{"id":183,"date":"2015-05-18T13:40:01","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T13:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunypoly.edu\/stories\/?p=183"},"modified":"2025-10-30T14:14:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T18:14:16","slug":"faculty-members-works-published","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp.sunypoly.edu\/stories\/faculty-members-works-published\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Profile: Lena Bertone’s Works Published"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lena Bertone teaches English and communications on SUNY Poly\u2019s Utica campus. When she\u2019s not teaching and helping others to hone their ability to tell stories, she\u2019s writing them herself, with two books seeing publication recently.<\/p>\n

\"Behind<\/a>Behind This Mirror, <\/em>published in January, is a collection of short pieces she had published in online and print magazines between 2011 and 2013. Sometimes they\u2019re a page, sometimes less, but in each, silly things happen to seemingly normal people, \u201cseemingly\u201d being the key word.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes the people aren\u2019t so normal,\u201d Bertone says. \u201cAnd sometimes the things that happen aren\u2019t so much silly as absurd or strange.\u201d<\/p>\n

She describes her other book, Letters to the Devil<\/em>, published in February, as a breakup story in which the heartbreaker is the Devil himself, and the letter-writer is his former lover and partner in cruel and devilish acts.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe works through her grief and anger in the letters, and tells the story of their time together.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took her roughly three months to write her first draft of Letters to the Devil<\/em> in 2011. She then spent a few years revising and reworking it before it won The Lit Pub\u2019s prose contest. About a year later, it saw publication.<\/p>\n

\"Letters<\/a>\u201cThat was a very productive time for me, during which I would write very short stories and have pretty good luck finding homes for them in magazines. Once I had enough stories, and they were thematically similar, I put them together and started sending them out to contests and small presses to see if I could find someone interested in publishing them as a volume. Origami Zoo Press expressed interest, and then it was a full year before the book was published.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jack London once said that you can\u2019t wait for inspiration to strike, that you have to go after it with a club. For Bertone, she found inspiration every day in the little things that get taken for granted or go unobserved in the world around her.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy favorite kinds of stories are those that happen in the real world, but that also captures the magical things that can happen in the real world. I find everyday life to be strange and surreal, and I like to write about that,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m currently teaching a class with a fairy tale theme, in which we talk about how the structures and metaphors of fairy tales are deeply engrained in our everyday lives, and shape our expectations of magic and happiness, and good and evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though people often think of academic writing very different than creative writing, Bertone says that her experiences behind the author\u2019s desk certainly lend themselves to her perspective in the classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth require close, careful reading, and the ability to observe from what you\u2019ve read and analyze and transform it in your own writing. So, though I don\u2019t directly use my creative writing in my approach to teaching academic writing, I think it informs how I think about all kinds of writing and gives me a particular flexibility in talking to students about their writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

With these two literary ventures now out of her head and into the hands of readers, she says that it\u2019s only the beginning, with countless other stories already begging to be told.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a novel that\u2019s completed and I\u2019m looking for a publisher for it; several stories that will eventually grow to (I think) novella size, based on the short life of an Italian scientist; and a novel-in-progress set in central and western New York that I\u2019ve been wanting to get back to for about two years now. My goal every day is to write something \u2013 some words, a sentence, a paragraph, a tiny story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Behind this Mirror is available at: origamizoopress.com\/titles\/behind-this-mirror<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Tell us YOUR story<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lena Bertone teaches English and communications on SUNY Poly\u2019s Utica campus. When she\u2019s not teaching and helping others to hone their ability to tell stories, she\u2019s writing them herself, with two books seeing publication recently. Behind This Mirror, published in January, is a collection of short pieces she had published in online and print magazines … <\/p>\n

Read more “Faculty Profile: Lena Bertone’s Works Published”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":185,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-in-focus"],"yoast_head":"\nFaculty Profile: Lena Bertone's Works Published - Stories<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/webapp.sunypoly.edu\/stories\/faculty-members-works-published\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Faculty Profile: Lena Bertone's Works Published - Stories\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lena Bertone teaches English and communications on SUNY Poly\u2019s Utica campus. 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