Interview part 4: My Mother's Gifts

"My mother‘s gift of a typewriter and the way she saved money for it for a year gave me courage. Although I know she thought I was insane for wanting to do something so impractical, she still was saying without saying it, “Try! Go ahead and see if you can do it. Find a way!”

That’s what I did, I just found a way. Even though my route was perhaps not the most direct way to becoming a poet, it was the way that allowed me to find other things that I loved, like teaching and organizing poetry programs and creating other cultural programs. 

I always wrote poetry before she got me that typewriter, but I wrote by hand. I would still write by hand, but her gift enabled me to type it neatly and send out my poems to magazines. The typewriter opened the door for me to get published and to win contests."

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.