Making a Place for Our Selves: A Story About Longing, Relationships, and the Search for Home

I use an ‘autoethnographic’ or ‘creative non-fiction’ writing approach to share a story of my relationship with my Italian-born father, a stone mason by trade whose singular dream in life was to build his family a home. Moving between vignettes of the past and composite re-tellings of conversations I had with my father before he died, I intertwine my father’s immigrant experience and life story with memories of the multiculturalism of my own youth. Through this process I try to illuminate Euro-colonial obsessions with property (ownership) and its impact on my understanding of self, home, and belonging.