By Valentina Di Cesare (Author), Michela Valmori (Author), Emanuele Pettener (Preface), Ilaria Serra (Preface), Annie Rachele Lanzillotto (Contributor), Gail Reitano (Contributor), Kathy Curto ...
Featuring Down Under By Karen Tintori
Twenty-eight leading voices in fiction - Including eleven New York Times Bestselling Authors - join together In a celebration of great storytelling. We ...
By Jillian Karr (pseudonym of Karen Tintori and Jill Gregory)
Miss America has vanished and photographer Cat Hansen refuses to sit and wait for someone to find her missing sister. Charging ...
By Karen Tintori
Featuring two accounts by Karen Tintori, this latest book from Casa Italia is an anthology about the Italian American experience as seen through the eyes of women. The first ...
By Karen Tintori and Jill Gregory -- originally published under the pseudonym Jillian Karr
Four glamorous women. Four perfect brides. Four deadly secrets. When Perfect Bride magazine editor ...
By Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori
David Shepherd knows the names of the thirty-six Righteous Souls, upon whose existence -- the Talmud says -- God keeps the world in existence. Thirty-three of ...
By Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori
Museum curator Natalie Landau fights to learn who murdered her reporter sister in Iraq -- and battles powerful forces pursuing the mysterious gift her sister ...
By Karen Tintori
One of the Chicago Tribune's Favorite Books of 2002, Trapped is the story of the worst coal mine fire in U.S. history, and still stands as that country's third worst coal mine ...
By Karen Tintori
Unto the Daughters is the story of a secret guarded so fiercely for nine decades that members of Tintori’s family died without ever learning of it. Unto the Daughters began ...
By Rabbi E.B. Freedman, Jan Greenberg and Karen A. Katz
Is everything in the Bible true? Why are there bad people in the world? Can't God stop them? Why do I need to learn to read, write, and ...
Healing the Scapegoat Complex in Karen Tintori's Unto the Daughters by Louisa Calio
"In her brilliant book Truth or Dare, the poet, philosopher-feminist Starhawk, explores the emerging feminine voice and its language of feeling after two thousand years of authoritarian patriarchy, as well as the terrors that needed to be faced and conquered after generations of silence and isolation. In the Chapter "Finding a Voice: Breaking the Censor's Silence” Starhawk writes, "The powerful weapon of the Censor is to deny actual events and paralyze us so eventually we forget or repress what happens." [i] The resulting loss is immeasurable, especially when the censor has been internalized as it has been in traditional cultures. If we are never told about an ancestor, who may have broken with convention, or broken the rules or laws of their time, or as in the case of Unto the Daughters been murdered by her brothers, we are denied a greater understanding of ourselves and our true history.
Families share patterns, but when we are kept from the truth of our family patterns, as a result of repression, shame and authoritarian rule, we subtly internalize a self hate and a tendency to perpetuate the same. "To be silenced is to be kept isolated...Breaking our silence releases us. When others know the worst about us, and accept us, we can believe we are truly valued. "[ii] Truth or Dare
Karen Tintori dared to search for and reveal the truth of her family’s and her own story in Unto the Daughters, a powerfully written memoir of discovery and recreation of her lost ancestor, Francesca Costa, who was erased from her family’s history after being brutally murdered by her brothers and discarded in the waters off Belle Isle in the Detroit River in 1919. The author, Karen, whose very act of uncovering the truth and publicly sharing it, calls forth the power of story telling to heal our past and ourselves also tells us her own story and struggle, as a Sicilian American daughter and writer, who despite being raised in contemporary America, would lose connection with her disapproving relations."
So begins Louisa Calio's thoughtful, well-researched exploration of scapegoating, secrets, silences in relationship to the book of my heart, the story of my great-aunt Francesca, a woman who had been lost to history -- a scapegoat. I invite you to read the entirety of her insightful and important essay at Louisa Calio LinkedIn. She has much to share.
I am deeply honored by Louisa's conclusion to her thoughtful and well-researched essay:
"By Tintori’s courageous act of commitment to recreate Frances’ tale, we witness a movement from power over and its denial to reconciliation and more space for honesty in our Italian American community and an ever expanding body of work upon which we can all stand.
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum in her book, The Future has an Ancient Heart, writes “in forming this story has been my hope that in trying to tell or write a truthful story in a world manipulated into violence by untruths, I am working toward a more equal and therefore more just world.”
I believe Unto the Daughters has achieved this."
Louisa and I met fourteen years ago when she introduced herself after my Unto the Daughters reading at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City. Of her many award-winning works, my favorite still remains her memoir in poetry, Journey to the Heartwaters. You can purchase this memorable and evocative book by clicking here.
Louisa Calio-- poet, writer, performer, photo artist