CANR
WORK TITLE: Men Who Walk in Dreams
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.marisalabozzetta.com/
CITY: Northampton
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LAST VOLUME: CA 398
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Brooklyn, NY; married; has children.
EDUCATION:Boston College, B.S.; Georgetown University, M.S.; attended Middlebury College and University of New Mexico.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, teaching fellow; Office of Bilingual Education, Washington, DC, education specialist. Has worked as a high school teacher; adjunct professor at Smith College and University of Massachusetts; foreign language and ESL teacher; instructor at Kirtland Community College Controlled Burn Seminar for Writers.
AWARDS:Victoria Chen Haider Memorial Award, 1980; Watchung Arts Center Award for Short Fiction, 2010, for “Forecast for a Sunny Day;” First prize, Rio Grande Writers’ fiction contest; Pushcart Prize nominee for At the Copa; Watchung Arts Center Award for Short Fiction, 2010; Eric Hoffer Fiction Award, 2012 and 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, Penguin Book of Italian American Writing, Knit Lit, Celebrating Writers of the Pioneer Valley, and Show Me a Hero: Great Contemporary Stories about Sports. Contributor to periodicals, including the Washington Star, Pegasus Review, VIA, Florida Review, Italian Americana, Torrance County Citizen, Perigee, and American Voice.
SIDELIGHTS
Marisa Labozzetta earned degrees in teaching, Spanish language and literature, and linguistics. After working as an education specialist in the Office of Bilingual Education, she worked as a reporter and turned to creative writing. She has since authored two novels, Stay with Me, Lella and Sometimes It Snows in America, and two short-story collections, At the Copa and Thieves Never Steal in the Rain. Her work has won first prize in the Rio Grande Writers’ fiction contest, a Pushcart Prize, and a Watchung Arts Center Award for Short Fiction.
In Thieves Never Steal in the Rain, Labozzetta offers ten linked tales that follow the Ficola family. Focusing on the women in the family, Labozzetta traces themes of motherhood. Barbara is an empty nester struggling to rediscover herself now that her children have moved away; Nancy is looking into adoption and dealing with illness; Joanna’s child has died, and her marriage is failing; and Rosemary’s marriage has already failed. Each woman commiserates with the other, facing the pitfalls of marriage and family and friendship. Their shared and separate dramas play out over the course of several stories, and “The Birthing Room” follows Barbara as she faces a house where items begin to move themselves (a metaphor for the absence of her children). In “Villa Foresta,” Labozzetta portrays Joanna as she mourns her dead daughter. The woman meets a young Italian girl and insists that the child is her reincarnated offspring.
Reviews of Thieves Never Steal in the Rain were largely positive, and online US Review of Books correspondent John E. Roper remarked: “It is easy to see how most of Labozzetta’s works have placed or been in the running for prestigious honors. … What is more difficult to fathom … is why they haven’t won more.” Angelina Oberdan, writing on the MDPI Web site, was also impressed, and she commented: “We ward off loss as best we can, but rarely are we so lucky. We attach significance to our rituals and collected items. This theme of warding off loss and searching for ways to cope with it is woven through the linked stories of Marisa Labozzetta’s Thieves Never Steal in the Rain. ” Oberdan went on to say: “Perhaps what we need to remember, and what the stories in Marisa Labozzetta’s Thieves Never Steal in the Rain remind us, is that we can’t prevent loss and somehow we have to cope with it. After my father received his heart transplant, I grieved and felt guilty for grieving because my dad was still alive. After reading this collection, I realized that I was grieving for every deal I made and for every habit that I thought would keep his heart beating.” She concluded: “I had lost something … but in losing it and in forgiving myself, I also rediscovered who I am. Like the stories in this collection show us, in coping with loss, we can rediscover our best selves.” Offering further applause in Kirkus Reviews, a contributor lauded Labozzetta for “taking common material … and adding something slightly uncanny.” The contributor added: “Most of the 10 stories could stand alone, but they gradually coalesce into a comprehensive, compelling family portrait—a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts.”
(open new)In her 2024 short story collection, Men Who Walk in Dreams, Labozzetta features both male and female protagonists, some of whom experience mental issues that upend their lives. In “Amnesia,” a man realizes that he no longer has feelings for his fiancée after enduring a head injury. In “The Woman Who Drew on Walls,” an older woman named Iris suffers from dementia. Her son, who is transgender, has become her primary caregiver. The two have difficult moments, as well as tender conversations. In one conversation, Iris suggests that the man her son knew as his father is not his real father, and the son wonders whether he can trust his mother’s apparent confession. The story, “For the Love of Buffaloes,” focuses on a wealth manager, who abruptly decides to leave his job and devotes his time to perfecting a recipe for mozzarella cheese. A younger woman and an older woman have an uncomfortable interaction in “The Intruder.” The older woman questions the younger woman, a stranger, about her undergarments and accuses her of wearing unattractive underwear. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews offered a favorable assessment of Men Who Walk in Dreams, commenting: “Labozzetta’s taut, self-assured storytelling is impressive, as is her ability to compassionately capture the complexities of ordinary lives in thought-provoking ways.” The same contributor also described the book as “an exquisite set of stories.” (close new)
Labozzetta told CA: “The most surprising thing I have learned as a writer is how much I continue to learn about myself.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2016, review of Thieves Never Steal in the Rain; April 23, 2024, review of Men Who Walk in Dreams.
