Time to Journey Home

Time to Journey Home is the story about the author's trip back to the small valley in Northern Italy that his ancestors called home for a thousand years before immigrating to a small Midwestern town in the mid-nineteenth century. While there Pedretti was inspired to write The Story of Our Stories, a twelve book epic designed to tell our story – of how our ancestors came to America, how America shaped them and how they shaped America. In this travelogue to discover his family history – his ancestry - the author explains how he prepared for the trip, whom he met on his journey and how he succeeded in adding nearly fifty ancestors to his family tree. Follow him in his genealogical search through the uncovering of church documents that identify the births, weddings and deaths of his family and how meeting others in search of their families often overlapped with his own research. Still his objective was not so much a genealogical search as it was a search to discover what shaped the way of life his ancestors had come to live. While visiting and meeting the people and the land, the author sees a kind and gentle people who seemed completely in synch with the beauty and majesty of the Alps. You will read about some very real imaginary conversations he had with a couple of his nineteenth century ancestors. Join the author as he visits the homes, churches, streets, and mountainsides where his ancestors had once lived. The first immigrants of our family saga settled in the small township of Bad Ax, Wisconsin. The book includes the story of rough-and-tough Bad Ax City evolving into Genoa, Wisconsin—the home of a spray drift of calm. This town will be center to much of the epic series. The author includes a manifesto calling for a new epic for the modern world. Historically epics helped to define who the culture was and provided the citizens a moral compass by which to live and make choices. The epics we know from the early ages celebrated man and war. The author believes the modern epic must celebrate woman and kindness. The new epic hero must be a planter rather than a warrior-destroyer. The new epic hero will be mother, the woman who shapes and defines the family and the world where kindness, creativity and empathy will rule. Each book will contain a piece that explores an idea that the people of this family saga might have written. In this book, the author reveals the great inequality perpetrated by the Social Security Act and offers a fail-safe solution to equalize and perpetuate a secure retirement for all ad infinitum. The appendix includes an ancestral history of the author at the start of his journey and the autobiographies of select persons, who researched the family's ancestry. The Story of Our Stories is the story of Marianna and Petronella, Peter and John, Adelaide and Stefano, and Agnes and her children and her grandchildren. It is about the individuals who peopled the Mount of San Bernardo and Valle Spluga who turned the roughness of Bad Ax City into the gentleness of Genoa, Wisconsin; but first and foremost it is our story, the story of you and me. Our story is written as an epic composed of twelve books, each with a supportive appendix. Each book covers a different story. Some cover the life of a typical family member of a specific generation; others reflect many people of a generation; another traces the entire story from beginning to now; and one looks into a future predicated by the behavior of our mothers. Each volume tells a critical part of the story, is an integral part of the whole, and plays into the unfolding of the epic. While part of a whole, each book can be read independent of the rest.

Michael Pedretti is currently more than halfway through writing a twelve-volume epic called "The Story of Our Stories", which tells the journey of an archetypal American family starting from the Mitochondrial Eve right through the next generation with a focus on the last families to live in Europe and the first families to settle in small town America in the second half of the nineteenth century. Time to Journey Home is volume I of that series. Pedretti has a master's degree in theater from the University of Kansas and he majored in English at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse. He taught acting and directing at Berry College, the University of Dayton and Davis & Elkins College in Elkins WV. The author has directed over 100 theater productions and presented/produced over 170 shows from 30 countries. He founded Movement Theatre International in 1979 and served as its Artistic Director for over 20 years. He recently completed a two-volume book covering the work of the originating performance artists whose work was presented at the international theater festivals he produced and who challenged the theater world in the later part of the twentieth century.