Terry Marotta:
Anyone Can Do This

I’m not a writer like other writers.

I bring out all my own books, collections mostly of snappy, super-short tales and gathered around a particular theme.

I formed Ravenscroft Press in 1993 and still handle every aspect of the business, which means I feel free to call a book whatever I like.

And this works out, sort of.

I called my first collection "I Thought He Was a Speed Bump," which is what our two-year old neighbor said after he had twice run his tricycle straight over the tummy of his little pal and most everyone hearing this title chuckles - except that one hothead who shouldered his way up to me at a book signing to ask if I thought it was FUNNY to be killing deer on the highway and then making jokes about it.

The title I chose for my next book was "Vacationing in My Driveway," which I guess does sound like a handbook for slackers but is really a 52-chapter journey around the year with one short sweet story per week, following the arc we see in Nature of bloomtime and fallowtime and at the end the sense of life returning.

Even the Library of Congress was baffled about how to categorize this one. They ended up calling it "Children’s Devotional" reading.

"Children’s Devotional"? I squeaked into the phone when I got the news. "I’m a writer who talks to grownups! This book has ER visits ending in death! Naked people taking showers on television! Tampons liberated from their tight little jackets by small children and set free to scamper mouse-like around the room!"

We don’t make mistakes," the woman on the other end gravely intoned. "We’re the Library of Congress."

Well this week sees the release of a third book—not a collection but a book about creatively interpreting the significance of the path we have made through this world. Still Following the Trail of Breadcrumbs to Journal Your Way Back Home is also a little different in that I beg people not to read it.

"Don’t look at the book!" I say. "Don’t even open it—until you’ve listened to the CDs first!"

Because this is an audio book first that just happens to come with a paperback "manual."

I made it an audio book because I believe that when you hear a story, it drops down directly into your heart, bypassing those killing filters like Judgment and Evaluation.

Because I believe when someone tells you his story it is a voice whispered in the ear. It is a hand laid upon the arm.

And it makes you want to tell your story in return.

Every day for five summer days I closed myself up in a hot little cabin with some sound equipment to produce it. Then a recording studio in out west cleaned it up and added the music. I typed up a transcript of everything I had said aloud, had all 142 pages made into a pretty paperback and there she stands: a tool that can teach even an eight-year-old how to write the short lively first-person essay.

I made it because over the years so many people have written me to ask how they can learn to do what I do every week in the paper.

Anyone can learn to do this, believe me.

If you want to try you can order the book yourself—or you can just think of some things from your past that makes you smile, or cry, or shake your head in recognition—then pick up your pen and begin.

Because any writer is really just talking; and haven’t you been doing that too since baby days?

Reach Terry at tmarotta@comcast.net, at www.VacationingInMyDriveway.com or at Ravenscroft Press, Box 270, Winchester, Mass., 01890; 617-512-2264.