128. Excavating Our Ancestral Sites w/ Poet Jennifer Barone

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On this episode, Daniel Dissinger speaks with Italian-American Bay Area poet and artist Jennifer Barone. Jennifer’s newest book of poems, Sirenland, is the result of a ten year period of traveling to Italy, researching and visiting the sacred and familial sites of Naples, Vesuvius, and Pompeii, and re-positioning the Sirens themselves to present them in all their mythic glory.

This conversation weaves in and out of mythology, what it means to reconnect to one’s ancestral roots and history, specifically the Italian-American experience, how sacredness plays a role in our personal excavations, and the spiritual experience of living in the cross-section of birth, death, and destruction. Jennifer Barone also shares a poem from her collection Sirenland and reflects on how learning Italian opened the channel for her to have conversations with her Nonna in her dreams, in Italian.

With our experiences as humans becoming more confusing with AI being forced on all of us without our consent, this episode challenges us to take more than a few moments to find what it means to be human, to be part of a community, to examine where we come from and what histories, mythologies, and folklore run through our blood. Jennifer asks us why we’re so hesitant to get closer to our dead, to grieve and mourn together, to talk to our deceased family, to celebrate their lives, and to pilgrimage to where it all started for our families. In this 21st century world, we’re inundated with so much information it’s hard to discern what’s important, what’s real, and what’s false, and yet we’re good at consuming all of these ideas. Why can’t we put the same energy into stopping and asking ourselves, “What’s meaningful to me?”

Jennifer Barone will leave us wanting to go out on our own quests, to excavate the ruins of our familial sacred sites, and finally fill the gaps that are causing so much disconnection and pain.

Approximate Rundown

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

03:01 Sirenland & Mixed Media

05:45 Workshops, Somatics & Myth

08:37 Pilgrimage & Sacred Sites

16:20 Ten Years in Naples

19:21 Volcanoes, Death & Life

24:49 Becoming a Poet

27:56 Ancestors & Everyday Magic

33:11 Poem “We Need Magic”

34:58 Dream Portals & Sirens

37:56 Sirens & Ancestors

39:16 Hired Mourners Rituals

41:01 Death Rituals vs America

45:06 Reclaiming Italian Roots

49:11 Pilgrimage & Excavation

51:23 Parthenope Protector Myth

55:03 Poetry & Somatic Myth

01:01:19 How to Hear Sirens

01:02:27 Naples’ Siren Lore Deep Dive

01:08:39 Where to Find the Book

01:11:26 Closing Thanks & Future Plans

Jennifer Barone is an Italian-American poet and artist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Sirenland about the Bay of Naples, Italy, the siren mythology and stories of the sea, and Saporoso: Poems of Italian Food & Love, Feather Press.

A two-time winner of the SF Public Library’s Poets Eleven contest for North Beach, where she resides, she hosts the Voices From the Hill podcast interviewing Bay Area authors for Telegraph Hill Books/Libreria Pino, and leads creative writing workshops that blend writing, alchemy, and Italian culture.

She also paints, designs, teaches yoga and immersive sound baths and delights in typing love poems for people on her vintage typewriter at special events. Find her books and events at:

Visit: jenniferbarone.wordpress.com
Connect: Instagram | Facebook  | Substack

Read: Sirenland & Saporoso: Poems of Italian Food & Love

Listen: to the “Voices From the Hill” Podcast: telhilit.org/podcast

Buy Sirenland

Sirenland – A new poetry collection by Jennifer Barone, published by Feather Press, featuring original, 24 color illustrations and photographs by the author.

A reclamation of personal lineage – Sirenland is a mythic conversation across time with the poet’s ancestors from the Bay of Naples, Italy. Ancestral spirits rise from sea caves and memory – as the poet reimagines her grandparents as sirens, singing stories long submerged.

People, Texts & Podcasts Mentioned in the Episode

“To know yourself is really what you’re doing anytime you’re doing something creative, anytime you’re doing a creative act […] You want to go deep, you know, into the levels of your psyche and in a way unearth […] yourself and excavate your own self.”
-Jennifer Barone

“It’s a very sacred experience to go to a sacred site with reverence, with respect for the energies that are there, for the practices, for the history that’s there. And then to go in and enter and have the experience, but then come out a little bit different, a little bit changed, a little bit transformed […] that’s really the goal of going on pilgrimage.”
-Jennifer Barone

“It’s not about just going to the site and seeing the place and going, ‘Oh, yeah, this thing happened in ancient times,’ but it’s also like, maybe we need to reclaim some of these practices because they were important.”
-Jennifer Barone

“And again, it’s like one of these things where the volcanic activity is simultaneously dangerous but also deeply healing. And there’s an immediacy to life when you get so close to that experience of like, ‘Oh my God,’ […] we’re on the verge of potential death or life or both. Because volcanoes […] do explode, but then they create new land, you know, so it’s a death-birth process, and you’re right on the edge of that sensation.”
-Jennifer Barone

“But you can go into your body even and ask your ancestors the questions that you wanna ask if you don’t literally have access to them anymore ’cause they’ve passed […] and the answers will come, like, if you listen deeply in your own blood, in your own spirit, in your own mind, because they’re with you.”
-Jennifer Barone

“But the other thing that happened to me very profoundly was I would, as I started to learn and get deeper into the [Italian] language and also go back and visit Italy, my grandmother would come into my dreams and have conversations with me in Italian.”
-Jennifer Barone

“Many different spiritual cultures have traditions or death traditions […] and this is another thing that American culture is very detached from. I find in the United States, we do not have spaces for grief. We don’t wanna talk about death. We don’t wanna face death. We have a whole country culture that is denying getting old or dying.”
-Jennifer Barone

“I think there’s a loss, a feeling of deep grief and loss and longing in Italian American people because [of] the assimilation process, we lost our culture in one generation.”
-Jennifer Barone

“We are the thing that needs excavating.”
-Jennifer Barone

“When you think about the sirens as half woman, half bird, what they really were, were liminal creatures. They were able to transcend the dimension of death. And so, a lot of the times in Greece and also sometimes in Italy too, the sirens would be put on gravestones and they were very much connected to this kind of liminal creature that was able to access the dead.”
-Jennifer Barone

Episode Reflection Questions:

  • Close your eyes and imagine the exact site of your personal excavation. Breathe into it. Breathe it into existence. Once you are there standing over the site, begin to write in order to dig into the site. Describe the sensations. Write about the findings. Examine fragments. Take your time.

  • The connections to our cultural roots are with our ancestors, living and passed on. This is a two pronged prompt. The first part is to ask a living ancestor/elder about your roots, about those gaps, ask your questions, dig with them, and record it however you need.

    The second part is asking an ancestor/elder that has passed on and do the same. This can be done waking or in your dreams, however you want.

  • Keep this prompt for when you travel to the space(s) of your cultural roots:

    When you are standing on the land, at the sites, in the ancient spaces, when you’re where your elders once were, take several breaths in silence and allow them to come to you, let the environment invite you home. When you are ready, write, write it all.

128. Excavating Our Ancestral Sites w/ Poet Jennifer Barone (Transcript)

128. Excavating Our Ancestral Sites w_ Poet Jennifer BaroneDownload

The theme song is “4 am” by Makaih Beats. You can follow the podcast & all social media: Linktree, join the newsletter/Follow Dan’s Medium & Follow the Substack to watch the full episode videos

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