BookView Review

Welcome to BookView Interview, a conversation series where BookView talks to authors.

Recently, we talked to Cynthia Reeves about her writing and her recently released novel Falling Through the New World, a mesmerizing and engrossing tale that chronicles the trials and triumphs of an Italian-American family entwined with the ever-changing landscape of the nineteenth century. (Read the review here).

How did you go about writing distinct stories that link multiple generations of one family? Did you have to plan everything out ahead of time, or did things come naturally as you were writing, or was it something else?

From the collection’s inception twenty years ago, I envisioned Falling Through the New World as a novel in stories. In fact, I had the title before I’d written anything else. My only “plan” was to follow the Desiderio family for a century, from World War I Italy to the present day, delving deeply into certain aspects of Catholic faith and Italian culture as opposed to creating a sweeping arc found in such multi-generational family sagas as The Joy Luck Club and The Godfather.

I admire writers who start with an outline and write more or less in timewise fashion following the rising action-climax-denouement paradigm as reflected in, for example, Freytag’s triangle; however, no matter the form, my approach has always been fragmentary. Certain stories or scenes become foundational and give rise to material that must link them. Even my other books, the novella Badlands and the novel The Last Whaler, which more or less follow a continuous arc, were written in this piecemeal fashion.

Part of the art of a novel in stories, as opposed to the traditional novel, is juxtaposition. The reader tackles each story in relation to the others, comparing the ways in which successive generations handle similar events (such as a mother’s death or the task of caretaking) or face new challenges that arise as the culture and external forces change. In this way, perhaps, the novel in stories presents the reader with more of a challenge than the traditional novel.

In addition to the characters themselves, place and setting play such an important role throughout Falling Through the New World. How did you create settings that felt authentic to your historical inspirations, and that created a real, lived-in basis for your stories?

Extensive travel all over Italy, including returning once alone and twice with my mother to her parents’ village of Vacri in Abruzzo, had a major impact on my storytelling. In many ways, Vacri is the same as it was a hundred years ago, so it wasn’t hard to imagine some of the early settings. For example, I stood at the altar of the church where my grandparents married, looked up at the crucifix beneath which they exchanged vows, and blessed myself at the same holy water font in which they dipped their fingers. Likewise, entering my grandparents’ home, inhaling its scents, and looking out over the valley from the veranda to the surrounding mountaintop villages had an almost mystical effect on me. Those feelings and observations give the early Italian settings authenticity.

Modern Italy is captured in the last two stories. Again, visiting the locations where the stories take place helped me recreate the atmosphere of those settings. Having my mother—who was fluent in Italian—as a guide helped immensely in gleaning background in Italian culture as manifested in traditions and faith. “All This the Heart Ordains,” for example, is a direct result of her influence. She insisted we visit the Holy Face at Manoppello, which is central to the story, because of the shrine’s importance to her own mother. That visit stayed with me for years, long after my mother’s death, until I moved through the crises of faith that inform the story.

Did you draw from any personal experiences to write these stories? If so, can you tell us more about that?

Falling Through the New World arose out of a fascination with my personal history as the American granddaughter of Italian immigrants and the events that spurred that history—World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. My mother often told the story of her own mother surviving the epidemic while her mother’s sister perished, calling for water to quench her thirst until her last breath. That image of two sisters sharing very different fates traveled with me down the years until I could finally understand enough about Italian history and that country’s involvement in World War I to write about their impact on my characters’ lives, primarily through the lenses of the stories’ female protagonists.

I’ve always been fascinated with World War I and how it defined the twentieth century—from the naïve hope that it was the war to end all wars to the ways in which its impact affected subsequent generations. The war’s aftermath was partly what led to my grandparents’ emigration from Italy. Thus, I undertook a years-long project to research WWI and Italy’s role in that war. I even made a pilgrimage to the war museum at Kobarid in Slovenia, near the site of what Italians refer to as the battles of the Isonzo, where my character Vincenzo is captured by the Austrians. Among the first published stories were those set during this time—“La Dolentissima Madre” and “Falling Through the New World.”

Family photographs inspired several of the stories. Before my mother died, I sat down with her to organize a box of old photos, yellowed and cracking with age. Each photo told a story, and she shared what she knew of the people and landscapes depicted. The leatherbound volume that resulted was an essential resource in writing these stories. For example, there is a poignant photo of my grandmother and her son, Vincent, who died in Italy of typhoid when he was three or four. That photo inspired “Ho Fame” and “La Mantiglia,” and (I like to think) preserves my uncle’s memory in some small way. Another is the picture of my grandfather, posed near the Italian front, that appears in the dedication. I marvel at the difference between the proud man in that photo and what I imagine became of that soldier, the impact of that war on his psyche. I tried to capture the essence of this transformation in the character Vincenzo Desiderio.

