While people commonly retrace their own footsteps to find items such as lost car keys, it is not so often that people trace the footsteps of another to discover and understand his or her battles. That is, however, exactly what Joy Passanante has done in writing her latest book.
Passanante, local writer and former associate director of creative writing at the University of Idaho, will present a reading from her most recent publication, “Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father’s Wars,” at 7 p.m. Thursday at Bookpeople of Moscow.
The event will include a brief introduction followed by a few short readings from various chapters of the book.
Passanante said she will then be available to answer questions and sign books. Passanante said the book is a recount of her emotional and concrete discoveries about her father’s journey through life and specifically through World War II. She said the book is narrative nonfiction and weaves in and out of time and place unfolding all her father’s wars, not just World War II.
“I wanted to make the war the theme of the book but not the overwhelming theme,” Passanante said.
Passanante said her father left her four volumes of diaries he had kept when overseas during the war as well as 1,365 pages of letters he had written to his wife, Passanante’s mother. She said, through these writings, she was able to gain a sense of what her father saw and experienced during the war.
Aside from researching the war and reading what her father left for her, Passanante said she and her husband travelled through Europe, tracing her father’s path during the war.
She said she began researching to write a collection of essays about her father’s journey years ago, but she later decided a book would better communicate his experiences, which included him growing up as the son of Sicilian immigrants.
Passanante has been publishing in three genres for five decades, according to the Bookpeople of Moscow webpage. She said, though, that she began writing when she was a little girl and knew by the time she was 9 years old that she wanted to write a novel. Reading is what drew her to writing, she said, adding her parents loved to read and there were multiple books in the house.
“I loved reading, and I loved words,” Passanante said. “My parents kept a dictionary at the table.”
Passanante said she enjoys writing poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction. She said “Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father’s Wars,” is her first nonfiction book, and it was important for her to try something else. She said she was able to use her fiction experience to make up the dialogue and her poetry experience to create a narrative story and render the language precise, she said.
“I think each genre feeds each other,” she said.
Passanante’s reading is just one of the multiple events Bookpeople has coming up for what Bookpeople owner and manager Carol Price Spurling said is the store’s busiest season. Spurling said during this season the business typically holds several off-site events as well as one or two in-store events per week.
She said the next instore event will be a reading of “Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore” by author Matthew Sullivan Oct. 12.
Jordan Willson can be reached at [email protected]