The Martlet

Throughout the 1950s, the Benecasa, Russos and Ferraris families uprooted their lives in Southern Italy and immigrated to Edmonton, Alta. Each one of the family members left their Italian soil to begin a life that, so far, had only existed in their imaginations.

Everybody, except Rosina Benecasa.

After the Second World War, Italy had a surplus of citizens. The government organized for whole villages to immigrate to nations whose economies were flourishing. But Rosina — the matriarch of her family — was getting old. She suffered from severe motion sickness. She had never ridden in a car, or even a carriage.

Rosina lived in Maione, Italy, for more than a decade after the mass immigration, and passed away in 1969 at the age of 86. Her family can only use their imagination to know what the last years of Rosina’s life were like.

A book in the making Fast-forward half a century. It’s August 2009. Rosina’s great, great granddaughter is driving from Edmonton to Victoria to start her graduate program at UVic. Her name is Jessica Kluthe and she’s entering the creative writing master’s program with a goal in mind.

She wants to write a book.

Kluthe, under the guidance of the associate dean of the writing department, Lynne Van Luven, is now working on the fifth chapter of a creative non-fiction book based on her own experience living as a second-generation Italian-Canadian, as well as a reconstructed world she creates for Rosina in the middle of the 20th century in the little Italian village of Maione.

Kluthe is interested in exploring the physical diaspora as migrants moved from Italian farming villages to Canadian urban centers. She wants to get at the psychological loss of cultural identity, too, and how subsequent generations, including Kluthe herself, are unable to communicate in the language their family once knew so well. She wants to investigate if there are parallels between leaving an ancestral place and losing ancestral culture and language.

Rosina’s life is a mystery, defined now by a few official documents and the memories her family have of her. She has birth, death and marriage certificates. There is one known photograph of her.

“There were always stories about Rosina,” says Kluthe. “But they just seemed like myths.”

She explained how her nanni, Rose Ferrari, believed Rosina had been 57 when the single photo was taken. But when Kluthe asked Rose’s younger cousin, he said Rosina had been 70. Neither knew who the photographer was or where it was taken.

“Everyone’s stories were different,” Kluthe says. “My grandparents were getting old and I thought I should learn their history while I still could.” Kluthe will write the majority of her 120-page manuscript this summer, as per requirements for her graduate degree. Come fall, she will travel to Italy to visit the villages where her family originated and she will meet locals who knew Rosina. She hopes to gather enough research and experience to finish the memoir.

“The book needs me to go to Italy,” she says.

A rural girl Kluthe grew up in the town of Morinville, Alta. — a town of 6,500, about 20 minutes north of Edmonton.

She’s been writing in journals since she was in Grade 4, and admits to having “a fierce need to record everything.”

“I just don’t want to forget anything,” Kluthe says. “I want to have some sort of a record of my life, even if it’s just for me.”

Kluthe has been to Italy twice before, but never felt ready to journey to the southern tip of the country to meet her relatives. While completing an English degree at the University of Alberta, she worked in a gas bar in Morinville, where she used to spend her eight-hour shifts flipping through her Italian guidebooks as she worked behind the wall of thick glass.

“It was embarrassing to be working there,” admits Kluthe. “It was such a small town and people I knew would always come up and say things like ‘Oh, you’re still working here?’”

Kluthe was excited to have been accepted into the graduate writing program at UVic. She’s always wanted to live in B.C. She remembers trips to Fairmont Hot Springs, a town in the southeast corner of the province near the Rocky Mountains, as one of her favourite places.

The story Kluthe started thinking about the idea for her book years ago when she was volunteering with a non-profit charitable organization in Edmonton called Changing Together: a Centre for Immigrant Women. There she interviewed immigrant and refugee women and wrote their stories of immigration, displacement and memories of home. Those women’s stories motivated Kluthe to research and write her own family’s immigration story.

Kluthe admits that she really “woke up” and realized her privilege as a Canadian citizen when she was volunteering at the centre.

“It wasn’t something I had thought a lot about. It was something I am ashamed to say I had taken for granted.”

She remembers talking to one immigrant from Latin America who looked her in the eye and said she was lucky to be Canadian. The woman wasn’t able to work until she became a Canadian citizen, but she could volunteer at the centre. She said helping others gave her a sense of self worth.

“Imagine, though, coming to a foreign place, alone, and not even being able to work?” Kluthe says.

