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 Civita di Bagnoregio
Read Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa's new essay on this medieval town in Tuscia by scrolling down the page "Story is a way of taking place with you when you are forced to leave"
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
Few places in Tuscia are as enchanted as Civita di Bagnoregio.In her poignant essay below, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa describes her visit to the place during an excursion with Peter Selgin's 2008 Workshop in Vitorchiano.
Civita de Bagnoregio
I sat alone in the van watching my colleagues make their way up the bridge. My arthritic knees made the climb impossible for me but I had silent, solitary time to really look and think about this most unusual village across the gorge. Of all the places we explored in Tuscia, and there were many, this place has stayed with me more than any other.
Just the approach required that the visitor screw up all his/her will power before starting the climb. The tiny, cliff-top village rises out of the valley like an apparition. The only way into the town is a steep and narrow bridge sitting on what, from this angle, appear to be mosquito legs anchored to the rocks below. Originally, the residents found building out there an effective way of safeguarding themselves. But in the end, erosion left their village stranded high over the valley. It wasn’t the enemy but the wearing down of the supporting rock that defeated them. Over the many years, there were repairs, repeated attempts to secure the path, but eventually the town had to be evacuated and rebuilt on the other side of the bridge where it still stands on firmer ground.
I closed my eyes and let my mind reach out to capture images of what had come before. I closed myself off from the modern sites and sounds around me and focused on feeling this place with my imagination, finding its spirit of place. I know very little of the true history of this place, but this is what I wrote in my journal…
June 17, 2008
“The old weaver is the last inhabitant, unwilling to leave this place where her husband and children are buried. She lives with only her dog as company, weaving her cloth from early morning late into the night, beginning her labor when the light rises and ending when it wanes. She looks down at the town being built down below on the other side of the bridge. Every year, there are more houses, more people, less of the old ways. Once a month she comes down to sell her cloth and buy supplies. Early morning, she loads her wooden cart and starts her journey. It takes all day to go across, sell her wares and drag her supply-laden cart back up the crooked bridge before the sun goes down. Every year there is more rubble on the path. She knows there will come a time when the bridge will have big gaps and no one to rescue it. It will become unusable, old and not worth saving, much like myself, she thinks. She hopes she will be gone by then. It has been many decades since she came here as a young bride to live in the sky among the clouds. She is too old to live in a new place where there is no space to breathe and the stars are too far away. Here the stars and the moon and the sun and even the falling snow in the winter have kept her company long after the others crossed and stayed beyond. She tends to the graves of those left behind. She doesn’t worry about who will tend to her grave. It will be over by then. She will be the last. She has made her peace with that.
One night when the snow starts to fall and settle in the crevices and the moon has fallen behind the horizon and her dog has stopped moving, she hears a great crack! And she knows the bridge is wounded beyond repair. She looks out at the gaping hole in the path and knows continuity is broken. She climbs the tower to the room closest to the sky and opens the window. The wind blows the snow in and around her white head. She wraps herself in her heavy shawl and covers her loom, weighing the cloth with heavy stones so the wind doesn’t disturb it. She lies down where she can see the dancing snowflakes and she waits. She can hear her family singing her home already. The snowflakes cling to her eyelashes. She has been expecting this night for some time.
In the new city, on the other side of the gorge, just below the village, the lights go out one by one. It is the time of sleeping. Above, in the uppermost room of the silent tower, the old woman closes her eyes and follows the singing in her head.”
 Poet Randall Watson, guest editor of a
new poetry anthology by Mutabilis Press Mutabilis Press Announces New Texas Poetry Anthology
including work by former participants in workshops at Centro Pokkoli
The Weight of Addition, an anthology of Texas Poetry is our fourth and newest title. In this new collection, Randall Watson has thoughtfully brought together the work of 118 poets connected to Texas by heritage and/or residence, or by coming here for a time, often to teach, contributing remarkably to our evolving poetry community. With The Weight of Addition, an Anthology of Texas Poetry, it is our continuing mission to document the rich and diverse work that is being created here.
Randy writes in his introduction, "It is my intention, then that the title, The Weight of Addition, should suggest the depth and range of the work that appears here."
He goes on to conclude, " . . . --we have the poems themselves: each a sign and a revelation of our uncommon lives . . . each an artifact of the spirit, of the inner life with its mass and fluidity, . . . each an addition and a weight--humane and troubled and hopeful and necessary--a mirror in which we might discover not just those things that distinguish us, but those that identify us, that connect us, individually, in what might be called our mutuality, our belonging."
