week I traveled to Shujaia to meet farmer Abdusalam al-Manasrah. His family has owned land near Gaza’s eastern border since Ottoman times. “Every speck of soil is mixed with my sweat and the sweat of my father, my grandfather and my grandmother,” he told me. The family tended olive trees on the land for […]
October
24
Gaza Dispatch: Post-war cooking in Khan Younis
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Earlier this week I traveled south from Gaza City to Khan Younis to see how families displaced by last year’s war are feeding themselves. A group of ladies, a mother with an assemblage of daughters and daughters-in-law, invited me into their temporary “caravan” and showed me their remarkable kitchen. One fridge, a pair of gas […]
October
12
“Cities are smells”
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
A few pretty lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence. He was writing about exile here, but reading these words in my East Jerusalem hotel room remind me of travel in general, and of the smell of fresh guava in the markets this week. Cities are smells: Acre is the smell of iodine […]
Dispatch from Jerusalem
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
My arrival in Jerusalem four days ago coincided with a wave of attacks and and violent clashes in Israel and Palestine. People have been shot and killed. Soldiers, teenagers, and elderly women have been stabbed – some with a screwdriver, another with a vegetable peeler. A pregnant woman died alongside her four year-old daughter. Rockets […]
October
02
A brief political rant
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I will be plain. We’ve reached the point where voting for the Conservative Party of Canada is an immoral act. Instead of appealing to our better natures – instead of invoking the once-Canadian values like inclusion, fairness and compromise – Harper and his cabal have chosen to appeal to the worst of us. This is […]
September
21
Writing Food: From Kelowna to Gaza
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
A couple of weekends ago I had the great pleasure of giving a talk at the Okanagan Food and Wine Writers’ Workshop in Kelowna. Many beautiful meals were consumed, much wine drunk, and many excellent discussions had about food writing, travel writing, and writing in general. In between meals and presentations, we toured Sandhill winery, […]
Pay No Heed to the Rockets – a book in progress
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
It occurred to me today that I haven’t “officially” announced my current project, at least not here online. Those who follow this blog know that a few years ago I spent a month as the writer-in-residence at the Palestine Writing Workshop. I became interested in Palestinian literary culture at that time and published a long […]
April
14
The Iceland Writers Retreat
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Last night I returned to Calgary after spending a week as an instructor at the Iceland Writers Retreat. The event, in only its second year, is a marvelous bringing-together of featured authors from around the world with about 80 workshop participants for a week of writing, reading, eating, drinking and – because it is in […]
February
11
Missing Michael Green
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I would like to express some thoughts on Michael Green’s passing, not as his friend or colleague – sadly, I was neither – but as a fan. Michael was a fearless, funny and completely absorbing performer. When he was on stage, I could never take my eyes off him – even when he stood there […]
