Marotta: ‘Because I Can’t NOT Write’

Marotta: ‘Because I Can’t NOT Write’

Some say you don’t know a thing, really, until you try putting it in words; that you don’t know who you are, even, until you try conveying it.

Last month I volunteered some time to New York Love Books, a literacy organization that fosters reading generally, and so spent a morning with three separate classes of 8th graders at M.S. 390, the Maggie L. Walker School of Brooklyn.

The kids moseyed into the library looking amiable, alert and wholly conscious of their stature as top dogs at the school. Smiling shyly, they slid into the standard-issue school chairs in that 8^th grade way that make all such chairs seems small—and went on, over each 45-minute period, to ask questions about my life that caused me for the first time to see it whole.

They’d been prepared for my visit by their teachers, by school librarian Edris Benjamin and by Literacy Specialist Steve Tullin. They knew, for example, that I’d been a teacher once myself and now divided my time between working as a newspaper columnist, an author, and, just in the last years, a massage therapist.

Additionally, I had sent ahead copies of my first book, a book I believe anyone at all could write who has spent time with small children, surviving that chaotic time of life when your house brims with people routinely falling out of their chairs at the supper table, and the pet hamsters they IMPLORED you to buy keep breaking free of their wee cages to scoot up inside your pantlegs.

Anyway, with chapter titles like "Bum Bum!," "Fruit of the Loom Jesus" and "When Will Dad Become a Woman?" it was bound to capture their interest.

And it did. They caught its spirit of fun all right; but they also asked these really great questions.

For example:

What did I do when I couldn’t think what to write?

Write anything, is what I answered. Even if it says, ‘This is boring.’ Just push that pen across the paper making sentences. The stream will be rusty at first, but if you just keep moving your hand and stay present to the task, it will start to run clear before long.

And when did I first know I was going to be a writer?

I didn’t, I told them. In my experience you inch along day by day trying to do work you care about and only slowly do you begin to sense what your gifts are.

Why did I write at all? one girl wondered.

"Not to get rich!" I almost said, in wry reference to the writer's meager bottom line. But I knew she was after something deeper.

So I told her the truth: that I write because I can’t NOT write. Because it’s how I say "I was here and I loved it." Because it's how I say thank you to God.

She nodded gravely.

When one last question came about how I got the courage to begin at all, I had to think a while. Finally I said that my mother had loved me a lot and maybe that was all you needed in life: just one person who really saw you and thought you were swell.

In the days following, I received warm notes from Steve and Edris saying the kids loved it and wondered if I’d come back one day—and give them all massages.

Reportedly, they thought my working as a massage therapist was the coolest thing about me.

Not that I was funny. Or clever. But that I was willing to lay hands on people to help them feel better.

And you know?

They might just have that right.

Write Terry anytime at tmarotta@ attbi.com