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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. I'm Michael Silverblatt.

Today my guest is Joya Timpennelie. She's the author of two novellas of Sicily, called

Sometimes The Soul, which has been published in paperbacked by Vintage,

it's a beautiful book made particularly beautiful by the fact that you can tell,

even if you didn't know it, that Joia Timponelli is a professional storyteller. And so the books are full of all of the inviting gestures of tale-telling, the formulas to begin a story,

the way of thickening and complicating the plot and the ways of ending a story.

This interview is part of women writing in the imagination, our ongoing series of conversations

with nine prominent women

artists at the beginning of the 21st century.

And I thought I'd begin by asking you why it is that the storyteller, the crone, is often

a woman figure.

What is the relation between women and stories?

I think that women in general have been the keepers of the law, have been trying all their

life to deal with the complicated world that they have to live in for many, many reasons.

We all know the cultural, historical, social.

And they have not left the imaginative world or the world of what later becomes

literature.

And as Penelope Fitzgerald just recently said, she started writing novels because it was not a place where it was fair.

...