Saturday, October 21, 2023; 10:00a-12:30p. Italian American Museum of Cleveland, 12111 Mayfield Road Cleveland, OH. Register here. Create a story of your family history by learning to write about your ancestors with author, blogger, speaker, and teacher Annette Januzzi Wick. Writing about ancestors we never knew or family that were strangers to us in some way isn’t as easy as it sounds.

There are thoughts and emotions that we cannot conceive of in our time. We tell tales or hand down stories about our ancestors to bring us comfort and to provide perspective. By parsing delicately and honestly through one’s family narratives, their historical and cultural context, and what secrets or parts of themselves were kept hidden to survive, we better understand ourselves.

In this 2.5-hour workshop, participants will be prompted to write in various genres to find those missing links with their past. Using published works, we will look at the role place, food, and the larger society play in contextualizing the lives and deaths of our relations. Participants will have an opportunity to share their words in a supportive setting with prompts for future work.Cost is $35 which includes workshop, handouts, and refreshments.

Annette Januzzi Wick is a writer, blogger, speaker, and author of two memoirs, including I’ll Have Some of Yours, a journey of cookies and caregiving. Her work spans creative writing, urban living, aging and memory, food, and the Italian American experience. Essays and articles have appeared in Ovunque Siamo, Italian Americana, a division of University of Illinois Press (Spring, 2023), Italy Segreta, and an upcoming Abruzzese cookbook to raise funds for Turkey’s earthquake survivors. Essays have also been published in Cincinnati Magazine, Nextavenue.com, 3rd Act Magazine, Belt Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Still Point Arts. She maintain strong relations with the Abruzzo region and with Cincinnati’s Italian American and food communities. Her blog, Morning Finds, can be found here.

Annette’s forthcoming work, "Something Italian: Stories from the Family Table," is a poetic and poignant journey of handwritten recipes that explores the culinary struggles of Italian Americans through ancestry, motherhood, and marriage, by a daughter who became the vessel to pass this wisdom down.

A daughter of Italian American parents with Abruzzese and Calabrese roots, Annette teaches creative writing at Cincinnati’s Women Writing for (a) Change, at Roebling Books in Newport, Kentucky, and various arts institutions and non-profits in the region. She and her husband make their home in a historic home in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine.