Hi! I’m Jeanna Lucci-Canapari, and I am currently working on a braided memoir about grief, place, and identity, as I examine the deaths, as I approached midlife, of two twin stars: my mother and my best friend. They were my strongest guiding lights, and able to convey their disapproval of me, my haircut, and my life choices with barely a glance. And now they are both gone.
I am originally from Rockville Centre, Long Island, though I may occasionally tell people who might not know better I am from New York City. That is the prerogative of the Nassau County folk.
About Once Upon a Time on Long Island:
It’s about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Italian-American culture. It’s about growing up in an Italian-American family on Long Island. It’s about midlife, looking backwards and forward. It used to be called “Spaghetti Northeastern” until I switched to a slightly less ponderous Sergio Leone joke.
I am using this Substack as a way to consider ideas that will feature in my book, which I thought of a really good title for, but will not share, because I adhere to one Italian-American stereotype, at least: I am superstitious. Plus I still have to write the whole thing.
About Me:
I am a freelance writer and adjunct writing professor living in New Haven, Connecticut, and I hold a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King's College (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2024). I teach English 101 (Academic Writing) at the University of Bridgeport (Go Purple Knights). My personal essays have appeared in Salon, Creative Nonfiction, Allegory Ridge, and Off Assignment, as well as in Fast Famous Women, an upcoming collection of flash nonfiction edited by Gina Barreca (Spring 2025), for which I wrote a humorous tribute to Speaker of the House (and flagship Italian-American) Nancy Pelosi. My freelance work has appeared regularly in Yale University publications, particularly in Yale Medicine, the alumni magazine of the Yale School of Medicine. I have led book groups at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY, where I led a group for members on Madeline Miller’s Circe and alternate voices in Homer’s Odyssey, another on the work of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, and another on Virgil’s Aeneid.
Me in front of the Duomo in Milan in 1996. I miss that Benetton coat.
I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Columbia University (Lions), and a Master of Liberal Arts from Harvard University (Crimson) in Literature and Creative Writing, which I completed while working full-time as a Communications Officer at Mass General Brigham, a hospital system in Boston. I also spent a college semester studying film at the University of Padua in Italy (no mascot).
The water tower at Jones Beach: Robert Moses’s Art Deco replica of Saint Mark’s Tower in Venice.
I hope to start a community and a conversation with other Italian-Americans, and the Italian-American adjacent. I hope to glorify Long Island. You have to throw a bunch of spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks, am I right?
Marina Grande, Sorrento.
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Essays about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Italian-America, Long Island, and midlife. Writing a memoir about grief: my mother and my best friend could built me up and cut me down with barely a glance. Now they are gone. So now what?
