I'm often asked what it's like living in Tuscany. Just real life, mostly.

I live in a mid-sized medieval city often overlooked by visitors. It's here in the everyday where I sometimes find the most compelling stories to tell.

Probably my first piece of serious writing was from middle school. It was a retelling of Odysseus' voyage with snippets of dialogue based on how I'd imagined Ancient Greeks talked using American English. The essay got the highest grade in class (a 97 if I recall) and I felt that, maybe, I was onto something. The ink stopped flowing for a while when my family uprooted from Chicago to Northern California. It took some time to get my bearings though I dabbled in a diary on occasion to process through the culture shock.

At university, I sidled back to writing, contributing a news blurb or record review to the school newspaper (the cultural editor who gave me a chance is still a dear friend) and writing copy for a mom-and-pop ad agency's quarterly magazine geared toward the university community. I also ventured over to the university's touted radio station where I spun indie and art- and post-punk (think: Throwing Muses, Buzzcocks, Wire, Les Rita Mitsouko) when those genres were truly thriving, sans the auto-tune.

After earning a Master's in Radio-TV I dove into broadcasting: My first documentary was an episode of an Emmy-winning PBS labor series focusing on women servers. With time, I  became a full-fledged broadcast writer, field producer and director of stand-alone documentaries to episodes of network series. I'd say that my interest in writing about real events and people, and writing about my own experiences, really congealed when I nabbed a Fulbright fellowship to document popular endangered traditions in Sicily, then on the cusp of the second millennium and undergoing enormous change. As part of my research, I taped extensive interviews with Sicilians from all walks of life from hinterland villagers to Palermitan nobility on a borrowed Hi-8 camcorder, the footage long since transferred to digital. Read my interview (or read it in Italian here) with late world-acclaimed photographer Letizia Battaglia who documented Palermo under siege during the so-called Second Mafia War. That experience still impacts my work approach and how I do interviews.

My career path's shifted with the changing times. I'm writing for print more, which satisfies my love for research and working independently and, now, sharing over two decades of living and working in Italy. I savor a more deliberate approach to exploring the Belpaese, uncovering hidden nuggets of history (a story's on the horizon exploring the remarkable history of our home, part of an 18th-century palazzo packed with intrigue (its original owner, one Alessandra Mari who married into nobility, led a contingent of anti-French troops, tantalizingly attired in male garb), interesting people I encounter on my travels who share their stories. With ancestral roots in Sicily, I sometimes inject some of that side of me into my writing.

Whenever I write, one ever-present thought is that you always get better at it; there's always room for improvement and you need others' feedback. When I can't find the right word, I'll search long and hard for it. When it doesn't appear, I head out the door for a walk and reset. Whatever the end goal, my advice is this: Be humble, be grateful for any opportunity that arises, especially to those who open the door for you. They've been there, too, and truly get it.