Gioia di vivere with Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
April 30, 2026
Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is an American memoirist, poet, and performance artist whose stage presence has been called riveting and volcanic. She was born in the Bronx. Her books include: Dyke Rubicons (Quelle Press chapbooks), Whaddyacall the Wind? (Bordighera Press), Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light; and Pitch Roll Yaw, (Guernica World Editions), L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY Press; finalist for LAMBDA Literary Award), and Schistsong (Bordighera Press).
Her short creative nonfiction essay, A Baby Named Freedom, appears in Issue #23.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
There’s a me/you ness in language that divides us. I / you and on and on. These boundaries dissolve in altered states — I’ve had a lot of deep illness, and have been on post-operative medications that blur the distinctions of you/I. I have ushered loved ones through these altered states. In post-op recovery, we hit milestones of coming back into focus, into the stride of the world, into the distinctions of me/you/they.
It’s springtime. Pink season. Peach blossoms just outside the window. Grandma Rose tossed peach pits out the window, spit onto the earth, after she ate a peach. She wouldn’t throw a pit away in the trash. That didn’t make sense to her. She grew up in peasant culture, peasant wisdom, working the land as a child in the heel of the boot, Italy. Her literacy was of the earth and leaves and the cycle of life. It was strange for her to see me reading and writing all my hour and playing softball. These endeavors didn’t make sense to her; you couldn’t eat them. I wasn’t helping the family survive. All children worked in her day. More children were more hands to work the land.
Her first peach tree sprouted up after she died in 2001, at 100 1/2 years old. Now the third generation of peach trees are here, right outside the window. I call these peach trees my grandmother. Hello Grandma Rose, thank you for the pink blossoms.
I hope I become a tree after I die and bring someone blossoms then sweet fruit to bite into to remember how delicious life is.
An incredible story. The essence of her lives on in the trees and her lived experiece persists through rememberance and shring. Thank you!
Turning to your essay, A Baby Named Freedom… What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process or the final version of your essay?
In revising this essay, I went back to describe the physicality of the moment where the man confronted me in the café. That moment could have gone in many directions. I could have gotten defensive and cursed him out. I asked Shyla, the editor of The Good Life Review, how she read that moment. We decided I could add a moment of physicality. I examine at these public interactions where strangers argue, fight, cast microaggressions on one another. Every day walking the streets of Manhattan I experience many of these moments. My superpower is to immediately peel back all the layers between the you/I ness of these encounters and laser in to connect, cross the vast oceans of space between us.
The circumstances around different parts of the essay are compelling and timely, with gun control and the general tension in the US, but you wove in other details, for example, the feeling of not being in control of your own body as a child. How did you decide what other details or aspects of your life to include?
In terms of the U.S.A. and gun violence, and this moment we are in culturally, I think if everyone recognized the rage within and if we created cultural ways to let the air out of the pressure cooker… Think primal screams at Cornell U, balcony singing during the pandemic on Italian balconies, banging pots and pans at 7pm in NYC during the pandemic, dancing around the fire, group singing, protesting, stomping, crying… I admire two-year-olds who throw tantrums. We all have that inside us. If we bring back tarantella dance trance, maybe we’d stop machine gunning in public…
We love learning something new! Tarantella, for those not familiar, is Southern Italian folk dance characterized by whirling movements, quick steps, and flirtatious gestures between two people set in time to music with a upbeat tempo played with a mandolin, a guitar, an accordion, and tambourines. And yes, if there were more dancing and singing going on, there would most certainly be less rage.
Are there any special projects, favorite pieces, or books you’d like to promote?
- Audio of my new chapbook of sonnets: DYKE RUBICONS
- Audio of story after story, all true: ANNIE’S STORY CAVE
- L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir
What do you think when you hear, “the good life?”
When I saw the title “The Good Life” many points of light sparkled up at me. Dante’s “the delectable mountain” in Canto 1 of the Inferno. La vita bella. Gioia di vivere. What is the good life for me as a writer? Is it strange to spend so many hours alone inside the cathedral of thought? I don’t know other ways to live. For me, life is work, and I am always on a mission. Reading has given me my best understanding of my inner life. I hope my writing expands readers sense of their inner life. I go back to reading James Joyce’s “Araby” in Dubliners. The echo of the soul in that vast space of the bazaar. The quest for connection, for love to land.
Thank you, Annie, for trusting us with a slice of your life and for sharing your voice with us, through your story and your actual voice, which we love-love! We appreciate your time and willingness to participate in this Q&A. Whatever distant shore you find yourself on, we hope you always have time to sing a song, be outside, do something kind for someone less fortunate, and ruminate about the past. Cheers to the joys of living!
Bonus audio of Annie reading A Baby Named Freedom…