In September 2024, John Ciavarella, a friend and co-worker at a NYC environmental planning firm we once worked for, contacted me about doing collages for the cover of a book he and his sister Paula were putting together. It was to be a combination of a Southern Italian cookbook and a memoir of growing up in Long Island City, Queens, during their childhood years. I thought I could pull it off, so I agreed to take this on. And since I had previously created two personal photo books of my portrait photography from the late 1970s and 1980s, I also offered to design the book.

John provided me with hundreds of images, including family photos, old and historic photos of the neighborhood, entertainers from that period, Long Island City street scenes and buildings, neighborhood kids, and myriad images of all different types of food that his mother had used to prepare family meals.

Since recipes didn’t exist, Paula recreated all of the dishes based on her experience and her siblings’ additional recollections of how their mom would prepare them, so that she could detail each recipe preparation with the ingredients and instructions. Some of the longer stories required a full-page collage that related to the particular story. It became a long but rewarding creative process, and six months later, we had a completed book titled DO THEY EAT TRIPE IN HEAVEN?—a heavy 272-page hardcover book. We were both excited when the book finally arrived in the mail and saw the fruits of our labor and collaboration. It was worth the effort.