How many twists and turns does life take before we feel we truly belong somewhere? The CapU English Instructor’s story at its heart.
María Camila Dávila (she/her) // Crew Writer
Lily Jones (she/her) // Contributing Visuals
Anxiety, loss and belonging. These are the three words that come to Holly Flauto’s mind when she thinks of immigration. The constant moving during her youth and her immigration to Canada have shaped her identity and teaching. She has a Bachelor’s in Public Relations, Minor in Law and Society from Purdue
University, along with a Master’s in English from the University of North Texas. Since 2023, Holly has brought to her CapU classrooms all the lessons she has learned through a life of constant movement, guiding her students to find their own voice amid all the noise.
Moving to Germany when she was three and a half years old was Holly’s earliest memory of feeling out of place. “We’re in another place now. Things are going to be a bit different,” was her mom’s answer when Holly noticed the differences in the neighbourhood. Her father was drafted during the Vietnam War and he later enlisted in the U.S. military. As a result, her mom, her brother and her moved frequently from place to place until he retired in 1993.
Her dad was mostly stationed in South America. They lived in Colombia, Venezuela and in Panama, always going back and forth between those places and the United States. During that time, Holly went to English-speaking schools, where most of their classmates were children of other military, diplomatic and other relocated families. They were used to living within that familiar bubble, which made it difficult to feel connected in these new places.
However, she loved moving. She was able to see the silver lining: instead of thinking that she didn’t belong anywhere, Holly thought she belonged everywhere. “I have all these favorite things from my childhood, and one of them was making arepas with my family. I love them! You move to Ohio, and you have friends over to spend the night, and for breakfast you make arepas, and they’re like ‘What have you made? What are these?’ And so they become part of my identity, but they’re not my culture. They’re not my family history. But they are.”
When Holly and her brother were about to start high school, their parents decided to stay in Ohio to provide them with stability. After graduation, she wanted to study photojournalism, but her plans changed when the guidance counselor suggested engineering due to her ability with math. Once again Holly packed her bags and enrolled in Purdue University to study, partly because of its prestige, but also because of her mom’s belief that moving away for university was essential to shaping her own identity.
However, her desire to become an engineer lasted only one semester, “I hated it! I wanted to take an English class, and those were not part of the engineering curriculum.” She changed her major to public relations, drawn to the way it brings together people, communication and society.
After graduation, Holly moved back to her parents’ house in Texas. While trying to figure out next steps after graduating, she started working at a temp agency, and later, just to get discounts on interview suits, she took a job at a mall that she unexpectedly ended up loving. After some time working in retail, Holly decided to return to school, this time at the University of North Texas, where she completed her Master’s in English.“Part of it [the master] was that we had to teach English 100 classes, which I find ridiculous now because we knew nothing!” she recalled.
Holly and her partner at the time applied together to PhD programs at 10 schools, and ended up being accepted at different universities on opposite sides of the country. Holly decided to go with her partner to Yale, and while he was studying, she spent her time looking through the archives at Yale’s library, writing and auditing classes. “And then, maybe a month before we graduated and moved, I found out I was pregnant. That changed everything.”
Joe, Holly’s first child, was born in 2003. She fondly remembers raising him during his early years in New Haven. “I found his toddlerhood really beautiful. We lived in a neighborhood where I met a lot of friends and I would go to a cafe and there would be all these other babies. I started a website called newhavenbaby.com and I would review restaurants to see if they were baby-friendly. I occupied myself very easily.”
When Joe started preschool, Holly got a job teaching English at the University of New Haven, Connecticut. Her department head saw her potential as a writing tutor and encouraged her to join the writing centre. Eventually, she became its director. Nevertheless, their plans changed again in 2008, when her partner got an offer to be a postdoctoral researcher at UBC. Holly had never been to Vancouver before, but she didn’t hesitate. They packed their bags and moved to Canada, but only one of them stayed.
It has been 18 years since Holly made the decision to call Vancouver her home. This is the longest she has stayed in one place. Although she has considered moving away at times, something always brings her back. “I never felt like I belonged in the U.S. I had different priorities from the people that lived there. And I can’t even tell you what they were. But, I just felt the way people looked at the world was not the way I looked at the world [. . .] Vancouver has so many people from different places and it has that personal interest. When I moved here I was like ‘Oh, this feels like Caracas or Bogotá from my childhood’ in a way that nowhere else I lived in the U.S. had.”
As a mother, Holly’s sense of belonging had become deeply intertwined with her son, Joe, who was one of the main reasons she decided to stay. Finding a school for her son in the United States was challenging, as none of the options seemed to be a good fit for him. However, after moving to Vancouver, Holly realized that the education system was completely different. “I found that it [school] has a social and emotional component. There was something about community building, whereas in the U.S. school felt like it was everyone trying to be better than the people next to them.”
As soon as she began the process of obtaining permanent residency for herself and Joe, she was confronted with an extensive questionnaire about her life. As Holly answered each question, she also wrote a poem in response to it. Writing became her way of coping with the overwhelming process. “I always write about what I’m feeling anxious about or what I’m obsessed over,” she shared.
Holly came to understand that settling in Canada also meant taking responsibility for learning about its violent history of colonization. This inevitably led her to question what was morally right, and her poems became a space to explore these feelings.
I would like to acknowledge that
I am asking to be Canadian
to settle here and
I would like to acknowledge that
I am asking the wrong people
I am asking permission to settle
from other settlers
asking to join something I know is wrong
complicit for not calling them out
2010 marked an important turning point in Holly’s life. She started working as a coordinator at the Douglas College Learning Centre, and she met Kevin, the “love of her life” and the father of her second child, Franny.
In July of 2016, Holly got her permanent residency, and in 2022 she finally achieved what she had worked so hard for and wanted so deeply: she became a Canadian citizen. Due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the ceremony was held on Zoom. At one point during the ceremony, Holly and her son were asked to cut up their PR cards in front of the camera. “That is scary because you’re like ‘This is my whole identity. This document anchors me here.’”
Vancouver was not only the city where she immediately felt at home, but also the place that opened the door for her to become a published writer.
In 2024, those poems that Holly was writing as answers to the immigration questionnaire, became her first book. Permission to Settle is a memoir-based on the challenges of migration, geographic privilege and the violence of colonization. She writes about the tangled emotions of the prospects of a better life and the grief of what you leave behind. It means acknowledging the violence and accepting that what you have done so far is not enough to honor and respect the Indigenous peoples whose land you now call home.
Holly is clear that her book reflects her own experience with migration, a process that involves thousands of individual experiences tied to a governmental and bureaucratic system. However, even though her experience was unique, many of us facing this huge and stressful change in our lives can find our own desires, fears and longings reflected in her words.
When you become a Canadian citizen, you are asked how you will contribute to making your community a better place. I strongly believe that Holly Flauto is giving to her community of CapU students everyday in her classroom. Not only because she is an incredible academic who shares everything she knows professionally with her students, but also because she understands that there are moments in life when we feel out of place and need someone to remind us that, in the middle of all the noise, we are not lost. Near the end of the interview, Holly shared with me that one of her favourite classes to teach is English 100. As she explained, this class creates a lot of anxiety for students, especially those who do not speak English as their first language.
“But then there’s all this pedagogy in terms of what voice sounds like. Grammar isn’t as important as it was when I started teaching. Now it is about, what’s your voice? How can you tell your story? How can you put yourself into your essay? I think that’s part of why I like teaching English 100. It’s about how people get to use their voice in a way that they’ve been told they can’t use before.”