Contributor’s Corner (Fiction): Isabel Lanzetta

INTVW by Keith Ayuman LANZETTA Isabel

NRM: How are you? What keeps you busy during this pandemic? Isabel Lanzetta: Considering the condition of our world today, and even before this pandemic began, I must say that I am tremendously grateful to be supported and surrounded by the people I love, all in good health. If anything, it is my emotional and physical body that is spent watching the widespread suffering that has permeated our communities on a scale I’ve never witnessed in my (relatively short) lifetime.

Writing, of course, keeps me engaged during this time. Even as the lockdown changed my day to day life, I was able to reconnect with my voice in a manner that wasn’t accessible to me before. This work came out of that time spent in deep isolation.

When the weather was warmer, I devoted most of my time to gardening. There was something nurturing about watching the little seeds I had germinated in March, when the country first was shutting down, blossom into an overgrown jungle in my backyard. That work was my own pursuit of the small joys that lie around me, and a reminder that all things, even this pandemic, are impermanent.

NRM: What made you write such a tragic yet engaging story? IL: If it was ever clearer that tragedy is all around us, it is now.

Mortality is its own tragedy, for the person departing their body and for those they leave behind. Still—I like to think of this story as one of redemption more than anything.

End of life care continues to be a relatively taboo subject of discussion, as is the aging female form. I wanted to create a story that puts this type of body at the forefront of its narrative, and which illustrates the somber, and yet tender, nature of hospice work.

As my first work of flash fiction, I knew that the language and the images should be compact but impactful. A story in such few words must hold the reader’s attention until the very end. It was an artistic challenge, but one of my most enjoyable ones.

NRM: The atmosphere and the tragedy of this short story really grasped me until it ended. Who, or what, influenced you to write a piece like this? IL: When I was younger, I worked in a residential home for people suffering from dementia. Watching the transition from life to death is one filled with grief and mystery. You begin to recognize that the body is largely a vessel for the spirit inside, more than anything. Age as we conceive it turns on its head— people from all walks of life return to their most elementary states of being. It is the closest I have seen an adult return to their infancy. It would be an oversimplification to define this transition as tragic or liberating, but I believe there is a great loss in not telling these stories.

NRM: When writing a story, is there a character name you always loved, but never had the chance to use? IL: Interesting that you might ask that. One of the components of storytelling I struggle most with is naming characters. I am a big proponent of meaningful naming, and so I find that often a character’s name will arrive as I write. Perhaps as I continue to create, a name might come to me that inspires a story, rather than the other way around.

NRM: What is the best and worst thing about being a writer? IL: Writing is a way of translating how I experience and contemplate that which I observe around me.

I write because it’s how I know to move through the world. The best thing about being a writer is the way it reveals myself to me.

On the flip side of this, perhaps the most challenging aspect of being a writer is that the work I create, whether fictional or not, is inevitably personal. Putting my work out to be received by a wider audience is naturally a vulnerable thing for me to do. Regardless of whether my writing is received how I intend it or not, the enjoyment for me is in the language, and the passion I hold for the work that I do.