How to Survive as the Only Opera Fan in Elementary School
Perhaps younger siblings always imitate the firstborn, going back to those burnt offerings outside of Eden. But in the Gioia household, this didn’t happen on a baseball diamond or football field. In our unusual family, the process played out slowly on blank sheets of paper.
So many years later, Dana is still a popular teacher at colleges and writing workshops, and I make no claim for preeminence among his pupils. But if he was my first teacher, I was also his first student.
I certainly gave him useful experience in correcting almost every mistake a writer can make. Give me credit at least for that.
I always envied Dana’s stylish and seemingly artless manner of expression. How does he achieve that relaxed, confident balance of humor and observation, erudition and reminiscence, storytelling and instruction?
That’s a long way of introducing Dana’s latest piece, a boyhood memoir about music in the latest issue of The Hudson Review.
