Calling in the Muse Creative Writing Retreat

 

We are hosting our first retreat! And we would love to see you there. Calling in the Muse Creative Writing Retreat in beautiful Puglia, Italy! Join us from July 6 - 12, 2025 at the stunning Masseria Specula for a week of inspiration, creativity, and connection. This retreat is designed for writers of all genres who are looking to rejuvenate their craft in a supportive and inspiring environment. Immerse yourself in the picturesque surroundings of Puglia as you dive deep into your writing practice. From workshops to one-on-one coaching sessions, this retreat offers a unique opportunity to tap into your creativity and unleash your muse.

Don't miss out on this unforgettable experience! Hosted by Author & Photo Director Angela Paolantonio.

Invoking the muse practice is grounded in ancient history. A ceremony, a prayer, a song, a dance. To bring you to center. To call in the muse. Building relationships with the spirit world and the invisible and immortal aspects of our own nature is the root of all creativity. We will use these beautiful surroundings to inform, to inspire, and to tap lines of power, creativity and connection. 

Immerse. Wait for the Muse. Write. That's It.

For inclusive details email me at ghostsofitaly@gmail.com

EVENTBRITE Calling in the MUSE

ANGELA PAOLANTONIO

EXPERIENCE RETREATS

STRADE DORATE | New Interview

An artist and photographer who has developed into a writer. 

INTERVIEW by VALENTINA DI CESARE

    Can you tell us something about your ancestor’s emigration? Where did they come from? 

    My paternal grandparents were born, raised and married in Calitri (AV) Italy. My paternal ancestry goes back a few hundred years in Calitri, though perhaps by way of our deep ancestral ‘Gens’, originating in Gubbio and Rome. They married in 1920 and emigrated to NYC. My grandfather had already been to New York and back as a young man, working and bringing money home to his parental family. They raised their family in New York City. My maternal grandparents were also Italian immigrants of the wave of the early 1900s. They too were born in the South in Calabria and Sicily and married in NYC where they raised their family. I currently live in my paternal grandmother’s childhood home — a two-room stone house in the Centro Storico of Calitri. This year is the 25th anniversary of my first foray to the town. I arrived in 2000, the Millennial Jubilee and have lived here full time since 2010.  

    When and how did you choose photography and literature to narrate the world and to make others share your view of things? 

    As I wrote for one of my early biography requests, ‘My love of photography began as I watched my father expose and develop contact sheets on the family kitchen table.’ Photography has been in my life as a form of artistic expression since then.  My father gave me my first 35mm camera, an Olympus OM1 35mm for my 18th birthday. Before that, it was a Polaroid Land camera and various Kodak Instamatics. I studied Fine Art and Art History in High School and I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Art History and History of Photography degree from Long Island University, Southampton, New York.  From there, I lived twenty years as a resident of Los Angeles where I was an Artist Agent, and Photo Editor and Director for national and international advertising and editorial companies. I have been an executive producer, curator, and consultant for art and photography exhibits, books, and events in both Italy and the U.S. 

    My career has always been within the fields of art and photography and design, up to co-designing the two memoirs I have published using my own images of the town to illustrate chapters and the companion book / author website.So, I consider myself an artist and photographer who has developed into a writer. My artistic and visual acuity has powerfully informed and guided my writing. This is my photographer turned writer origin story. At heart, a visual storyteller.

    What inspired your books THE GHOSTS OF ITALY and STILL LIFE WITH SAINTS? How and when did you get the first inkling that you’d write this book? 

    I was struck early in my journey by the idea that I would write this story. Actually it came to me as a voice in my head on that first bus ride up to the town back in 2000. It then took me a few years to complete THE GHOSTS OF ITALY simply because a significant part of the story had yet to unfold.  All the while, I was documenting the village with my OM1. Creating what I called my sight-map of the town over those early years, and of my experiences in it. I must have taken a thousand or more images now on various formats of the vie and vicoli and characters of the town.  I wrote STILL LIFE WITH SAINTS from the POV of ‘una figliola,’– what I came to understand as an endearment, ‘a daughter of the town.’ Once embedded in their rural Italian microculture I wrote from mental imagery, deeply rooted instinct, and as some here would say personal courage. To live in, and write about, these hilltop places and the myths of their streets and to give that story wide appeal, I would have to agree. Turned out to be the voice of destiny.

     What has changed in you since you first arrived in Calitri, documented the town in photographs, then wrote two memoirs about your experience of life and culture from a remote region of hill town Italy? 

    Interpreting and writing about this experience has changed me in profound ways. My interest and exploration of life here however was never from a scholarly point of view but from an artist’s point of view. A journey into another culture, another world, albeit of my ancestry, of listening to their stories and adapting to their livelihoods. I am currently writing book three. Always from the perspective of a daughter of the community —  who the townspeople view as a kind of pathfinder. An insider outsider. On a kind of philosophical journey between this culture and my (original) own and how they intersect; themes exploring the folklore of the feminine and mother daughter relationships among other cross-cultural threads.