 Cecilia Woloch  Charlotte Uekert and writing students  Pam Leavy and husband Jim |
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An Interview with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa Dahlma attended Peter Selgin's 2008 workshop in Vitorchiano and participated in Linda Lappin's Spirit of Place Writing Workshop. Linda recently interviewed her about the role spirit of place has played in her writing.
Linda Lappin: What do the words “spirit of place” mean to you?
Dahlma Llanos- Figueroa: For me, spirit of place is that feeling, those images that come to me when I surrender myself to an old place. I try to look beyond the modernity to what might have been. I don’t know where the images come from. The simple answer is my imagination. But I think there is more to it than that. Some philosophers feel that the energy of the people who live and die in one place never go away. Maybe they leave imprints behind, traces of their life force, which can’t be destroyed and which can be read by someone who really looks for it.
Linda Lappin: In what ways does your work draw sustenance from the link between soul of place and individual & family identity?
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa Today, we are constantly on the move. We buy starter houses with the idea of upgrading to something bigger and better in the future. This idea would have been preposterous to my grandmother. Home is home. It is a place where those who came before lived and played and died. It is a place you defend and you pass on to your children. When there is nothing else, there is the land, there are the stories. That way of thinking makes for a totally different relationship with place, my place, our place. With the realities of today’s urban world, many of us have lost that sense of place. In my work, I try hard to get the reader to connect to place. I try to recapture that spirit of place, if not by actual location, then by story. Story is a way of taking place with you when you are forced to leave. Story is a way of taking people with you too. It is my way of sharing. Something has to connect us to what came before and will come in the future. Mere DNA isn’t enough.
Linda Lappin What places past or present are most haunting to you now?
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa: For me old places are always haunting. The older the better—the more stories.
Read Dahlma's essay on Civita di Bagnoregio in the sidebar to the left of this page
In June 2009, Centro Pokkoli welcomed San Franciso writer, song writer, and writing teacher, Karen Toloui who stayed at the center for a personalized workshop week with writing teacher Linda Lappin in order to work on a memoir. Below is a brief narrative of her time, along with a link to her blog. Thank you, Karen!
NEW Karen Toloui blogs from Vitorchiano  Writer Karen Toloui at Centro Pokkoli A Writer's Stay in Vitorchiano by Karen Toloui
Months ago, knowing there was something I needed to do, I decided to begin telling the story that I have to tell. Burdened with teaching too many classes, the essays and book reports waiting, constantly for my perusal, I wondered when, if at all, I would be able to write it. That was when I decided I needed to get away to some place quiet and strange where my usual life would not tug me away from this thing that I have to do. So I hatched the perfect plan—go to Italy where I feel comfortable enough with the language to be able to order dinner and find a quiet monastic place to begin writing. The place appeared in the form of a medieval village about a hundred miles north west of Rome, and an opportunity to stay in my own little flat in the quaintest of villages where not even an internet connection was available to me, or television or friend or cat could discourage me from writing. It turns out that along with the time and space came a writer/writing teacher who would help me get started on this journey.
For writing surely is a journey. A journey into some place haunted and private, a cave yet to be drilled but where are embedded the veins of experience and insight. The writer begins to burrow through the thick walls of time and decorum, the tough skin of memory and forgetting, to bring out truth, if you will, but truth blindingly beautiful and clear, sparkling in daylight. But such a journey begins in darkness, and finding the cave and the way into the cave is arduous, lonely. Whose hand, but the writer's feeling along the rocky surface of the wall , can find the soft place to begin to dig and drill? So, here I am in a walled town built on hard volcanic stone, walking with bare hands extended, tentative and halting.
