Romanistan
The authors of Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling present: Romanistan! Do you love rebels? Do you want to live in a place where outcasts shine their brightest? Welcome to Romanistan! We're your friendly neighborhood Gypsies, celebrating Romani identity and outcast culture, and practicing good diplomatic relations with other marginalized communities.
We love the rebels who are living their truth, even if it clashes with tradition. We also love tradition and honoring our roots. This podcast is for everyone who loves and supports Roma & related groups, and anyone who feels like a misfit and wants to uplift others to create a beautiful community.
We feature pioneers in culture, fashion, art, literature, music, activism, cuisine, and everything good. We adore the intersections of gender, sexuality, spirituality, ability, and identity. We cover all topics, from the difficult to the glorious. Let's sit crooked and talk straight.
Hosted by Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele. We reclaim the slur Gypsy, but if you aren’t Romani, we prefer you don't use it. xoxo.
P.S. The Romani people are a diasporic ethnic group originally from northwest India, circa the 10th century. Now, Roma live all over the globe, and due to centuries of oppression, slavery, genocide, and other atrocities, Roma are still fighting for basic human rights. We seek to raise awareness of who Roma are, and highlight Romani resilience, creativity, & culture.
Romanistan
Diana Norma Szokolyai: writer, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and healer
Diana Norma Szokolyai is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, educator and healer. Her books include Disobedient Futures, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos & Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Parallel Sparrows, and Roses in the Snow. Her poetry and prose appear in Chariot Press Literary Journal, Critical Romani Studies, and more. A finalist for the inaugural Poet Laureate of Salem, MA, she was also shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in poetry. Working with composers from around the world, her poetry & music collaborations have hit the Creative Commons Hot 100 list and featured on WFMU-FM. Her poetry has been translated into German for the international anthology of Romani poets Die Morgendämmerung der Worte, Moderner Poesie–Atlas der Roma und Sinti. She has performed her poetry with music in many venues including Spoken Word Paris, Outpost 186, Sidewalk Café, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, and Salem Arts Festival poetry. Her poetry has been supported by grants from the City of Salem Public Art Commission and the Center for Arts and Social Justice at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she served as an inaugural fellow. She is Co-Founder/Co-Director of Chagall Performance Art Collaborative and serves as Co-Founder/Co-Director of Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She is on faculty at Salem State University and Harborlight Montessori. Passionate about energy healing, she founded Sacred Swan Healing Arts, based in Salem, MA.
Follow @sacredswanhealingarts and @diananormas
Romani crushes in this episode are Cecilia Woloch, Margit Bangó, and Roby Lakatos
SANTA JEZ ABUNDANCE RITUAL FUNDRAISER
@romanistanpodcast. Join our Patreon or donate to Ko-fi.com/romanistan, and please rate, review, and subscribe.
@jezmina.vonthiele @romaniholistic.
Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling
Email us at romanistanpodcast@gmail.com
Romanistan is hosted by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens
Conceived of by Paulina Stevens
Edited by Viktor Pachas
With Music by Viktor Pachas
And Artwork by Elijah Vardo
Hey listeners, we are doing a fundraiser for the podcast and one of our favorite nonprofits, Iramnia. On the 22nd of December at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, it is the Santa Jez Abundance Ritual where me, Santa Jez, does an abundance ritual with you. There will be a replay if you can't make it live. But basically, the price of your ticket, which is totally by donation, goes toward 5050, the podcast and e-romnia, which does amazing work for Oromani community in Romania, including work with domestic violence survivors, trafficking survivors, just they're just wonderful. And you can send in a wish list that I will incorporate into the ritual. Your wish list remains private, of course, just I see it. But there will also be a meditation with my immaterial world co-host Jessica Richards and a reading guiding you into an abundant new year. So it'll be really cute. You can sign up through the link in the show notes. It's on Eventbrite, it's on my Instagram link tree. It's everywhere I post things, it's on my website, judzminavantila.com. So please join us. And uh if you don't want to join for some reason, but you just want to donate, I also have links to do that. If you want to donate directly to IRomnia or directly to the podcast, I have links on the Eventbrite as well. Thanks so much for listening. We really appreciate you. Bye.
SPEAKER_03:Welcome to Romana SNE.
SPEAKER_00:We're your friendly neighborhood gypsies. I'm Paulina. And I'm Jez. And we are here today with Diana Norma Sokoyei. And Paulina, why don't you introduce our guest?
