Foreword

I wanted to share Stephen's foreword as I thought it was a really great example of one. Notice how he talks about the specific texts and his process of writing and revising. He also tries to make sense of why he wrote the texts he did. And finally, he tells his readers about how he feels about the different texts. Check it out:

Foreword:

This collection, “The Italian-American take on Love & Family” is strong because this collection incorporates and exploits my Italian-American heritage successfully. The four pieces of writing in this collection may not explicitly be about being Italian-American but the ones that don’t incorporate many ideals and morals I was taught by my family.  “Finding my Family” is the introduction to a fiction novel where a young boy experiences a traumatic event that changes his life.  The boy is from Prizzi, Sicily which is the town where my fathers’ family is from.  I chose this setting because I have visited this place in my life and some aspects of the setting are familiar to me. I am currently in the third draft of this story.  I plan on revisiting this character at a later point in his life and continue his story.  I wanted this introduction to depict the struggle he faced with losing his parents and the fact that you can find a family in the most unlikely places. This story clearly depicts the Italian aspect of my Italian-American heritage. This piece is probably my favorite piece of my collection.  I truly enjoyed every moment I spent on this piece.  As I was crafting my story I found myself getting more and more excited about where this story was headed.  This was my first attempt at creative writing and I couldn’t be prouder of the hard work I put in.  “My Disaster After Hurricane Sandy” is a nonfiction memoir of my Uncle Phil’s death.  This moment in my life was traumatic for me since my family and I were visiting him the moment he passed away.  Writing this story was a bit hard for me because it brought back memories and emotions from that day.  This memoir may not explicitly depict my Italian-American culture but it does explicitly depict the value that family always comes first and this was instilled in me by my parents and grandparents at a very young age.  “The Perfect Balance” is a poem I wrote based on my relationship experiences.  This is my second draft of this poem and it covers my definition of what love entails and also has some personal elements of my experiences in relationships.  I was told to delve deeper into my personal experiences but I decided to keep it the way it was because I felt that if I were to keep it more general I could reach a wider audience.  Also my reason for keeping it was that my idea of poetry is that its purpose is to be able to relate with almost anybody and if I were to make it more about me I felt many readers wouldn’t truly grasp the meaning behind this poem. This was honestly my first real attempt at poetry.  Sure I may have attempted it at a young age while in elementary school but that was before I truly understood the meaning behind writing poetry.  “Io Italiano” is a short-lined poem that I wrote based on my Italian-American heritage.  I chose to make the stanza on family and tradition the longest stanzas for the reason that those are the two most important aspects (from what I was taught by my family) of being an Italian-American. I think it was pretty obvious how this depicts my heritage.  I took straight from what my belief of what an Italian-American is to write this poem. We are loud-mouthed, family-oriented and tradition-oriented.  I didn’t just want to give the general look so in some aspects of the poem you will see me dive a bit deeper so I don’t only scratch the surface. Sure this poem gives a very stereotypical look at Italian-Americans, but I feel most stereotypes for us fit us well.  There are bad stereotypes for us but I did not want to dwell on that for this poem.  I felt that if I chose to prove the bad stereotypes wrong would have taken away from the pride I have in the good stereotypes.