This town dates back to ancient times, layered with history told in the shards and bones of an Etruscan past, covered over by the medieval walls and floors of a proud people at times in the thick of conflict with neighboring bully towns but who managed to survive and thrive. Their strength is constitutional. Surrounded by stone, residents make their way through narrow passage ways, the dark walls occasionally decorated with bright pots of geraniums bringing reds and yellows and greens as if painted on the surface—signs of the human way of bringing light to darkness, beauty to the hard reality of the rock of survival. The streets are uneven in plan, circular. Some flow downward, some lead to steps, and some to ramps. Making your way past wooden doors, you feel a strain at the knee, the foot touching a stone at an odd angle, a dampness at a corner, a slight wind in your face at another. Turn a corner, and you gasp at the steepness that awaits you. Everything is hard, but there is safety. It's the first of June, but it's raining. The sky, gray, is the backdrop to the black, wet stone of the walls. The sides of the town above the green gorge are like the sides of a ship. My windows are portholes through which I can gaze at the calm green vegetation of the gorge. These are the lights to the outside from the place I am inside of. Impenetrable town, impenetrable walls, this safety is an illusion. Flesh against stone: in combat, the latter would win. Just slip at a slick spot and see how it stings the skin, or have a misstep and fall, and the skull would crack. I am reminded that being human, we are subject to falling and pain. Being human, our histories are brief, but even we can make our mark on the stone.
Finding the soft spot, the place to go inside the past and bring out the experiences that someone might want to read about—that is the problem. Coming to Italy, there is a history that can be dug up and rendered for all, including myself, to see.
 Karen Toloui at the Centro Pokkoli Old Friends from the Kenyon Review
Read David Lynn's account of the first Kenyon Review Italy Workshop at Centro Pokkoli below
 David Baker and David Lynn of The Kenyon Review
Italy Writing Program Watch this space for news about our friends, teachers, and participants
Vitorchiano Diary by David Lynn
originally printed in The Kenyon Review
Sunday, June 5
I’m sitting in my hotel room, the window wide open, a steep hill of pines and plane trees climbing across the way. The Tuscia, this area north of Rome, is much greener than I’d expected, its sharp hills and mountains rising from the broad plain below. Only a few hours ago I was buffeted by the weekend bustle of da Vinci Airport in Rome, worried—as I always worry—about the new Kenyon Review Writers Workshop about to begin. But this one is in Italy—a far cry from the well-known paths of Gambier.
Our writing programs have become an ever more important part of the identity and mission of The Kenyon Review. Our workshops for young writers and adults in Gambier have grown every year. We are developing new generations of readers and writers, and that’s a critical and creative way to keep the flame of literature alive. But adults are a challenging market: persuading them to spend money—and time!—on themselves can be a hard sell. The idea of launching this new program abroad is to offer both the chance for serious writing and instruction and for the pleasures of exploration and holiday as well.
A ninety-minute drive through the green-golden hills outside of Rome brought the twenty-plus participants and staff up into the vineyards, olive groves, and forests of the Cimini Mountains. The air is immediately lighter, cooler, lovely. This is an authentic Italy that one so rarely has access to—nary a tourist coach on the horizon.
Monday, June 6
Truth is, last night after dinner I sneaked out of the Hotel Piccola to glimpse Vitorchiano firsthand, the village where the workshops will take place. I did not, could not write about my impressions on returning, not merely because I was sleepy and the hour late, but because I doubted my ability to do so in anything other than a tone of hyperbole that readers would dismiss as preposterous. I considered, truly, abandoning this journal. But in this morning’s brilliant sunshine, I returned to the central village once more, this time with the ten participants of our fiction workshop, and now I feel better able to take a shot.
Last night, passing through the archway of a wall that encircles the small hill town, all I could make out were the ancient buildings themselves. At the edge of one terrace, staring out into the vast blackness of the chasm that falls away to three sides, I could see only the stars high overhead. From the distance came the song of the nightingale and the clockless call of the cuckoo.
Everything here—walls, pavement, churches and houses, alleys and arches—is wrought from a dark gray stone mined locally and aptly named pepperino, or pepperstone. The village perches on the crown of a jutting outcrop of that same rock, as if it were part of the same original extrusion from the earth, or perhaps a later, stony blossom. Built largely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Vitorchiano seems largely untouched by the modern world, except that tiny cars do indeed sidle through the narrow lanes and alleys, and the denizens who live here are very much a part of our world. No touch of Epcott in these precincts.
Today we arrived to begin our program at the seminar center recently opened by the American poet Linda Lappin. The cottage is in the center of the village. Its main room—comfortable space for twelve or fourteen writers—looks out across that great chasm falling protectively away below.
Tuesday, June 7
Our participants—seventeen writers and four partners or guests— make up an interesting group of most every size, shape, and persuasion. They come from across the U.S. And though several have been involved with earlier KR workshops in Gambier, most have never had a Kenyon or KR connection. I’m pretty sure that after this experience, most will continue as part of the national community that has become such a signature of our programs.