SPEAKER_03:Diana Norma Sokoyei is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and healer. Her books include Disobedient Futures, Credo, an anthology of manifestos and source book for creative writing, parallel sparrows, and roses in the snow. Her poetry and prose appear in Chariot Press Literary Journal, Critical Romani Studies, The Poetry, Miscellane, The Boston Globe, Luna Luna magazine, and MER Vox Quarterly. A finalist for the inaugural poet Laureate of Salem, Massachusetts, she was also shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in Poetry, working with composers from around the world. Her poetry and music collaborations have hit the Creative Commons Hot 100 list and featured on WFMU FM. Her poetry has been translated into German for the International Anthology of Romani Poets. She has performed her poetry with music in many venues, including Spoken Word Paris, Outpost 186, Sidewalk Cafe, Low Celebrates, Kerouac, and Salem Arts Festival Poetry. Her poetry has been supported by grants from the City of Salem Public Art Commission and the Center for Arts and Social Justice at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she served as an inaugural fellow. She is the co-founder and co-director of Chigal Performance Art Collaborative and serves as co-founder and co-director of Cambridge Writers Workshop. She is on faculty at Salem State University and Harbor Light Montessori. Passionate about energy healing, she founded Sacred Swan Healing Arts based in Salem, Massachusetts. Welcome, Norma. We're so happy to have you here.
SPEAKER_01:I'm so honored to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to your amazing podcast. I follow you and I think you're doing wonderful work. I'm just really honored to be here. Thank you. Oh, we're so happy to have you.
SPEAKER_03:And we do.
SPEAKER_00:Tell us about yourself. Where are you from? Where is your family from?
SPEAKER_01:Well, um, I am a first-generation American. Um, my parents um immigrated here from Hungary in 1981. And I was born here. I was born in America, but I always felt like that I wasn't just American because I was growing up in a household where we were speaking Hungarian a lot. And also I was traveling back to Hungary and spending a lot of time with my relatives there. And I even spent part of my childhood living in Hungary for several years in my early childhood, especially up until around age five. Um, so on the Romani side, my father's side, we come from a family of musicians. Um, and also my uh grandmother on that side had a last name that means blacksmith in Hungarian. And yeah, so in the Romani family, we have some musicians, some violinists, some pianists. And my grandmother was always very connected to her garden, and she taught me a lot about gardening. She had a really wonderful green thumb. Um, and she seemed to have an herbal remedy for like everything. So I really grew up loving herbs and herbal tea, um, and and learned some some good healing things from her, some natural remedies. So that's a little bit about my background. Um but yeah, hung I'm Hungarian American and um I still speak the language. It was my first language. I didn't speak any English until I was five. Very cool.
SPEAKER_03:And I love that your I love your grammar recipe sharing. We like to ask our famous question do you consider yourself a rebel?
SPEAKER_01:Um yeah, in that I don't like to conform. Um I'm always sort of I like to create my own path and I have my own interests. My third grade teacher wrote on my report card that um I marched to the beat of my own drum. And I would say that's very accurate. That was probably the most accurate report card comment that I had gotten all through my elementary school years. And I I do like to take my time and really think about things, find, you know, what's true for me. I don't know if I'm a rebel in in like I'm not, I don't know if I'm as punk as maybe some other people are, like, but I do think that I question things, and I do think um I admire some rebels, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You love the spirit.
