Audience Experience

Last night, I attended a marvelous reading and discussion with the author Anthony De Sa and Wilfried N'Sonde. Both authors were amazing, and revealed the excellent approaches they took about research and their backgrounds and how they contributed to their work. Both were WRITERS first, their backgrounds were just pieces which informed their writings-not characteristics by which they needed to be pigeonholed. I admit, that I came because De Sa had grown up in the Portuguese neighborhood of Toronto, and I had read Barnacle Love while in the Azores. There aren't enough children of Portuguese immigrants writing fiction today and I loved what I had encountered-feeling as if I was not alone in the experience. De Sa's new book is about Mozambique, Children of the Moon.  In an aside, he revealed that even though his uncles had fought in the wars (including Angola and Guinea), he had never gotten a fuller story out of them.  When I probed further, he mentioned how difficult