    Have you ever felt, directly or indirectly, what scholars call ‘emigration disorientation’? what you feel when your cultural references are not clear?

    Disorientation plays a minor role in my daily life here, if at all. I have always felt guided included and at home. It’s a kind of spiritual stewardship to live in rooms once populated by my paternal grandmother’s matriarchal line. I feel their feminine companionship. The companionship of all the women up and down my stone lane is soul enriching. It has been twenty-five years since I first stepped foot in the village that I have now called home for almost as long. I have never addressed myself as a migrant or emigrant or even an expat. To me I was simply on an inner journey to uncover some personal truths. Curiosity informed my first journey in 2000 and continued serendipity took care of the rest. 

You can read the website article here. And in Italian by clicking here.

GITARELLA

Facciamo un giretto?

So here I am 30 years out from that very first ever trip to (Etruscan) Tuscan, Italy. The year is now 2025. Rome is celebrating another Jubilee and I’m still home. 

A gita is to take a brief walk, drive, a short trip, quick road trip, a jaunt. A gitarella, ending in the feminine A, is a girl, a young woman out of the house. Not to be confused with citarella, or little citadel, which will come a little later down chapter road.

Facciamo un giretto? This phrase in Italian is asking you if you would like to take a quick tour around the town. Generally it is a friendly inquiry to join someone you know for a little spin. Otherwise it can mean a man asking a woman for a date, a spin in his orbit, to show the town–which to him is his world–who he is out with.

Dove Vai? Much more problematic for a young single woman is 'un giretto'. In quotes. Though maybe I am speaking too soon, or too many years after the learned fact, from the now infamous and ubiquitous question posed as a directive from just about any family member when I first arrived alone in the town and thought innocently to spend a few hours alone walking around the town to simply take photos of the old village. ‘Dove Vai?’ Where are you going? Always from family. In both languages. In both worlds.

Gira per il mondo, is another thing altogether. It is part monella, part vagabonda. Dove sei stata? Un gira per il mondo? They’ve now accepted your peripatetic ways jovially, though still watchfully, maybe accepting that this is not their choice for themselves or maybe even you but they’ll let you have it. They let you be it.

It's complicated. 

✍ ✍ ✍

BOOK THREE of the TRILOGY

Coming in 2025

TO GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE

The Journey Home Making a New Life in the Old Country

'You might say it is odd, to go off by yourself on the most family-oriented holiday of the year, and Angela Paolantonio, a Los Angeles photographers’ representative with a shock of black curls and a tendency to worry about other people’s feelings first and her own later, would agree.'

So begins the story, you might say a perfect nut graf, by a veteran journalist in the New York Times sixteen years ago -- published on Thursday, November 22, 2007. Thanksgiving Day. November 22, 2007 was the 44th anniversary of JFK's assassination. Though I must admit I hadn't realized it at the time. 

This year, November 22 marks the 60th anniversary of that fateful day and we Americans, and the world still commemorate it as a national day of rememberance and mystery. 

Even Franco, zio Franco, fondly remembered by the reporter and featured in the same Thanksgiving Day article, understood the power of collective memory as he posed the not so unique question it seemed to me some years earlier late one November, as we sat in his darkend living room the very first day we met and that I recount in the first chapters of THE GHOSTS OF ITALY -- Tutto accade a novembre?

'Then Franco leaned in with an unexpected question. "Do you think the Mafia assassinated Kennedy?"

It caught me by surprise, yet I recognized his concern. Of being lumped in with the doings of nefarious members of his, our Southern Italian heritage. I was only four at the time but I remember everything that black day. The sorrow of others. Watching the funeral. The sober glow of my Aunt Rose's black-and-white television set in her darkened living room in East New York. .... Venerated, romanticized, the Mafia. Someone always wanted to know if you were in. I never understood why. My family, my childhood, was far from this kind of occlusion. We were a product of President Kennedy's Camelot. My Italian-American aunts and uncles had served in two wars, were blue collar earners with American hopes and dreams. The Mafia? We children never thought of it, or were shielded from it. And then, a scant three months after the assassination, the Beatles arrived, and with the release of "Please Please Me" everything changed. 

But Franco was waiting. 

I pulled out of my private reverie and shook my head no. "I don't think they" (we Italians) "had anything to do with it." 

He turned to light another cigarette and that concluded our discussion.' 

Sixty years after JFK's death (sixteen after zio Franco's) the Beatles are back in the charts and Italian news headlines read, 

John Kennedy, a 60 anni dalla morte una famiglia e un'America divise

Allora, tutto ancora accade a novembre. Happy Thanksgiving.