SPEAKER_01:I love the spirit, yeah. I think as an you know, I I love poetry and art and music that is kind of different and atonal, and and so I love I love when things go against the rules of how they're supposed to be. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So something that we are passionate about that we personally don't have the skills to do ourselves is translation. So we are so excited about the idea of Romani authors reaching a wider audience through the art of translation, which is something that you do. Can you please tell us about your journey translating poems by Romani authors?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So I read in three main languages. I also read a fourth, but less often. Um, so I read in French, English, and Hungarian. And when I say I read, I mean I'm reading largely across fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, but I also read like some newspapers and things like that, and I listen to radio from France, and I'm consuming media from those three different languages. I also studied Spanish, so I can read and understand some Spanish. Um I've had I've done a little bit of translation, but I would say that one I'm not as uh fluent in. I think it's important when we read other poets, um we're seeing another perspective, and so I think it's important to like incorporate that perspective when you're thinking about worldviews. So let me bring up a quote here. Just give me a second. I when I was at the um Vermont College of Fine Arts um for my MFA, um, I was really honored to accept the Center for Arts and Social Justice Fellowship um in their inaugural year for translating work of Romani Poets. As I was studying poetry, I really was excited about bringing some new poetry um into English. Poetry can be a really powerful like vehicle to bear witness to authentic Romani stories. And the more we can give those stories a witness, um, the more rich the landscape of literature becomes, right? So as we know, um today, like many people are disenfranchised in the Romani community and continue to suffer from systemic and targeted racism. And so in that problematic like landscape, I think it's really important to bring in Romani voices and reading Romani poetry and translation is it gives us this kind of multifaceted perspective and and it gives us a firsthand account of those experiences. So there is um a uh professor, Edith Grossman, who wrote a book on why translation matters. And she says, quote, translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable, end quote. And so that's what I think. I think if we're only reading in our own language and like in a monolingual literary landscape, the perspectives become more limited. So I think it's essential for us to um bring in more voices into English, right? Just makes things more interesting and uh multifaceted. So yeah, I've I'd love to tell you about a few of the authors that I translated. Um one of the authors that I translated is Alexandre Romanes, and he is the owner of Cirque Sigan, which is also uh a Romani circus based in Paris, France, and they travel all around uh the world. It's a family type like family circus. Um, and his thought was to bring in this kind of the traditional circus arts um to the French people, and then started touring all around the world. And he came from a circus family um that was kind of doing more of the more modern circus arts, and he wanted to kind of bring it back to traditional Romani circus arts. So I've seen him and his circus and his family perform a few times in Paris, and I interviewed him under his tent and I asked him if I could translate some of his poetry. Um, and he said yes. So I translated his book Parole perdu. It means like lost words in English, and currently I am still looking for a publisher and clearing all of you know the paperwork about that. Um, but some of those poems have been published in the poetry miscellaneous and you know are forthcoming in some other places as well. Another Romani poet is um Seichi Magda. Um that I I did some of her individual poems from her book Vakata Feignak. Um she's Hungarian, and um I also translated some of the work of uh Papusa, but going through the French. So there was a great French translator of her work, and then I translated it from the French. So from the Polish, uh there was a French translation, Polish to French, and then I did the French to English.
SPEAKER_00:What's it like translating? Like you because there's not exact words. Like, what is that process like for you? I mean, sometimes there might be an exact word, but I imagine not always.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so first I just I try to read the poem and get the essence of it and really understand, I guess, the heart of it, because that's the most important thing. Once I have the heart and and I feel like it's um sometimes the meaning is hidden behind some of the words and language, so I might need to use an idiomatic expression in English that's a little different than the literal translation. It's a bit of um a puzzle. So I'll usually try like a first draft and see how see how that works and first see if I have the heart of the poem. If I can get the heart, then I start working on the technicality. Like now, can I bring in some of the rhythm and the cadence and if there's any meter to respect or line length? And then I sort of try to make it more concise from a technical perspective after that. And sometimes I'll run it by a friend who also is um fluent in both languages, and I'll say, How do you think this sounds? Like, do you think I've captured the essence? And and then I'll get feedback and then I'll take that feedback and maybe go back to the draft. It can take a long time, it can be a process, um, but I think there is an art to it. And if we read some translations um, you know, of poetry, you can see which translations kind of capture the essence or which ones are just literal versus literary. So I aim to do a literary translation, which means sometimes it might not be exact, but I want to capture the heart.
SPEAKER_00:I really love that. Yeah, thank you for sharing your process.
SPEAKER_01:We wanted to create community around creative writing, and we wanted to do retreats and workshops. We started it back in 2007, and it started first as a place where we would just workshop poetry, and everybody in the Cambridge community was welcome from students to citizens of Cambridge who were curious about writing, retired people, young college folks. Uh, we would gather in cafes and bookstores. Sometimes we would go to museums and do like ecrastic writing. And then back in 2012, we organized our first writing retreat in France at a little château called the Château de Sassy. And it was wonderful. We got gathered a community of people and we went for a 10-day retreat. Um, and it was like an eco-living and writing retreat. So we learned about the ecology of the land and we participated in some farming work because it was at a worldwide opportunities on organic farms site. So we helped um maintain the garden a bit and you know, picked herbs and things for our salads, and it was nice. Um, and we gave a reading for the community, so it was it was very nice. Um, and then we've done since we've done a lot of other retreats. Um, in fact, after that uh experience in 2013 and 14, we did uh the Chateau de Verderone, where where I met Jasmina, who first came on the retreat with us um as a writer, and then also came on as a professor of writing and taught with us, um, which was wonderful. And we've done many retreats now in Spain, um in Granada, in Paris itself, um, as well as the countryside, and like I said, Verdoron and Barcelona. Um, and last year, or the year before last year, excuse me, we did a Budapest and Prague riding retreat in Eastern Europe. So we did four days in Budapest, four days in Prague. We visited Kafka's uh house, and it was incredible. And people got to meet my grandmother in Hungary.
