Episode 7 | Eufemia Fantetti

In this episode, Eufemia Fantetti describes how she approaches teaching with compassion, outlines the challenges of writing about emotional trauma, and shares how she uses humour as a superpower and a shield.

She discusses:

 0:52 | teachers who take their frustrations out on students and why it’s important to provide practical tips in every lesson

 4:34 | writing food and complicated relationships in her short story collection A Recipe for Disaster and Other Unlikely Tales of Love

 8:44 | finding the narrative frame for her memoir My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me and how the “fool’s journey” provided a useful template

11:46 | watching true-crime documentaries during the pandemic and the insights it gave her into writing about family 

14:01 | helping students enrich their creative non-fiction by “mapping the personal and charting the global”

17:15 | sharing the Molisan dialect with her father and how her fascination with language led to the anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language 

21:14 | working on the Humber Literary Review, imagining rejection as a four-burner oven and embracing writing as a life-long pursuit that you can always improve at

Guest bio:

 Eufemia Fantetti is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU and the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing. Her fiction, nonfiction and plays have been published in the anthologies Love Me True, Exploring Voice and Body & Soul. Her work has also appeared in The New Quarterly, Event and the Globe and Mail. She is a winner of the Event Magazine Non-Fiction Contest, and a three-time winner of the annual Accenti Writing Contest. Her work has been nominated for the Creative Nonfiction Collective Readers' Choice Award and was listed as notable in Best American Essays (2009).

Eufemia’s memoir, My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me was released in October 2019 by Mother Tongue Publishing. Her first book, A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love (Mother Tongue, 2013), was runner up for the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, a winner of the 2014 F.G. Bressani Prize. 

About the Podcast:

Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.

Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.

Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.