About Kathleen Zamboni McCormick
Weaving Words, Finding Humor in the Serious
I’ve 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 have told and written stories for as long as I can remember. They usually make people laugh, though sometimes, after the laughter fades, people realize how serious, or even painful, those stories can be. That balance between humor and heart is at the center of much of my writing.
I’m especially fascinated by the way children make sense of the world around them, taking the information adults give 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 can 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 follows Bridget Flaherty as she tries to make sense of Catholicism, family life, the supernatural, and the complicated world of adults. Bridget’s wacky misunderstandings may be wonderfully absurd, but there is always a grain of truth behind them.
Much of my creative writing draws 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 has 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’m thrilled that the book has made so many readers laugh. For me, humor has always been one of the most powerful ways to tell the truth.
My newer writing continues to feature Bridget Flaherty while exploring questions of gender and social class more deeply. My short creative work has also appeared in journals including Witness, South Carolina Review, and Italian Americana.
Writing and teaching writing are deep rhythms in my life. I continue to be amazed by the way writing allows my students, and me, to grow, question what we think we know, and make sense of the paths we have chosen, the ones we may choose next, and the ones we simply find ourselves traveling.
At Purchase College, SUNY, where I am Professor of Literature and Writing, I teach writing at all levels as well as Irish and Italian-American literature. My academic books include 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 have also co-edited MLA volumes on Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture and Teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses, and written extensively about how we can 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 recognizes Italian-American scholars for outstanding contributions to their professions and communities.
Whether I’m writing fiction, teaching, or thinking about the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from, I keep returning to the same things: memory, family, culture, language, and laughter. Especially laughter.