SPEAKER_00:Cool so cute. Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_01:And and we had some great traditional meals, and and so it it's all about the community. Um, in in America, we've we've done retreats in New Orleans. Portland, Oregon, Newport, Rhode Island. But so we love creating community around writing. We've also done some anthologies together, and the most recent one we have coming out with University of Kentucky Press. It's called Disobedient Futures. What's that about? Tell us more. Disobedient Futures is our new project with my fellow editors Rita Bannerjee and Corinne Previty, who are also Cambridge Writers Workshop staff. Corinne Previty is our manager, and Rita Bannerjee is the co-founder of Cambridge Writers Workshop. And it's a speculative literature anthology that imagines what the future cultures of America and the world might look like through a diverse, inclusive, and multi-genre lens. And it includes fiction, poetry, nonfiction, hybrid work, art, and photography that explore utopian, dystopian, and alternative realities, futuristic places, and parallel histories. And it's coming out with University Press of Kentucky. So we thought about this anthology as a great place to really hold a forum for discussing the importance of disobedience. We felt that it is a good time to talk about disobedience because without disobedience, we can't really have responsible citizenship. I think we always have to be questioning: are we holding up to our values? What can we do to make the world a better place and to be more inclusive? And to not turn a blind eye to the suffering of the world. So the anthology brings together a host of authors that we're really, really proud to bring together. And it has different sections. So we have disobedient gender, disobedient identities, disobedient class, disobedient borders, disobedient environmentalism, and disobedient futures. And some of the authors that we have are Rafael Amal Khoury, Christina Marie Darling, Anka Silagy, Ella Voss, Cecilia Wulak, who is a wonderful Romani author, Christine Catano, and Carlos Andreas Gomez, Paul Daniel Ash, Ayo Kunle Falomo, Kolud Sharraf, Bianca Stone, Samuel Colowale, Matthew Olzman, all these wonderful people and Aksana Marafiotti, who's also a Romani author. Did I say that correctly?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's Marafiotti.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not sure though, but we have to have her on because both Paulina and I, and you, we we all love her so much. Just a few episodes back.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So some of our other authors are Aksana Marafiotti, January Jill O'Neal, Tami Anison, and Kenzie Allen. So just a wonderful group. And Ilya Kaminsky as well, Dipekaguha. So it's just a fantastic group. Those are just some of our of our authors that are coming together to talk about these different topics through their poetry essays. We also started the book and ended the book with manifestos. So the beginning of the book talks about the Our Disobedient Futures manifesto and why, like art, it talks about art and disobedience, and how America has a creative problem with AI coming in and taking away some of those jobs from creative people. We also discuss hostile versus universal design in those manifestos and how the poet inherently like disobeys. Like it's very important for like poets essentially are always questioning right the structure of things. So the poet's work is very revelatory. So we we discuss that. Yeah. So creating those disobedient spaces, like you all are doing too, is so essential. So yeah, um, the healing arts have also always been important to me. And I've I've studied many different types of healing arts. And for me, um creating like a space. Okay, let me back up and say like our mission at Sacred Swan is providing a welcoming and inclusive space for individuals to experience transformation through the healing arts on a physical, energetic, creative, and spiritual level. So we offer healing sessions and energy work in Reiki and hypnotherapy. There's different kinds of body work, including something called the reconnection, which one of our practitioners offers to reconnect to spirit and the earth's energies, group classes, workshops, and um also we do talisman making, amulet making, uh, and aromatherapy. So yeah, it's a it's a creative healing space. And I am a Reiki master teacher and a certified yoga and meditation teacher as well. And I'm I am also an astrologer. So um I love to work intuitively and interpret astrology charts. I'm especially really passionate about astrocartography, which is the kind of figuring out which places on the planet are best for a person according to their birth chart. So I love teaching workshops that connect the mind, body, and spirit and fuse healing and artistic um and creative expression through the energy healing and expressive arts. So um, and then um we are also offering uh Reiki certification workshops, and um we also have readings. So we have uh oracle card readings, tarot card readings, chakra readings, astrological consultations, one-on-one yoga consultations, palmistry, tea leaf readings. So you can see all of these options on my website, sacred-swan.com. Sacred-swan is the website. And I'm so pleased to say that um I have a collaboration going with uh Jasmina as well, which is coming up called the Mystic Parlor. Yeah, it's a kind of dry speakeasy, um, as as you would say, Jez.
