The Story:
SEEDS OF THE POMEGRANATE is set in Sicily and New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. It is the story of Mimi Inglese, a young artist who immigrates to the United States and is immediately brought into a counterfeiting operation. Seeds is, at its heart, a story about being true to yourself and finding a place to belong.
SEEDS is based on the story of my grandfather’s family. His mother, aunt, grandparents and great grandmother arrived at Ellis Island in 1906. He was born 5 years later. When my grandfather was 11, his two younger brothers, his great-grandmother and his aunt died in a suspicious tenement fire. He suffered disfiguring scars but didn’t talk about it to his four daughters or grandchildren. After my grandfather died at 97, I started wondering about that fire. I found a front page article about it in the New York Times and I was hooked.
Many iterations later, I found the core of the story in his Aunt Mimi’s experience. No one ever spoke about her — my mother and aunts didn’t even know she existed — but it was her body that was found with the two little boys’, and it was likely she who saved my grandfather’s life by pushing him out the window before it imploded.
I started wondering who Mimi was and who she would have been had she not died in that fire. In the archives of a small Sicilian town, I discovered that she likely suffered from a chronic illness that stunted her growth. More research both in Sicily and at home revealed that the family was noble, but that Mimi’s father (and my grandfather’s grandfather) had significant legal troubles.
Seeds of the Pomegranate is a fictionalized story about the power of love, art, and belonging. 
