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Jenni deBie’s Italian Summer

October 20, 2014

An English major from Texarkana and member of the ASU Honors Program, deBie was one of a select group of U.S. undergraduate students selected for the New York University Writers in Florence program this summer at the Villa La Pietra near Florence in the Tuscan countryside.



“NYU-Florence is on roughly 60 acres of an old estate,” deBie said. “There are six villas on the estate, so we were in classrooms in one villa, our dorm rooms were in another villa, and another one is a museum. We got to walk through the olive grove every day to go write poetry in a classroom with windows looking out over the formal gardens. It was spectacular!”



“The dorms were fitted out pretty much the same as a regular dorm,” she added. “There were three to a room with twin beds, a shared bathroom and a cupboard each for our clothes. But the gardens were spectacular, and we got to go outside every morning and see the entire valley of olive groves. We’d walk through the formal gardens with old marble statues and fountains. It was incredible.”

”We got to walk through the olive grove every day to go write poetry in a classroom with windows looking out over the formal gardens. It was spectacular!”

Jenni deBie

But the program was not all about drawing inspiration for their writing from the beautiful scenery.

“There was definitely an academic component,” deBie said. “We were taking roughly six hours’ worth of credit during the month-long course. They brought in professors from NYU and there were poets and other students from all over the world. There was a guy from England and a girl from China and a guy from Israel, but none of us from Italy. That was really cool, being with students from all over the world.”

“Florence is a very old city that, at one point, was under consideration to be the capital of Italy,” she added. “The National Gallery is still in Florence. The piazzas are massive and beautiful. It was just the perfect place to write poetry.”

And what would a trip to Italy be without also being a tourist.

“We did a lot of side trips,” deBie said. “We went to the castle where Dante wrote ‘The Inferno.’ We did tours of the Tuscan countryside and wine tours. We just really had a blast. I’m truly thrilled to have gone on this trip.”

Back in her real world at ASU, deBie is an Honors Program mentor for eight freshmen, an Honors Student Association member, secretary/treasurer of the Sigma Tau Delta national English honor society, and a member of the Silver Wings support organization for ROTC. Besides her Florence trip, she has participated in the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) Partners in the Park program at Great Basin National Park and has presented her original poetry at NCHC conferences.

Slated to graduate in May of 2015, deBie will head to graduate school for a master’s degree in creative writing and a doctorate in British literature with ultimate plans to be a university English professor.


Spine Dust by Jenni deBie

(Summer 2014)

This is the way in which Man was made:

of dust,
gathered in the soul of a star
at its moment of death
by some force great enough
to grant that collected dust the wisdom
to name its parts
in such a way
that a universe turns
to contemplate
itself.

This is the way in which Man proved His wisdom:

First He made a god to hold up the earth
and named him Atlas,
then He named the point around which the earth wrapped itself
Axis,
last He named the calcium stones
inside the skin of His neck
Atlas
beneath His skull to hold the world
and below it,
Axis
to make the world turn.

This is the way in which the universe contemplates itself:

Through Man
who is collected dust
of dying stars
formed in such a way
that the god built to carry the heavens and the earth
rests in His spine
on the point around which
a world
pivots.