One thing these writers all share is talent and commitment. Amazingly, there’s been not a single whinge so far—remarkable for any enterprise such as this. It helps to have Nancy Zafris teaching fiction and David Baker poetry. They are marvelous, challenging, inspiring instructors, and they share not a little diplomatic talent as well.
The fiction workshop meets each morning for two hours, the poetry for two hours; one group took the early shift in the seminar room on Monday. Today they have flip-flopped. I can tell that all is going well because everyone seems so eager to keep writing in the afternoons, despite the fine lunches and the lure of a siesta at the Hotel Piccola.
This afternoon we took the first of our special outings, this to a local “park of monsters.” The Tuscia, it turns out, is full of these unexpected glories. The park was created on a mountaintop near the hill town of Bomarzo by Prince Orsini in the sixteenth century. In dells and glens, across rolling hills and sharp rocky spines, enormous stone gorgons and giants preen and astonish. Supposedly, the prince was so in love with his young wife that he built this park as a place to play and sport, and one can imagine the parties here. Many of the monsters have been carved in place from outcrops of the dark gray pepperino, and the artistry is astounding. Waterfalls and streams flow throughout, and it’s impossible to tell which of these waterways were created, which occur quite naturally. David Baker suggested—and I think it’s a great idea—that next year we arrange a picnic here and have workshops in the park in the afternoon.
Wednesday, June 8
One of the women on the program came up to me after dinner. “I thought, when I first saw the schedule, that taking a day off would be a waste of time,” she said. “But now I realize it was brilliant—we’ve been working so hard. I needed the break!”
I was glad to hear that, of course. A handful of our writers decided to stay in Vitorchiano and keep at their work. More power to them! Most of the others, however, used the off-day to travel near and far for fun and, I suspect, for fresh inspiration. Orvieto is only forty-five minutes away, with one of the great cathedrals in Italy, its famous wines, its glorious views from high above the countryside. More locally, Viterbo and Orte are well worth a visit. One woman took a train to Florence for the day, and reported tonight that she had a marvelous time just walking nonstop through that magical city. Still others, myself included, slipped away for a bright, breezy day of walking, shopping, eating in Rome.
Friday, June 9
A good day of work it has been. I’m delighted that each of the workshop groups has developed its own personality and independence. They’ve taken to meeting when and where they like, sometimes in an open air café just outside the walls of the old town, sometimes in the hidden grotto that lies all but secret within another café within the narrow, cobbled streets. You have to enter the outer chamber, find your way down a dark hole, before the inner room opens out with spaciousness and warmth. A wonderful place to collaborate—if only you can find it.
David and Nancy have their cohorts writing around the clock, all sharing a bond of excitement and exhilaration and not a little conspiracy. Tomorrow night before our parting gala dinner there will be an open reading and, as always, I know it will be great fun.
Already Ellen Sheffield, our program director who has made this all happen, and I are planning for next year. I’d anticipated making wholesale changes after the initial event, but there’s surely no need. I can hardly wait.
~David H. Lynn
 David Lynn Relaxing at the Palazzo Pieri Piatti Introducing the Kenyon Review Blog
Kenyon Review Blog Cecilia Wolcoh's Writing Group
Received by Mary Jane Cryan
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Pokkoli Writers Gallery
Featuring an interview with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa , author of Daughters of Stone and Karen Toloui of San Francisco, June 2009 resident at Centro Pokkoli
Linda Lappin
author of The Etruscan (Wynkin Deworde, 2004) and Katherine's Wish co-director of Centro Pokkoli Workshop leader for the "Spirit of Place" Creative Writing Online Workshops now available
Peter Selgin
novelist, writing teacher, and painter, author of By Cunning and Craft, Ten Lessons for Fiction Writers Writers Digest Books 2007. Join Peter at Centro Pokkoli for his fiction writing workshop in June 2010
Cecilia Woloch
Poet, multigenre workshop teacher.
No workshops scheduled for 2009
Check back for information
Chef Sergio
founder and director of Centro Pokkoli.
Instructor for "Survival Italian," Italian culture and cuisine workshops.
Discover his recipe memoirs here.
Thomas E. Kennedy
author of The Copenhagen Quartet
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