Sitting with discomfort: Eufemia Fantetti on her life and career

Finding and building passion for something can be easy. But that doesn’t mean that taking it and honing it for it to grow will be easy as well. There will be good days and bad ones too. This woman knows that better than anyone.

University of Guelph-Humber students who are into writing may have heard of Eufemia Fantetti. Eufemia Fantetti is a Creative Writing professor at UofGH and Fundamentals of Writing at Humber College. Outside of school, she is an author and teaches adult learners generative writing. 

As a professor, students may have had her as an instructor, but don’t know half of the story and it does not start easily.

She was born an only child in Etobicoke, Toronto in the 1960s to Italian immigrant parents. Since she was in elementary school, she has loved the subject of writing and thought of it as an expression of her creativity. She received a typewriter when she was in the fourth grade. Fantetti was subjected to bullying because she spoke English with a little accent. 

Fantetti said in an interview via Zoom that they chose to make fun of her because of her accent. “They treated me like I was less intelligent”, Fantetti said.

While her school life wasn’t great, her home life wasn’t either. Both her father and mother had a mental illness; her father had severe depression and anxiety and her mother had schizophrenia. Fantetti describes that time as “scared and frustrating” because it was hard watching her parents be in pain. 

She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio and has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. 

She didn’t enjoy writing in school because she felt stressed out about all the assignments she was given and at times it felt more like a task.

“I didn’t enjoy it as an undergrad. It was stressful. I didn’t have the focus or attention to do creative writing. But you can get somewhere with it even if it’s just a hobby.

Fantetti published her debut book titled A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love in 2013. It was the runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and won the F.G. Bressani Prize. 

A Recipe for Disaster tells the story of six characters going through love with different scenarios. Fantetti was inspired to write this book based on the connections between food and love.

After getting her teaching as a second language certificate, Fantetti wanted to be a part of a lot of people’s positive learning experience because of her own negative ones in elementary school. She started teaching after getting publications and also wanted to highlight the challenges someone has to think about when going into creative writing.

When Fantetti teaches she hopes to inspire people to stay in touch with their “creative spark”, as she says people don’t focus enough on the arts. Fantetti takes what she’s learned from being an author and implements it in her teaching. 

“I share examples from my own writing journey to show what I mean and to stress that good writing is a skill that one can keep learning and improving in. Making mistakes is a common part of the learning process and students should be encouraged in an educational environment,” Fantetti said. 

When Ruth Oudit, second year justice studies student at UofGH, was asked about what type of professor Fantetti is, she had this to say:

“She offers her time, efforts, and incredible feedback to help her students thrive and cultivate their skills.”

Advice Fantetti wished she had when starting out as an author is “it’s a marathon not a sprint”. That when something goes awry, it doesn’t ruin the consistency. 

Fantetti released her memoir, My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir in 2019. In the memoir, Fantetti writes about her struggles with living with her family. She wrote the memoir because she believed that she was not the only child to be subjected to experiences with mental illness.  

“When I write about my parents, I’m aware that I’m destroying their privacy. It’s my way to say that this really happened. I take the chaos of that experience and put it into something that’s artful,” Fantetti said.

It was inspired by an ongoing discussion she’s had with her father about fate versus free will; her family believes that life is predestined, but finds that belief to be “deeply problematic”.

“Believing in destiny doesn’t take into account the generations of oppressive poverty and barriers to education and opportunity that my ancestors endured which contributed to forming that mindset,” Fantetti said. “It’s deeply unsettling to live with the unpredictable. But it’s social determinants built and supported by human beings that influences the true course of our lives, not divine intervention.”

 

Advice Fantetti has for an upcoming writer is to make friends with other writers and be part of a community, so that they can be supportive and encouraging. 

“[She] is a person before a professor, and that’s evident with how much she deeply cares about people and their success,” said Heba Abdelahakour, justice studies student at UofGH. “Before this [Creative Writing class], my writing was at a plateau, but because of Eufemia, I was able to add to it from elevating my descriptions to writing my first fiction piece and having a completely new door open.” 

Fantetti adds that someone doesn’t have to have a strong passion to be great at something like the arts, there just has to be joy involved.

She believes that someone doesn’t have to be a master to pursue what they want. If it’s something that gives them some pleasure to continue with it. If it’s not giving them pleasure, that’s something they have to examine for themselves.

“Figure out what works for you, and stick with that process instead of copying someone else’s,” Fantetti said.

Last year, Fantetti helped edit a book, Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language, with friends Leonarda Carranza and Ayelet Tsabari. The book is a collection of personal essays from twenty-six writers about identity and language. The idea that came together when talking about their experiences with English being their second language.

One of the hardest parts that Fantetti found in her career is rejection. Even though she has written works already, she still sends out work to publications that get rejected. She says to stay away from the negativity and don’t let rejection stop any ambitions. But she realized that rejection is a part of the process and it didn’t let it discourage her. 

“It’s sitting with being uncomfortable. Not letting that be the end of it. A little bit of creative discomfort is a good thing. It helps to train to make the situation better. It’s great training for life.”