I was telling her about my grape vine. The joy I am experiencing watching it grow, leaf by leaf, inch by inch. The way I marvel at how it reaches out toward nowhere, in search of support. And when it find something secure to cling on to, it wraps its grape-y tendrils around it and hold on with palpable ferocity.

My older vine made grapes this year. It spent one baron year as a twig, casually poked into the terra firma of East Syracuse, NY after having broken off from an established vine. Last summer we marveled over it’s willingness to establish itself in our home in Pennsylvania, surrounded by different soil, different air, and a different growing region. It grew to about 4 feet and made the prettiest leaves. Perhaps it felt at home because it was coddled by the same tenor of love Compare Leonardo gave it back home.

I mentioned how beautiful the vines are to my friend and described the daily grooming I give them. Every morning and evening, in addition to watering, I search for invasive Lantern Fly larvae to flick into a jar of soapy water.

And then my friend told me about her bush.

Apparently her best and most beautiful flowering bush, the one who’s abundant flowers give off the most fragrant perfume, has the unfortunate side effect of attracting a special kind of spider that are, well, a real pain in the tuchus. Something she tended and hoped to enjoy in a relaxed way, has transformed into yet another thing to defend against the forces of nature.

And then our conversation turned, as they often do, to the insightful. Every positive thing comes with it’s share of negative, and it’s best, she says, to accept that. Life gets much easier if you do. As young idealists, we hope and believe that the good will overcome the bad. And we fight for that. It is a noble pursuit. As a young woman, I didn’t want to believe my father when he would warn me of the dangers in the world, of people. I wanted to believe in the nicey-nice world of mommies and Disney and Full House. He knew the world. He descended from people who survived centuries in Calabria. He himself grew from that rocky inhospitable soil.

My friend is right, of course. To expect the yin yang to play out in all things actually keeps one balanced and out of the extremes of life. It keeps one in the place where the still small voice can be heard. The one whispering “Grow! Grow!”

This is the proper use of expectation.

I’m honored and genuinely excited to share my first piece as a regular contributor to the Italian American Herald.

Local and diaspora papers like this matter. They hold space for our cultural memory, our arguments, our celebrations, and our reckonings. They give shape to conversations that might otherwise remain private or disappear entirely.

In this review of Jo Piazza’s The Sicilian Inheritance, I explore what it means to inherit not just land or stories, but temperament, silence, and the emotional architecture shaped by women whose choices were never fully recorded. This is not inheritance as nostalgia, but inheritance as temperament, survival, and unfinished conversation.

The novel understands something many Italian Americans feel but rarely articulate: that the real story began before us, somewhere else, and what we carry is only a fragment. A gesture. A rumor. Half a sentence.

For those who follow my work on Italian-American memory, women’s lives, and ancestral inheritance, this piece sits squarely in that terrain.

You can read the full review here:

The Sicilian Inheritance Review

This is part of the ongoing work of Olive on the Apple Tree — holding both the news of the diaspora and the deeper work of memory and inheritance. If you or

someone you know might enjoy this kind of conversation and community. Please subscribe and share!

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Yes. It really did. And, as promised, here’s the video proof.

That day at St. Thomas of Savoy Italian-American festival in Avon, Connecticut, I climbed into a barrel of grapes and stomped with everything I had. My daughter, cleared the spout, with an innate know-how I can’t explain. Could it be genetics? The crowd cheered, the juice flew, and — believe it or not — we won.

In the video you’ll see us overcome technical difficulties, hear the theme from Rocky, see Lucia clear the spout like a boss and feel my joy at the end when we are announced the winners! Hopefully the joy is contagious!

But seriously, there was something about this moment that felt big. It’s tradition, joy, and identity all mixed together. And it’s exactly the kind of story that became my Italian American memoir essay published in Ovunque Siamo. Tell me in the comments if you see it.

If you haven’t read the essay yet, you can find it here: CRUSHED IT: LESSONS FROM A GRAPE STOMP

Thanks for sharing the joy with me — I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Oh yes and please sign up for the mailing list for this Substack. It is FREE! Click here:

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— Julianna

Friends, I’m thrilled to share that my Italian American memoir essay, “Crushed It: Lessons from a Grape Stomp,” was just published in the literary journal Ovunque Siamo. It’s a story about family, tradition, and the unexpected lessons of a grape stomping contest.

It’s a funny, heartfelt piece about entering — and winning — a mother–daughter grape stomping contest at an Italian-American festival in Avon, Connecticut. There were purple feet, lots of laughter, and a few unexpected lessons about tradition, identity, and what it means to carry our roots forward in playful (and sometimes sticky) ways.