Another kind of artifact—bobbin lace—plays a role in these stories. My grandmother was a lacemaker, and she gave some of the lace she wove to my mother, which my mother in turn preserved in a cedar chest and handed down to our generation. Among these items was a white nightgown edged with lace. As the collection took shape, I realized that I needed a “lighter” story to balance the heaviness of much of the other material. For a long time, all I had was a title, “The White Nightgown,” and a phrase connecting it to a wedding night. Toward the end of writing the book, I saw the ways in which that nightgown could connect three generations of women, and how it meant something different to each one.

Then there is the history shared over Sunday dinners. In my family, as in many families of Italian heritage, the multi-course Sunday dinner—served in the early afternoon—was obligatory. Even after I married and had children, we gathered every Sunday whenever possible. (Sad to say, this tradition ended with my children’s generation.) Those dinners were the source of family stories handed down over all-day gravy and homemade pasta, bracciole and meatballs and leftovers of weekday roasts.

In fact, what my mother and my living uncle passed on to my siblings and me over these meals was passed down from their relatives, so the line between fact and fiction is blurred as in a game of telephone tag. I say this because I want to make clear that although family history and artifacts inspired many of the stories in Falling Through the New World, the stories themselves are fiction. Reality—the way things happened—must give way to the structures and events and character traits necessary to form cohesion, both in the individual stories as well as the collection as a whole.

In addition to Falling Through the New World, you have published one other work of fiction, the novella Badlands, and have a novel, The Last Whaler, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing (September 2024). What have you learned through your writing and publishing journeys that you carried into the writing and publishing of Falling Through the New World?

Regarding writing, I’ve learned that a story is never finished. Every piece I’ve had published, from the stories to the books, has been improved through the editorial process. I even have a tattered copy of Badlands that I’ve marked up with edits I’d make if the novella ever went to a second printing. Of course, at some point each work is the best that it can be at whatever stage writers find themselves. Even so, the four previously published stories in Falling Through the New World dating back to 2006 have been edited in the process of producing the book. Partly this was necessary to make them fit more cleanly into the larger arc of the collection; partly it was to improve the originals.

Regarding publishing, Badlands gave me some insight into the process, from acceptance to copyediting to proofreading to having the printed copy in my hands. Those aspects of publishing remain largely unchanged. What’s changed is marketing—publication doesn’t end when the copies (or e-books) are released. Writers are expected to navigate the world of social media, Zoom events, and the like. Social media was still in its infancy back in 2008 when Badlands was released, and Zoom didn’t exist. Of course, writers still do “old-fashioned” public readings and book signings, and I much prefer that kind of marketing. Falling Through the New World has thus presented me with a whole new set of challenges getting the book out into the world, compounded by the fact that—as luck would have it—my novel is coming out in September. And all of this is happening in a publishing landscape flooded with new titles every year. The biggest task now is to get your voice heard in such a crowded field.

As a teacher of creative writing, is there anything you’ve learned about writing or literature from your students?

As a lecturer in Rosemont College’s MFA program, which is a non-traditional evening program, I taught writers of all ages and backgrounds. Many were older students who had found their way back to writing and to dreams they’d had in their youth. These “late bloomers” were and are an inspiration.

Teaching also kept me in touch with the changing world. The concerns of the generations that followed mine are quite different from what I grew up worrying and wondering about. In fact, one of my intentions in writing Falling Through the New World was to capture how the mores and culture of four generations of Italians and Italian Americans, particularly of the women, changed over a century. I made a deliberate decision to end the cycle leaving Kathleen childless, but I could imagine continuing these stories into the future with succeeding generations, each of whom become farther and farther removed from the traditions and concerns of their families of origin. Since I’ve stopped teaching, I miss this direct connection to younger generations.

Who (or what) are your writing inspirations?

My work most frequently arises out of passion and curiosity surrounding a particular issue, which leads to research, which in turn sparks my imagination. I search for the unusual angle, something overlooked in the history of a time or place. Often this fresh angle comes through locating the work in the lives of ordinary people whose stories have been lost or ignored, with the goal of enlarging our engagement with wider, unfamiliar worlds. Moreover, I tend toward non-traditional forms of writing to defamiliarize the familiar in ways that reenergize archetypal stories.

Other writers also inspire me; high of the list is A. S. Byatt. Among other works, her story “A Stone Woman” takes my breath away. Her command of myth and fairy tale, and the ways in which she embeds her fictions with their magic but also honors reality and the natural world, is something I greatly admire. The stories in this collection that wander into the realm of magic realism owe a debt to her influence.

What’s next for you as a writer?

After the upcoming whirlwind year of marketing—with interviews and readings and presentations as far afield as Longyearbyen and Los Angeles and a second residency aboard a ship that will circumnavigate Svalbard—I plan to escape to the private world of my imagination and write a novel about a woman so obsessed with the love of her life that she carries her obsession beyond the grave.

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