SPEAKER_00:I'm super super excited to be involved. So I'll be um popping in and out of the um sacred swan healing space in general because I'm not that far from Salem Mass. And so I'll be really excited to be doing little pop-ups with you. But also Mystic Parlor is so fun. It's a night of divination. You can get all kinds of readings um from astrology, tea leaf reading, tarot, oracles, palmistry, so on and so forth, depending on who's available that night. There's some music, there's some light entertainment, and there's also herbal elixirs. So it's a kind of dry speakeasy. It's this little spot above a pawn shop, and um, it's a little tucked away, but it's somehow still on the main drag. And it's really lovely if you if you love all things magical and you also want to have a really fun evening that's not a boozy evening. It's it's more of like high vibes experience. So I'm really enjoying it.
SPEAKER_01:We're excited. Like you said, like a lot of people are not drinking as much. And also with this kind of event, we wanted people to um make the focus more about the readings and hanging out than about the alcohol. So um we're gonna have these moonshadow mocktails. Um, and we will have local teas also um mixed by local herbalists. And it's meant to be just a fun, like spiritual evening where it's like a psychic parlor meets immersive art installation and lounge, and there will be soul path astrology readings, tea leaf readings and palmistry, tarot readings and oracle card readings, as well as like a little meditation and um a not tying manifestation ritual. It should be really fun. And if you would like to get on that list or look up the event, you can get on the list by going to sacred-swan.com and signing up there, or you can um book the event on Eventbrite. I have the link on my site as well, whenever we have one coming up. I'm very excited to have you, uh Jasmina, offering some of your wonderful um fortune telling at our space as well. And we also have uh Zenovia, who offers um tarot and energy bodywork and different services, so you can see that on our website. That's a great question. A lot of my traditions are are things just like that I've always done. Um, and sometimes it's funny. Jasmine and I have had these moments where we're like, wait, you do that too? And we realize that we have some kind of tradition that's that's part of the Romani experience. Like, I know that Jasmina, you're from your your background is Cindy and mine is Hungarian, um, but we both have like these cabbage rolls, for example, that we love to make. Um, so one of the ways I honor my Romani traditions is through the food that I make. I really I try to um make the time and space to create my family recipes and cook for my family and friends and share those recipes and share where they came from, whether the recipe was, you know, from my grandmother or my aunt or my father. But one of the things we love to make is stuffed cabbage with paprika, and it's a kind of stew with the it's it's absolutely delicious. It's a little bit sour, um, with uh like a it's got sauerkraut in it, and the traditional Hungarian spice of you know paprika. I thought it was fun when we exchanged our cabbage roll recipes. Yeah, like I cooked them for you and you shared some of yours. We do that too. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Do you do that as well? Yeah, we have cabbage roll cabbage sarma too.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's like such a popular dish. I know so many different like folks from different places who who make them and they're all so delicious.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So for me, like finding those um connections with other Roma um who are making similar recipes is just like it's so much fun. And it's fun to see a bit of variation that different cultures spin on a recipe. I also have an altar where I have um objects from my ancestors and from family members, and just like looking at those those items, honoring them, you know, and keeping my altar, you know, in in good order and just honoring them, talking about those um items or special pictures or items from my grandmother. And I think it's important to take time to meditate on those memory memories and and the lessons that um I've learned from them, from our ancestors. And I sometimes do like a kind of devotional writing where I listen. Also, um, I do a meditation, I try to see what messages come in from the my ancestors or from I try to just create an opening and invite that energy in. And I may light a candle. I use candles a lot to kind of get into that meditative state, um, or light some incense and create a kind of offering to the past, you know, and to those energies. And then I I will write as well. I'll write and see what happens. Sometimes it's just like a journal entry, but sometimes it may be more poetic or something will come through for me. So I'm actually going to be doing a uh workshop on creating an altar for your ancestors and and doing devotional writing at an upcoming event. I also I let I I have some seeds. I I think I honor my ancestors through carrying on their traditions too, some in some ways, like through simple things like gardening. Um, my grandma taught me a lot about gardening. And this is my father's mother who loved loved to garden. So I like to I like to grow a little vegetable garden every year. And I think about her. The last time I saw her, I got these radish seeds. Um, and I I brought them back from Hungary. And I still have some of those seeds because every year when the radishes sprout, they they have new seeds, and then I dry them out and I keep them, and I have those on the altar as well in a in a um in a little bottle. So I like to keep that cycle of those seeds going and growing in my garden. Sorry, a lot of this stuff is very personal to me, and I I'm not used to talking about it. So I'm like that's okay.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's really precious. I love uh I love seeds and gardening. I have I was just looking at this um little ficus that uh I'm pretty sure my parents have had since before I was born, and now I've inherited it and it's in my home, and I'm just like, oh hey buddy, we grew up together.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think plants have um memory, and um it's so wonderful to have a relationship with plants, and yeah, yeah, plants are so cute. I love plants.