Another inspiration behind the book was Kluthe’s curiosity about Rosina. Rosina was a midwife and a mother of five children. When her husband died of a heart attack in a farmer’s field, Rosina moved in with Kluthe’s grandmother, who was just a child at the time. Kluthe has done much of her research through her grandmother, who admits that leaving Rosina was her biggest loss.

“When I talk about going to Italy, Nanni says she could never go back,” says Kluthe. “A place is part of your identity and, for her, it’s better in memory. She can’t go back to her Italy.”

A trip to the homeland Kluthe is now in the process of obtaining citizenship in Italy. She acknowledges her privilege in comparison to her family’s situation just a few generations ago.

“Rosina couldn’t leave the country, and here I am getting citizenship when I can’t even speak the language,” she says.

Kluthe doesn’t know what Maione looks like now, but family stories have helped her construct a setting where Rosina lives in the book.

There is a river that Mussolini’s men crossed to demand families give up their copper pots so that they could be melted down into bullets. This is the same river that Kluthe’s nonno crossed to declare his love for her nanni, who, at first, turned him down. It’s the river Nonno fell in, wearing his new suit, crushing the eggs that he was carrying in his pocket.

There is an open field where Nanni used to pick acorns. It is the same field where Rosina’s husband had a heart attack and died.

“These spots belong to an Italy I won’t ever get to travel to — an Italy my grandparent’s couldn’t go back to because places change over time,” says Kluthe. “But it doesn’t matter. Everyone has their own landscapes that belong to them.”

Kluthe imagines the last three chapters of the book will be about her own trip to Italy. She says she can “feel them there” but really wants the experience to shape the book.

“I want to speak to people in the village who knew Rosina,” says Kluthe. “I want to imagine what it would be like to be with her, and what it would be like at the end of her life when her whole family was gone.”

Truth in non-fiction Unlike fiction, creative non-fiction is based upon lived experiences and is rooted in an unstated pact between the author and the reader that the story the writer is telling is true. But how do we find truth? And is there just one?

Kluthe hopes her manuscript helps examine the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Her recreated scenes of Rosina’s Italy are based in facts she has learned through her family: there is a river, an open field, a house on the hill.

But the art of creative non-fiction, and what makes the genre so compelling, is the reality a writer creates through his or her imagination.

“The places in the book probably don’t exist in the ways that I have imagined them, but they are real to me,” says Kluthe. “They are the only way I can connect to the past.”

In Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Non-Fiction, authors Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paula probe at the question of just how much emphasis writers should put on “non-fiction” and how much on the “creative” part. “In creative non-fiction, the creative aspect involves not only writerly techniques, but also a creative interpretation of the facts of our lives, plumping the skeletal facts with the flesh of imagination,” they write.

Van Luven, Kluthe’s writing advisor, says that Kluthe is “scrupulous” in telling her reader when she is recreating a scene. Van Luven says non-fiction writers have been creating an imagined past for a long time, but the younger generation seems to be more fearless in stretching the boundaries of the genre.

The work that thrills One word Kluthe repeats a lot about her inexperience with writing a book is, “overwhelming.”

Kluthe is a teacher’s assistant (TA) for the non-fiction section of the 100-level writing workshop at UVic, she is working through the first few chapters of her book in a fourth-year workshop and has Van Luven as a one-on-one mentor. She admits to being “grateful” that she’s not “writing in a room blindly without any feedback.”

Soon she will send her first few chapters and book proposals to Canadian publishers.

“I can see the end of the book, and I can see the shape of it,” she said. “But I don’t know how I’m going to get there.”

Kluthe explains that she can’t use plot points when mapping out her book, which fiction writers often use, because she wants her experience to form the book.

“The overwhelming part is trying to privilege experience. I want to let the interviews and my own experience shape this story,” she says.

She does, however, believe that true stories are more interesting than fiction because they speak to our “lived experience.” She admits that the hardest part of the writing process is wondering if anyone, other than herself, is going to be interested in the story.

Van Luven says that all writers feel disillusioned at various points in the writing process, and that you just have to “beat it away and carry on.”

“Jessica’s not just writing her own family history,” says Van Luven. “She’s writing a story on behalf of all Italians who came to North America.”

Writing a book, especially in the non-fiction genre, comes with obstacles: dealing with the issues of truth, memory and self-doubt. For Kluthe, she just has to keep reminding herself one thing.

“I just have to trust that everyone has a story to tell.”