My story “If Only a Word for All Things” was published in the podcast Cast of Wonders in August 2019. Here’s where you can find out more about why and how I wrote the story. There will be spoilers ahead, so go read the story first.
After I graduated from college, I spent a year living in Italy. I was working at two high schools as a Fulbright English teaching assistant, and it was my experiences there that really created and shaped this story.
I first wrote “If Only a Word for All Things” in the fall of 2014, just a month after I arrived in Italy. I was meeting and working with a lot of new people, and I worked with quite a few multilingual families. When I first met these families, I heard one parent speaking one language, the other parent speaking a second language, and the kids speaking Italian, and in my state of culture shock, I was totally mystified. I said to myself, “No one is speaking the same language. How can this possibly work?”
It turned out later that both parents could also speak Italian in most of these families, but my first impression remained with me, and this story was born.
“If Only a Word for All Things” was one of those stories that took shape in my mind all at once and poured out of me in one sitting. I drew a lot on my own personal sensory impressions of Italy, including the weird cold-but-warm temperature of southern Europe in December and the feeling you get when cars drive past you really fast when you’re walking.
My love of languages—I’ve studied Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French—became part of this story too. My preference for Italian over French may have been obvious as well.
Though it poured out of me in one sitting, this story took a lot of revision and fine-tuning. I actually got a revise and resubmit request from one magazine, and I did some work to make the magical elements a little more pronounced and clarify Annachiara’s motivation to find her mother. Although the revisions ultimately weren’t what the magazine was looking for, I definitely feel like they helped the story. I ended up revising more before sending the story out again to make the magic a little more subtler. One of the things I loved about the story was how subtle the speculative element is and yet also how central to the story.
It took some more rejections and more revisions, but I kept getting positive feedback from editors on this one, so I kept at it. Then in June 2018, I got the acceptance letter from Cast of Wonders. Cast of Wonders published my story “The Collector” back in 2014, and they did such a great job with it, so I was really excited to hear what they did with this story. And I was not disappointed.
“If Only a Word for All Things” is a really special story to me, because it came directly out of a year that was both very difficult for me but also very important in shaping who I am. It came from my love of languages and my fascination with translation and words that are difficult to translate. I also see a lot of the literary style that I cultivated while at Kenyon and that I only use for certain stories these days. So I feel like I’m really giving you a piece of myself with this story, and now that I said that and made this awkward, I really hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Some other fun facts:
“I am fluent in Italian, and I studied French during a summer course before I went to Italy and then again through my whole second year of law school. I’ve kept up the Italian, but though I can occasionally pull up some random French phrases, I haven’t practiced much since I finished my last course a year ago.
“Maggari” is in fact an Italian word. Google tells me it means “even,” “maybe,” or “if only,” but a lot of Italians told me that it is used as a filler word that can mean whatever you want it to mean.
The title for this story has always been “If Only a Word for All Things.” I did toy with adding a colon after “if only” but decided I liked how it sounded without the colon better.
The artwork at the top of the page is the episode art by Alexis Goble, and I love how it captures the story so well.