Twisting Facts to Suit Theories: In Defense of Sherlock

[First paragraph] In August 2011, the Albemarle County school board unanimously voted to remove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet from the sixth-grade curricula. Over twenty students beseeched the board for the book to remain, and they were ignored. Teachers were afraid to voice their opinions on the matter. The novel has not been taught since in Albemarle, on any grade level, nor any other Sherlock Holmes texts

The Letters

[First paragraph] “You know, your grandmother only wrote me once during the war?” he says, sipping his scotch, staring out at the Chesapeake Bay which he can no longer see. I look at him with her eyes. It was the first I heard of it. He wouldn’t lie to me, but I wonder how this could be true

France in June

[First paragraph] Motion sickness bothered me since childhood, though Dad never believed me—thought I was faking for attention. Fits of sweat, the swaying, my nervous stomach would bloat and burn like the aftermath of a warm glass of expired milk. I’d start burping, pleading to my dad to crack a window, if I could only breathe. But he always kept them locked, ever the dictator. One day after school, it was too late, and projectile vomit splattered all over the leather interior of his light blue 1962 Buick Riviera. He occasionally opened the window an inch for me thereafter

Inspection

Endure an inspection with Alicia DeFonzo

The Time Left between

A blend of memoir, history, and oral storytelling, The Time Left between Us bridges the gap between the generation who fought World War II and the generation who has forgotten it. Alicia DeFonzo takes an unplanned visit to the Normandy beaches while staying in Paris. Her grandfather “Del” (Anthony DelRossi) had fought in World War II, and she becomes distraught after realizing how little she knows about the war and his experiences, which until then had remained largely unspoken. Across landscapes and lifetimes DeFonzo retraces her beloved grandfather’s tour through World War II Europe. The eighty-four-year-old DelRossi recounts stories as an army combat engineer surviving major campaigns, including Normandy, St. Lo, the Bulge, Hürtgenwald, and Remagen, then liberating concentration camps. In this braided narrative, we see DeFonzo’s childhood in a traditional Italian American family with an erratic Marine Corps father and a beloved grandfather. Spanning ten years, DeFonzo’s travels and research take an unexpected detour after she inherits a Nazi Waffen-SS diary from her grandfather, and, in her final trip, returns to Germany to confront the diary owner’s family. DeFonzo’s and her grandfather’s stories merge when Del undergoes open-heart surgery and Alicia must be the one to safeguard the past. Both nostalgic and gripping, The Time Left between Us is a meditation on how deeply connected the past is to the present and how the truth—and what we remember of it—are fragmented. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_books/1065/thumbnail.jp

Alicia DeFonzo, 45th Annual ODU Literary Festival

Alicia DeFonzo is the author of The Time Left Between Us, published by Potomac Books in September 2022. She is a Senior Lecturer and Fulbright Specialist at Old Dominion University, having earned an MFA in Nonfiction, MA in Literature, with an undergraduate degree in Broadcast Journalism. She received the Gettysburg Review Conference Award in Nonfiction and has been published in War, Literature, and the Arts, The Montreal Review, Cobalt Review, Voices in Italian Americana; her most popular academic essay Banning Sherlock has been published and translated by the University of Urbino (Italy). She has presented for reading series such as Miss Manhattan Nonfiction and Inner Loop in D.C. and is a frequent literary guest on local and national NPR programs