For me, this publication feels like a milestone. It’s the first time a piece of my literary non-fiction found its way into the world in print. And it landed in Ovunque Siamo — a journal dedicated to Italian-American writing, which feels like exactly the right home.

Having written for other publications and outlets, I must say I have had to adjust my voice to fit the voice of the publication. This may be the very first time I felt as if my own voice was heard and valued in it’s authentic form. I can’t tell you how deeply satisfying that is.

I’m incredibly grateful for the support of this community, for the editors at Ovunque Siamo, and for all the ancestors who probably never imagined their descendants would be writing about grape stomps on the internet.

You can read the full essay here: Julianna In Ovunque Siamo

If this kind of writing speaks to you, please consider subscribing to Olive on the Apple Tree.

There’s more to come — memoir chapters, podcast conversations, and reflections on reclaiming Italian-American identity and finding healing in our roots.

AND, my next post will be VIDEO of the grape stomp. You don’t want to miss that do ya? So add your name to the subscriber list. FREE!

Grazie a tutti!

Thanks for celebrating this step with me. I’m so glad you’re here.

— Julianna

Being a novice at legume horticulture, I thought the circles of seeds would sprout, find their pole and politely maypole up to the top in an orderly fashion.I assumed my memoir would do the same—start with a trip to Italy, then unfurl neatly into a book. Turns out, both beans and memoirs have minds of their own.

After five days away, with the garden left in Mother Nature’s hands, the tendrils had elongated at an incredible rate. The beans had taken this race seriously, growing full tilt, unimpeded. But I have an impediment: the daily battle of carving out time and mind space to write. It is August. My highly spirited daughter needs camp or a play date, or something to channel her intensity so I can have a moment’s creative breath. Often, by the time I’ve arranged all that, there’s no juice left for the work. This fight for air, for life, is what moms of neurodivergent children call “summer vacation.”

The beans, meanwhile, have no distractions from their mission. They aren’t waiting for burnout to lift, for the mood to strike, or for their beanie nervous systems to settle after yet another sunblock standoff. When I left town, each seedling had two leaves near the ground. When I returned, they’d become big, bushy beings, of shoulder height. Clearly they are winning.

Not only are they unexpectedly huge, but some of these beans had the audacity to ignore the poles I lovingly offered and instead reach wildly along the ground, shooting tendrils in every direction. Maybe they’re looking for more sun, more room—or maybe, like my grandmother who carried their ancestors across the Atlantic 80 years ago, they’re just seeking a better life. These Southern Italian Papaloni and I share a lot: a restless instinct to grow, to reach beyond the limits of the container we are planted in.

Seeing the plants pull so far ahead in the race, activates my competitive spirit. I’m in the first draft of this memoir, the “fun draft,” they call it—though for me, it brings up memories that require revisiting with new awareness. I began writing what I thought would be a straightforward travelogue, no embellishments needed. “Just the facts, ma’am,” was my creed, because the facts alone are moving enough. I believed that if I captured them honestly, the mystery that shaped the journey could reach the reader too—a message of depth, awe, reverence, even joy, just as it had in me. That’s the point of this whole exercise: to share the experience, strength, and hope.

But my mind is a web of connections. One thought tugs another awake and they all rush through the mind-to-pen pipeline to get on the page. The other day, I wrote about arriving in my father’s hometown half a world away and parking—oddly—in the exact same spot I had 15 years ago. At the time, I enjoyed it as a wink from the universe: This isn’t a mistake, Julianna. Keep going. Writing about that parking space felt trivial, and it lead far from what I had intended. My mind scolded me: This won’t amount to anything. You’re wandering again. Get back on track. But I kept writing, following the dendrite less traveled. An hour later, I stumbled upon a revolutionary insight I never saw coming.

The beans had escaped their containers. The writing had escaped its structure. But both are bearing fruit. I see now that the trip to Italy itself was the universe’s way of saying: Here is your story’s container, poles, and fertile soil. But the story itself is a living, breathing vine. I am not in control of it—I am shepherding it.

So I let it grow as it will. Nothing is wasted. I’ll tie it to a pole when it needs support so it can bear fruit to sustain others. But the life force moving through it is not mine. My job is simpler than I thought: show up to the desk each morning, be present, and follow where the flow takes me.

My nonna, on her first and only, one way trip from Delianuova, Calabria, Italy, to upstate NY, thought it wise to bring with her, the seeds of the beans upon which her ancestors have been harvesting, and surviving off, for more generations than even Henry Louis Gates could possibly trace.

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