Femminista, storyteller, espresso enthusiast
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Brief bio:  

 Eufemia Fantetti’s short fiction collection, A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love, was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and winner of the Bressani Prize for short story. Her second book, My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir, was released by Mother Tongue Publishing in 2019. The anthology she co-edited, Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language (Book*hug Press), was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Silver winner at the Foreword INDIES and Gold winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards. She teaches writing at Humber College and the University of Guelph-Humber.  

Longer bio:  

Eufemia Fantetti’s short fiction collection, A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love, was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and winner of the Bressani Prize for short story. She’s a three-time winner of the annual Accenti Magazine Writing Contest and received highly commended in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association’s Short Story Competition. Her writing was nominated for the Creative Nonfiction Collective Readers’ Choice Award and listed as a notable essay in the Best American Essay Series. Her second book, My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir, was released by Mother Tongue Publishing in 2019. 

Her work can be found in various anthologies including Conspicuous Accents, Exploring Voices, Fish Anthology 2012, Flash Non-fiction Funny, Love Me True and Body & Soul. The anthology she co-edited, Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language (Book*hug Press), was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Silver winner at the Foreword INDIES and Gold winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards. She teaches writing at Humber College and edits the Humber Literary Review.  

Everything but the kitchen sink, let’s discuss over a cappuccino bio: 

 I am the product of a careless matchmaker, a featherbrained cupid who ignored my mother’s early warning signs of psychosis and her maternal family’s history of brain disease.  

My parents were born and raised in a hillside village in southern Italy called Bonefro, a Sabine-inhabited region assimilated by the Roman Empire, an area steeped in millennia-old superstition; a plaboce where everybody knows your name, plus your grandfather’s and great grandfather’s names; a small community where an elderly gent noticed me standing outside the home my father owns (destroyed in the 2002 earthquake) staring up at the balcony French doors lost in “what if” thoughts. Without hesitation, the man placed an enormous bag of ripe yellow plums in my hands and said, “bentornato.” Welcome back.  

I swallowed tears to express gratitude in a shaky voice. I’d stayed away for thirty-six years, and his act of generosity humbled me.   

Before they were committed to each other in sacrament for a lifetime of sickness and sadness, my parents were related to each other as second cousins. This resulted in my favourite dinner party punchline: that if I were to research my family tree, I might find out I'm related to myself multiple ways, but the whole thing feels too Mormon to consider. Through my paternal line, I’m descended from “bandits of honour” (according to my father) and the maternal lineage contains sheep-herding thieves (according to the scuttlebutt) with a side hustle protection racket.  

This part is recorded in history of Bonefro: my great-great-great grandfather, Michelangelo Fantetti, killed a man for harassing and pestering his daughter-in-law. Then he hid out from the law for two decades, finally choosing to reveal himself and dying from a gunshot wound fired off by a member of the Carabinieri. My three-times great grandfather’s final words were, “I took a life through violence. It’s a fitting end that mine should be taken.” (Paraphrased, of course. There is no dictionary for the Molisan dialect I speak.)   

Once, I asked my dad if there were any writers in the family before me. He laughed long and hard over that query. He said, "Writers? People were illiterate. They signed documents with an X for their name." Then he repeated my comment to his elder sisters, and everyone had a good “what’s-the-matter-with-you?” chuckle. In my defence, I have none. His education curtailed by the Second World War meant my dad never said no to a book purchase. A work bonus paid for a set of Encyclopedias I used to complete homework assignments through middle school. I'm not sure what La-la-land I was living in when I opened my mouth. 

Both my paternal grandparents could read and write, rare in turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Italy. My maternal grandmother could do neither; I think she tried to learn in her fifties.  

I connect the dots: I became a writer and am passionate about teaching creative writing. As an instructor, my aim is to ensure the process is smoother for others, to acknowledge barriers or ancestral obstacles and plant the seeds for a love of storytelling with each student. 

My first name rhymes with Bohemia and last is pronounced Fan-teddy. Biggest challenges? I’ve played myself in two documentaries, Cracking Up and INVISIBLE VOICES: A Spotlight on Italian Canadian Women Writers and yet I put my skirts on one leg at a time. I’m a carb-fiend, caffeine devotee, luster of salt and friend to all known sugars that stalk the earth who sometimes craves vegetables. I’ve been known to self-medicate with sour candy. On occasion, I show up in a LinkedIn search.  

My life is an open book—it’s a memoir titled My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me.  

Write your books, poems, play and stories too, please; it would mean so much to me and this transitory world.