Patricia Catto lives and works (some) in Bisbee Arizona where she is retiring from teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute for 22 years. She remains Italian even though it’s hard to get pre-made cannoli shells and scamorza in the Sonoran desert. Her memoir-in-stories Aunt Pig of Puglia was just released by Jaded Ibis Press.
David Hoenigman: Is Aunt Pig a real person?
Patricia Catto: When i was little, I always heard about the great pig aunt who was born in Cassamassima, but by the 50′s the pseudo-scientific American relatives were supposing that she was a spina bifida
baby and not part pig at all….but i was raised on The National Enquirer and Bullfinch’s Mythology and i felt sure
that spina bifida was just too clean and clinical a diagnosis….i wanted poetry …I wanted a pig ancestress and so i made sure i got one by writing her up like that..I love to write about my family..they are mine…they are funny and they are mostly dead…but above all they were 100% Italian in their worldview…
Writing about what you know best is always the advice to writers—and there is certainly a reason for that.
Who wants to hear somebody hold forth on some lukewarm third hand stuff they cooked up just to say they are working and serious? Man, i certainly don’t want to read it…and the thing is, family is the original stuff of all mythology…birth, death, love, suffering, battling, weeping, gnashing, betraying and forgiving….it it’s all there..
The dinner table is—or at least it used to be..the Last Supper for somebody…each and every night…if you know what i mean….somebody’s body and blood got transformed by the time dessert was served…
It was high drama and the stories of the day and of each individual’s problems were all just ripe to be retold and embellished….and everybody was co-writing with you as you were trying to get a word in edgewise…it had its “publishing world “competition too….
All the stories in Aunt Pig roiled around in me for my whole life and they are all true and even if they were told in a different way, they would still be true because they came right out of us….
When i first was shopping Aunt Pig, I got a lot of praise and rejection as is often the case and it was most often from the same editor…and one special editor told me to make the book more like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. I remember how ridiculous it seemed to be told to go read a book I did not know and then to kind of copy it….
Basically, the rhythms and voices in my head when writing
Pig came from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a Chinese author who i can’t remember –Li Po maybe–but who wrote a funny tragedy of a faux revolutionary loser who got his head cut off, and from Mark Twain and David Chase. And i was teaching Sophocles at the time, so
there are many references to Fate and so on that crept in….For me, those kinds of references were way better
than the Garcia girls and their lost accents….Basically, now that i think of it….those girls should have clung to their accents…..is that a good book that Garcia girls book? i still haven’t read it…
My friend told me the other day that there is a series on cable now about Italians in New York who have a cake creation business….How I wish I had had them as my role models…but what can you do? Time is cruel and capricious…there were no cake bosses back in 2000 when i was putting Pig together…but there was Moonstruck and Caligula.
DH: When and why did you begin writing?
PC: When i was a little girl in New York everyone around me was Italian, even my Polish aunt…so we had lots of stories from the old country and lots from the new…most of the stories were about people in the community and how messed up they were and how they needed correcting…If however, those same people came over to visit, then they would tell stories about themselves and i would see they maybe were okay., maybe they did not need deep therapies….There were a lot of dueling realities. Whoever was telling the tale was the King or Queen of Reality….so I wanted that job,…I wanted to tell everyone’s side, actually, kind of like a little Pirandello…
DH: What genre are you most comfortable writing?
PC: I can write in most any genre, except sports writing….although maybe that would be successful if it were satire..’after 500 years of teaching literature and reading literature and writing literature i can ape any genre fairly well. but i like best to write free verse, formal verse and stories in my own voice about family, loved ones, and hated ones…..in the early 80′s i wrote one of the first on-line advice columns—That is when i was working at Hallmark Cards, Inc.—-now there is a company with a lot of comfortable subgenres!
DH: What inspired you to write your first book?
PC: My first book, Wife of Geronimo’s Virile Old Age, was inspired by my initial trip to Bisbee, Arizona–now my home.
I had a dream in which someone told me that i was to be the wife of Geronimo’s virile old age…Though I did not feel
any real physical attraction to Geronimo and he was not in any way, shape or form my type, I decided that i would get with him
anyway, and then write a book of poems about the Sonoran desert and so on….It couldn’t hurt. This I did and Mathom Press published it and
rocketed me to success. The other night I had a dream about a dead swan and i am not sure what to do with that yet…
DH: What book are you reading now?
PC: As of late, I am reading a gorgeous picture book about the Day of the Dead and it has altars and Posada illustrations and all the Mexican things we like here in the Sonora…and I am reading a book called The Thoreau You Don’t Know by Robert Sullivan which humanizes and celebrates my counter culture hero of many years….usually, i always am reading Mary Oliver, Hafiz, Rumi, Rabia of Basra and the OMG section of Yahoo so I can keep up with Kim Kardashian. I also like to read lurid tales about strangled co-eds or terrorists and so on……Those are a must for people living alone…
DH: When did you first consider yourself a writer?
PC: In New York, the schools start you on perfecting the paragraph when you are in third grade….at least they used to….
I enjoyed being tortured by this kind of thing and thought others did too…I was wrong….Later on, I realized that i had the warped masochistic notion that if i painstakingly put down words just right, then it would have some ultimate meaning for everyone….and joy would ensue….As I say, I was wrong…but I was a writer, that was for sure….
DH: Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?
PC: The big message in my work is that we do not want our shadow. We spend a lot of time crafting our personas but it doesn’t matter when push comes to shove….Others see our shadow and have a good goddamn laugh out of it…The character of My Mother in Aunt Pig is the prime character/carrier of this message. And yet she is loveable in her folly, deserves compassion, not scorn…She knows this message herself but does not escape its effects….
