Domenica Martinello
twitter: @domenicahope
Domenica Martinello is a writer born and raised in Montreal, QC, where she is currently based. She’s also lived in Toronto and Iowa, where she did her MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is also a college English teacher and she writes mobile app storytelling game scripts as her day job. She tries to be an active member of the Montreal writing community and is affiliated with the Quebec Writers’ Federation, as well as facilitating youth workshops with the QWF’s Writers in the Community program.
Her first collection of poetry All Day I Dream about Sirens (Coach House Books, 2019) is about reimagining mermaid narratives and siren mythology across time and culture, from Homer’s Odyssey to late capitalist Starbucks iconography. She loves mythology and loves pop culture and the two often overlap in her thinking. Currently, she is slowly writing poems toward a new book on, very broadly, the grey space between between “good” and “bad.”
Makeup is her favourite creative, non-literary hobby (I have a book-makeup hybrid instagram account @makeup4books). Additionally hobbies include but are not limited to: Zumba, reality TV, memes, and YouTube drama.
Rattling off the top of her head, some of her favorite authors include—Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, Homer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Carson, Danez Smith, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten, Alexander Chee, Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Ross Gay, Kate Zambreno, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dionne Brand, Lorrie Moore, Rachel Zucker, Angela Carter, Anne Boyer, etc. etc.
She is currently reading about reading: Alberto Manguel’s Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions and A History of Reading. I am giving myself a constraint in the new year to only re-read books that I already own and write about the process of slowing down, rediscovering, and temporarily opting out of the book-buying economy. I put a lot of pressure on myself to “keep up” with new books and I think it will be a healthy experiment that will shake a few interesting thoughts loose.
selected publications:
- All Day I Dream About Sirens (book)
- “Equinox” in Maisonneuve Magazine
- “All the Trimmings” in Poetry Northwest
- “The Last Surviving Sea Silk Seamstress” in the Montreal Review of Books
- “Cattle of the Sun” on Lemon Hound
(Photo credit: by Vincenzo D’Alto)