SPEAKER_03:So, who are your Romani crushes?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I already spoke about some of the authors that I translated, so all of those people um that I mentioned, but also I love Cecilia Wullock. Um, she is a poet who wrote Seagun The Gypsy Pole. She also wrote um Carpathia. She's just such a lyrically gifted poet, and she's wonderful.
SPEAKER_00:We love her too.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, her poetry is so tender and complex and it's just beautiful. And I've known her um on a personal level since my uh mid-twenties. I got introduced to her through mutual friend and um and mentor, Kathleen Spivak, who's a Boston based poet. And we actually exchanged, it was very meaningful to me because I had written a master's thesis. My master's thesis was in French, anyway. I exchanged my thesis with her, and she gave me her book signed. And it was it's just a nice encouraging thing for a younger writer to get a signed book from an author that I admired. So she's been she's been wonderfully generous. And um, we've had a correspondence kind of relationship, and we've met a few times in person too, although she lives in uh on the other coast in California, so don't see her often. She's quite a traveler too. Yes, she is. She just um traveled quite a bit doing some retreats in Europe. Um, but we're going to catch up. We we were just emailing back and forth about catching up on the phone soon with our our mutual friend. But I'm also a big fan of some Hungarian musicians, and I wanted to mention their names. So uh one is uh Spungul Margit. So in Hungarian we always say the last name first, so in English it would be Margit Bangl. She is a Hungarian singer, and she she just has beautiful these beautiful um albums that are a lot of like ballads. Um I kind of view her as like the Romani, like Edith Piaf. I just love her work.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I have I don't think I've listened to her. She that sounds wonderful.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, she's she's just got these beautiful. Um I I'll I have some of her CDs, I can lend them to you. So another um jazz musician is uh Robi Sakchi Lakatosh, who's a wonderful pianist.
SPEAKER_00:That was Alexian uh Santino Spinelli's crush too.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, I've um I've met him. Um we hung out a few times in in Hungary, but he's a jazz and classical pianist. So I know him a little bit, but I haven't seen him in many years. But I love to try to get tickets to see him whenever I can um when I'm in Hungary. So yeah, those are a couple of my my uh Romani crushes, I guess, or people that I admire.
SPEAKER_00:Um, our last question is how can listeners find you and support your work?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, thank you so much. Yes. Um well I've mentioned already my healing arts website, sacred-swan.com, um, where you can see some of those offerings and events that I'm doing in Salem and online. I also have a uh writer website, which is Diana Norma.com. That's Diana Norma.wordpress.com. And on there I usually post about when I have something related to my book tours or um some kind of new workshop that I'm doing for writing, writing workshops, and any new um news about like new publications coming out. So I really appreciate um the opportunity to be on Ramanastan. Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we were so, so happy to chat with you. Um listeners, Paulina had to step out for a second. Um, you know, she has a life full of responsibilities, whereas I'm carefree and what, footloose and fancy free? I don't know. But thank you so much for being here with us, Norma. This was so fun to chat. I love you so much. And come visit us in Salem, Massachusetts, y'all. Yes, Sacred Swan. Sacred Swan!
SPEAKER_03:Thank you for listening to Romanasan Podcast.
SPEAKER_00:You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook at Romanasan Podcast, and on Twitter at Romanasan Pod. To support us, join our Patreon for extra content or just donate to our coffee fundraiser, ko-fi.com backslash romanasan. And please rate, review, and subscribe. It helps people find our show. It helps us so much.
SPEAKER_03:You can follow Jez on Instagram at jezmina.vontila and Paulina at RomaniHolistic. You can get our book, Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling, online or wherever books are sold. Visit Romanistan Podcast.com for events, educational resources, and more. Email us at Romanistanpodcast at gmail.com for inquiries.
SPEAKER_00:Romanistan is hosted by Jasmina Vontila and Paulina Stevens, conceived of by Paulina Stevens, edited by Victor Pachas, with music by Victor Pachas, and artwork by Elijah Barardow.