To celebrate Italian Heritage Month with a cultural event, the OSDIA Carmel Lodge invited Tiziano Thomas Dossena, the winner of the 2019 OSIA Literary Award and our Editorial Director, on October 10 to speak on the importance of writing memoirs. The presentation was very lively and prompted a lot of questions from the members of the Lodge. Besides talking about the relevance of leaving information about your life, whether to the descendants or to the large public, Mr. Dossena, who is the Recording Secretary of the Giuseppe Garibaldi Lodge of Eastchester/Tuckahoe, touched all the technical aspects of the decision process, from choosing pictures to the initial note-taking method and the very important analysis on whether to whom make the memoir available, and presented four examples of memoirs, which he had edited for his publishing company. The first two, written as novels, were Given Away, the Rest of the Story, by Marianna Biazzo Randazzo, and Some Grief, Some Joy by Leo Vadalà. He then talked about Gilda, Promise Me, a factual memoir by Gilda Battaglia Rorro Baldassari, and George Washing Machine, Portables and Submarine Races, an interesting look at his family’s events narrated through amusing short stories.
