About Kathleen Zamboni McCormick
Weaving Words, Finding Humor in the Serious
I always said that if I hadn’t gone to college, I would have become a weaver. Instead, I became a Professor of Literature and Writing at Purchase College, SUNY, and a weaver of words.
I told and wrote stories for as long as I can remember. They usually made people laugh, though sometimes, after the laughter faded, people realized how serious, or even painful, those stories could be. That balance between humor and heart was at the center of much of my writing.
I was especially fascinated by the way children made sense of the world around them, taking the information adults gave them and reshaping it to fit their own logic. Growing up in a strict Catholic family, school, and parish, I often struggled to understand God, religion, and the rules that seemed to govern both. Some of those childhood misunderstandings were funny. Others reflected the fear, confusion, and contradictions that could come with growing up.
That perspective became part of the inspiration for my first full-length novel, Dodging Satan: My Irish/Italian, Sometimes Awesome, but Mostly Creepy, Childhood. The novel followed Bridget Flaherty as she tried to make sense of Catholicism, family life, the supernatural, and the complicated world of adults. Bridget’s wacky misunderstandings may have been wonderfully absurd, but there was always a grain of truth behind them.
Much of my creative writing drew from the rigid yet confusing universe in which I grew up as an Irish and Italian Catholic girl in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the 1960s and ’70s. It was an exciting urban and intellectual environment, but it could also be disconcerting, especially for a child trying to reconcile the expectations of family, church, school, culture, and the changing world outside.
Dodging Satan received a number of Independent Publishers awards for humor and religious writing, including the 2016 Foreword Reviews Gold Medal in Humor and the 2017 Illumination Book Awards Bronze Medal in Catholic books. I was thrilled that the book made so many readers laugh. For me, humor was always one of the most powerful ways to tell the truth.
My later writing continued to feature Bridget Flaherty while exploring questions of gender and social class more deeply. My short creative work also appeared in journals including Witness, South Carolina Review, and Italian Americana.
Writing and teaching writing were deep rhythms in my life. I was continually amazed by the way writing allowed my students and me to grow, question what we thought we knew, and make sense of the paths we had chosen, the ones we might choose next, and the ones we simply found ourselves traveling.
Before retiring from Purchase College, SUNY, I was a Professor of Literature and Writing, where I taught writing at all levels as well as Irish and Italian-American literature. My academic books included The Culture of Reading and the Teaching of English, which received the Modern Language Association’s Mina Shaughnessy Award, and Reading Our Histories, Understanding Our Cultures, among others. I also co-edited MLA volumes on Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture and Teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses, and wrote extensively about how we could help college students develop a deeper relationship with reading and writing.
In 2019, I was deeply honored to receive the Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Award, named for the first woman in history to earn a PhD and presented by the Sons and Daughters of Italy’s New York State Grand Lodge Foundation. The award recognized Italian-American scholars for outstanding contributions to their professions and communities.
Whether I was writing fiction, teaching, or thinking about the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from, I kept returning to the same things: memory, family, culture, language, and laughter. Especially laughter.
