Wallis Wilde - Menozzi

Fourteen years ago, the author moved with her husband and daughter to Parma, a prosperous city in northern Italy. Searching for a way to find a place within a city that has existed since Roman times, she conducted a highly personal investigation of the often baffling, closed way of life she encountered. Mother Tongue explores Parma, largely through the lives of its women, some historical figures - Giuseppe Verdi, Correggio, the Renaissance badessa Giovanna Piacenza - and other extraordinary individuals. It is also a remarkable, probing evocation of an American life that has been tried and tempered by two very different societies. No other book evokes so poignantly and profoundly the role of food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life and, by reflection, in our own.

An excerpt from The Oneness of Music
Literary Essays about Italian and international writers
Essays in the works
Essays about multiculture
More...

Poetry has appeared multiple times in Mississippi Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, Malahat Review, Kansas City Review, 2Plus2 as well as in Notre Dame Review, Pequod, Frank, Spoon River, The Cream City Review, The Literary Review...

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi leads the Parma Writers' Workshop, now in its 6th year, as well as a group in Milan. She also teaches in Geneva for the Geneva Writers Workshop and is part of a European network seeking to expand writers' circles.

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi leads workshops on doctor-patient relationships.
The topic of doctor/patient relationships has become a subject of research as well as a school of thought within the discipline of medicine. The subject of communication in terminal illnesses, cancer treatment, chronic illnesses, operative and post-operative care, pediatric problems, psychosomatic illness, alternative treatments has grown into a serious discipline. Large bodies of specialized literature about problems specific to each area have been integrated into the teaching of those fields. Many medical schools have departments and specialized faculty dedicated to this important interface in illness and hospitalization. The courses taught in this field, which is generally composed of faculty from many disciplines from literature to psychology to the respective medical fields: cardiology, oncology, nursing, etc., are now considered an important part of healing. The awareness of communication is conceived of as something necessary for doctors, who also live under stress, anxiety, and feelings of empathy as well as failure, in their daily lives as healers. It is important to learn how to face stress and how to communicate with other members of staff such as nurses. Nurses training is part of this field, and such elements as talk circles within departments in order to improve communication and patient care are also subjects that can be taught. Finally, dealing with patients in an honest and dignified way, is also a subject that can and must be integrated into medical practice.