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By Susan Williams
Tony Ardizzone's new novel, In the Garden of Papa
Santuzzu, brings a sense of time and timelessness to
the story of a Sicilian sharecropper whose dream is that his children find lives of plenty in a wonderful new land‹"La America."
A professor of English at IU Bloomington, Ardizzone is the grandson of Sicilian immigrants. "My grandparents came from Agrigento," said Ardizzone. "My grandfather fell ill with tuberculosis, so my father, the first
born son, had to support the family from the time he was 8. He sold newspapers in Grant Park (Chicago) every day after school."
In a figurative sense, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu is his family's history, but it also creates a much larger tale of an ethnic group's experience in America.
Ardizzone, who has also written about Morocco and the Arab world, saw himself as a scientist in high school and focused on science fair experimentations in immunology. Then he discovered Lawrence Ferlinghetti's book of poetry, Coney Island of the Mind.
"I marveled at the effects its language achieved," said Ardizzone. "I carried the book around constantly and read more of Ferlinghetti's work, and the work of other Beat writers. I found friends who introduced me to jazz‹specifically to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. These voices, literary and musical, seemed exactly right to me at the time."
From this grew his interest in language and its forms, which is evidenced in the folklore, songs and lusty sense of oral tradition that guides his book‹and in its beautiful language.
"Flannery O'Connor spoke frequently about living 'the habit of art,'" said Ardizzone. "This involves practice, attitude and quality of mind. The writer makes art a habit, reading widely, writing regularly, and finding pastimes, such as listening to or playing music, that don't involve words."
Ardizzone, the winner of prestigious literary awards, also received a 1998 Teaching Excellence Award from IU.
"I tell students to focus on the process of becoming and being a writer," he said. "The process itself is always more important than the result. And I tell them to learn to take as much pleasure as they can from the act of writing itself.
"I don't write specifically for publication, and certainly not for money, but rather as a way of pleasing some sense of myself and my own growing interests in literature and language."
For more on Ardizzone and reviews of his work, go to:
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