“I’ve gathered so many books (….), all about the family. This is all washing over me like a waterfall. I can’t figure out the genealogy, the chronology flows like currents that wind around each other at different rates. (…). And now I’m recognizing that I’m part of this tribe, this family of writers writing about our tribe.”

These sentences can be found in Simone Forti´s new publication “The Bear in the Mirror”, a wonderful collection of stories, prose-poems, drawings, photos, letters, notes and memories. Simone Forti dives into the (his)stories of her family and of the woolen mills they once owned, trying to put all the myths and fragments of information into some kind of perspective. She takes us on a mind-provoking, mesmerizing journey through time and place, from December 1938 till the present moment, from Italy to Los Angeles. Along the journey we find ourselves in different cities and in the woods, where we meet her family, bears, dogs and spiders.