ONLINE
Marisa Labozzetta website, http://marisalabozzetta.com (August 8, 2024).
MDPI, http:// www.mdpi.com/ (November 3, 2016), Angelina Oberdan, review of Thieves Never Steal in the Rain.
US Review of Books, http://www.theusreview.com/ (November 3, 2016), John E. Roper, review of Thieves Never Steal in the Rain.
Marisa Labozzetta was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She was spared the negative connotation of being an only child by a mother who took great pains not to spoil her and by the companionship of many cousins in a closely-knit family. She majored in secondary education and Spanish at Boston College and taught high school for a brief time on Long Island. As a teaching fellow in the Graduate School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University, she received a Masters of Science degree and completed her doctoral coursework.
While Labozzetta was working as an education specialist in the D.C. Office of Bilingual Education, her boss encouraged her to write, and she published her first piece in The Washington Star. She married and relocated to New Mexico, where she became a regular contributor to The Torrance County Citizen, enrolled in creative writing classes at the University of New Mexico, and had babies. She won first prize in the Rio Grande Writers´ fiction contest, and was a finalist in Playboy´s Victoria Chen Haider Memorial Literary Award for Fiction, and in New Letters Literary Awards. After missing too many family weddings and funerals, she and her husband moved back east.
Labozzetta went on to publish stories in the best-selling When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, The American Voice, Show Me a Hero: Great Contemporary Stories About Sports, The Pegasus Review, VIA, KnitLit, Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing, Paradise, Our Mothers Our Selves, Beliefnet.com, Italian Americana, Perigee, and American Fiction,among others.
In her first novel, Stay With Me, Lella, a less than conventional choice made early in a conventional marriage tests a couple's notions of love and loyalty in a tale of sex, betrayal and family politics. Kirkus called At the Copa, a funny, finely wrought collection of short stories that stirs up the emotional currents beneath seemingly placid lives of middle-aged characters in “the old age of youth.” Labozzetta received a Pushcart Prize for the collection, and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Award in 2009. "Forecast for a Sunny Day," from that collection, won the Watchung Arts Center Award for Short Fiction in 2010. Her novel, Sometimes It Snows in America, and collection of linked short stories, Thieves Never Steal in the Rain, were Eric Hoffer Award Finalists.
Labozzetta has taught Italian American Studies through literature at Smith College and the University of Massachusetts, and fiction writing at Kirtland Community College Controlled Burn. Seminar for Writers. She was guest editor for the special issue of the mdpi journal Religions, dedicated to Critics and Writers on Love, Loss, and the Supernatural. Her last novel, A Day in June, was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, winner of the Best Book and American Fiction Awards, and a Best New Fiction Award Finalist. “The Woman Who Drew on Walls,” from her new collection, Men Who Walk in Dreams, was a New Millennium Writings Fiction Award Finalist.
She lives in Northampton and Eastham Massachusetts.
QUOTED: "Labozzetta's taut, self-assured storytelling is impressive, as is her ability to compassionately capture the complexities of ordinary lives in thought-provoking ways."
"an exquisite set of stories."
Labozzetta, Marisa MEN WHO WALK IN DREAMS Guernica Editions (Fiction Fiction) $17.95 10, 1 ISBN: 9781771839075
Labozzetta examines desire, connection, marriage, and ambition in her latest collection of 10 short stories.
These quirky, emotionally fraught, and deeply introspective slice-of-life pieces feature moments of with dry wit and subtle, unexpected twists. "Amnesia" tells the story of a man who suffers a head injury and realizes he doesn't love his fiancée, and in "For the Love of Buffaloes," a wealth manager suddenly quits his job and becomes singularly preoccupied with producing the perfect mozzarella. Among the standouts is "The Intruder," about an eccentric older woman who aggressively asks a stranger about her love life and underwear preferences; when the prying woman accuses her, with disgust, of wearing practical, unattractive cotton underwear hiked to her waist, the character indignantly and humorously retorts: "It's bikini style--on sale." The most stunning piece, which will linger with readers long after it ends, is "The Woman Who Drew on Walls," about a woman named Iris whose memory is muddled by dementia and her transgender son who helps care for her; it reveals the close relationship between the two, and Iris' difficulties and rare moments of lucidity in touching and sometimes-amusing conversations. When Iris tells her son, "Your father. Well, he's not your father," he considers the veracity of her claim in light of her other confusions. The eclectic and cleverly nuanced characters, who dwell in Italy, El Salvador, Antarctica, and elsewhere, are recognizable and relatable--flawed and whimsical enough to be interesting without seeming unrealistic or outlandish. Labozzetta's taut, self-assured storytelling is impressive, as is her ability to compassionately capture the complexities of ordinary lives in thought-provoking ways.
An exquisite set of stories steeped in humor, humanity, and grace.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Labozzetta, Marisa: MEN WHO WALK IN DREAMS." Kirkus Reviews, 23 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A791877167/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1963b351. Accessed 13 July 2024.