Daily Inspiration: Meet Annette Januzzi Wick

Today we’d like to introduce you to Annette Januzzi Wick.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started? 
I’m a second-generation Italian American. My parents’ families hailed from Calabria and Abruzzo. Though they proclaimed their Italianità at every turn, we never knew how Italian we really were. But we sure ate like we were 100%. I’m a product of small-town Ohio. My favorite pastime in my youth was to bike daily to our town’s awe-inspiring sandstone library, built out of stone from the nearby quarries. With a millstone situated in front of City Hall, Amherst, Ohio, proclaims itself as the Sandstone Capital of the World. I proudly say the same.

I grew up as the proverbial middle child, no need to air out my therapy here. However, in ninth-grade English, the teacher asked students to write a superhero story. With a built-in nickname of “Netti,” I drew inspiration from my Italian background and developed the character “Netti Spaghetti.” All superheroes need a sidekick. So, I created the “Meatball Kid“ to join “Netti.” That story was lost in the crush of dozens of cartons moved from home to college and beyond. But I learned several valuable lessons. Netti Spaghetti stood for what I wanted in the world, and her persona was a motivation for me. And–always save your work.

While I continued to my weekly trek to Italian American grocery stores, festivals, and family tables, I earned a computer science degree from the University of Akron and worked in tech for many years before writing became a passion and vocation. I thank my first husband, Devin, for that spark. During one of my entrepreneurial stints as a barista and owner of Cincinnati’s first drive-through coffee shop in the 1990s, he sent me flowers with the message, “You can be anything you want to be.” Despite my career training, I mostly wanted to live in the present moment. After a long encounter with cancer, Devin died. And I found I was meant to be so much more. A writer, a mother, and a caregiver to my parents, especially my mother, in her dementia.

I pursued writing in the same way I chased after the hurdles while on the track team. With my usual fierceness, which I credit to my Italian upbringing, sibling rivalries, and an innate need to follow my curiosity.

Now, I’m a writer, teacher, speaker, and author of two memoirs on love and loss: I’ll Be in the Car, and I’ll Have Some of Yours, based on my award-winning blog about caregiving for my mother, Find You in the Sun. The contractions in successive titles were not planned. But they symbolized owning our life’s choices and living fully even with regrets. A combination of Italian roots, small-town footholds, and urban living, my writings span the arts, women’s issues, food and cooking, aging, and memory. My work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Belt Magazine, Edible Ohio Valley, Cincinnati Magazine, and Italian Americana (U. of Illinois Press), Ovunque Siamo, and Italian American (Spring, 2024). Something Italian: Essays and recipes from the family table, part memoir, cookbook, and homage, is forthcoming (U. of Akron Press, 2025).

I make my home with my dear husband Mark in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine. Every writer should have a Mark in their corner. One who understands the need for introverism when it’s called for. He’s always up for whatever life throws at us. We live in an Italianate-style home built by German immigrants and later occupied by a few good Italian tailors. There, I relish the opportunity to embrace the meaning of “neighbor” as “someone living in proximity to another.” For this ever-so-punctual person, I don’t mind being a little late for meetings and appointments if it means I’ve held in my heart a momentary encounter with someone on the street to carry me through the day.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
As much as I always hurried to grow up or catch up with my older siblings, I never anticipated I would care for and mourn the death of my husband in my early thirties. I did not anticipate when my children were in high school, I would begin caring for my father, then mother.

In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens writes, “It seemed to me so long, however, since I had been among such boys, or amount any comparisons of my own age… that I felt as strange an even I have done in my life. I was so conscious of having passed through scenes of which they could have no knowledge and of having acquired experiences foreign to my age, appearance, and condition as one of them that I half believed it was an imposture to come there as an ordinary schoolboy….I was made infinitely more uncomfortable by the consideration that, in what I did know, I was much farther removed from my companions than in what I did not.”

I lived that quote for many years as a young widow and single mother. Becoming part of a stepfamily was soon added into that experience as well. Life has offered me a plate of material from which to dine, and I am full of stories yet to be fed to myself and my readers.

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I can’t recall when I began calling myself a writer in public, but I knew it in my fingers and on the page. The fact remains, we all have this intrinsic need to feel, to be heard, even if the only listening device is a paper and pen. I love nothing more than my time writing. I’ve tried to maintain that love affair with words since the day I called myself a writer.

As an essayist and memoirist, I’ve published two books and a variety of writings on subject matters that interest me or pay some bills. What do I love most about that aspect of my work? Speaking to others about their process, their challenges, their lives. Using writing to find the common ground among strangers and friends. And that moment of magic when those foreign thoughts in your head have somehow been translated to a masterful work on the page.

However, my writing often glistens not because of my original words but from the constellations of thoughts, ideas, hopes, and dreams of others. I’m a listener first, and that’s what sets me apart.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
A few years ago, I texted with a friend about some personal family challenges. “How do you keep going, knowing that?” she asked. Was I motivated by fear, afraid of what would happen if I didn’t keep going? Or was I motivated because I’m fearless? I went with the latter. When we care about something, we’re taking a risk. Caregivers take huge risks every day in making decisions on behalf of someone else, perhaps someone who cannot speak for themselves. They take a risk on being ostracized for their decisions. They risk their careers and other relationships with spouses, children, and friends. They risk their time and energy to pursue other pastimes for the sake of a single moment in which their loved one feels that sense of care.

In a way, my caregiving experience made me fearless. I have walked the most beloved people in my life to their deaths. What really is there left to fear? “Risk” is another four-letter word in the face of those challenges.

This year, I’ll take a few more risks. To work with the University of Akron Press and publish Something Italian: Essays and recipes from the family table. I didn’t start out to write about food, but if I’m always talking about it, why not? Besides, there’s an Italian saying, “A tavola non s’invecchia.” Readers, look it up. And I‘ll also add some long-awaited fiction to my reportoire this year, as well as mainting my Substack, Morning Finds, where readers can follow the journey of me untangling my morning thoughts and keep up on workshops and events.