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	The Trail of Breadcrumbs by Terry Marotta Audiobook/Handbook This is from the very first "cut" on The Trail of Breadcrumbs’ first CD, and gives a sense of the book’s purpose so I guess it might be properly called a Preface. Read on down and pretend that you’re listening instead and the sky outside is all blue and you are sitting in your favorite chair – Terry M.

PREFACE

The Trail of Breadcrumbs, on Writing to Find Your Way Home, by Terry Marotta, who is talking to you now.

I put this book together with the idea that it would work in two ways, first as a simple collection of stories for people to enjoy and use to stimulate their own reflections, and second as a no-frills manual for those wishing to form the habit of getting their own thoughts down on paper.

The stories come from years of recording what I see and hear - my job description since the dawn of that long-ago Reagan era when the gals all had poofy hair and shoulder pads as wide as the decks of aircraft carriers. Since 1980 in other words I have been writing a weekly self-syndicated newspaper column, a job that has forced me to get out there every day and just plain look around at each unique and irreproducible moment.

But anyone can do what I do. That’s my theory anyway and I aim to prove it to you here.

In each very short chapter of this book I will say some things that look back or ahead or even sideways at our culture and then I will hand the ‘mike’ to you and invite you to do the same – that is, sit down and open the taps yourself and see what comes out.

And if the water seems rusty at first, never mind. The more you write the clearer it will become. Keep moving your pen or hammering away at that keyboard and before you know it you will have stopped talking like everyone else and begun talking like your own little self. Maybe if you can really peel back the layers you will rediscover that self who was once 18 months old and happily playing away with language in your crib in those moments before the grownups could come and set you down in your busy day.

Busy days are great. On some levels we all love a busy day. But in recent years we have grown too busy. In recent years we have forgotten that really what God was hoping was that we might just look around a little and appreciate all the trouble He went to on our behalf.

Recording what you saw or heard or felt helps you do this even if what you are setting down is painful, as it is bound to be from time to time. Pain is OK; crying too. Think how good you feel when you finally unearth an old buried feeling. "That’s what’s been hurting all along; this little splinter of a memory all dug in and worked under the skin!" But only write about and it starts to loosen and rise, closer and closer still to the surface until look! There it is right where you can just gently lift it out and the old pain along with it.

So healing is what this book is for too, I guess. It’s for feeling thankful and for healing and finally for finding someone to tell this stuff to once you unearth it all. Joan Didion said it: you don’t know what you think sometimes until you write it down.

"What was that!" Isn’t that what we’re inwardly saying after like 98% of what happened to us? This is your chance to figure out what "that" was. The people you leave behind are going to be so glad when they come upon your nice messy journals with scribbling in the margins, and the doodles you maybe made to get yourself going.

So take the book in the car with you as you drive if you like but be ready, because most of the traffic you encounter will be "inner."

It might be better just to sit in your car and listen while you’re parked.

Or find a quiet place at home.

Or, bring it on your next walk with some headphones.

I will talk for five or so minutes telling my own little stories and then offer you some beginnings for your own entries. If you press ‘pause’ after each story I’m pretty sure the next thing you will hear will be this new voice. This voice is your own voice, scratchy as it may be at first.

Use it. ‘Sing,’ as the old poets used to say when they talked about writing.

You’re going to love doing it.

I know I loved making this book, which I did in a sweet little cabin on a dirt road on the shores of New Hampshire’s Big Boy of a lake called Winnipesaukee.

Lois Lew of Massachusetts and Roger Baker of New Mexico did all the sound magic. Doug Lipman, internationally known storyteller, provided more technical advice plus all the early inspiration and moral support.

My sister-in-law Joan Marotta of Wendell Center used her keen sense of beauty to design the cover, using a crooked and imperfect picture I took looking out my study window one late-August day this year.

Look again now that picture on the front cover. That’s our ivy trimming the window. That blue china pen holder was my grandmother’s, though she never thought of herself as a grandmother. She was just getting used to being a few people’s mother when she died at 31 in 1910. That cut-glass ink stand belonged to her young husband, whom I knew as my grandfather.

And that young woman in the silver frame? That’s my big sister Nan the summer she was 35.

Witty as she is, she has never picked up her own pen, except for the zingy truth-telling letters and emails she has now and then sent up from her home in Florida so far from our salt-air, freeze-to-death-in-winter Boston roots.

This book is dedicated to her; to Nan, who made all my fun so long ago, when we were Nan and Terry Sheehy, and the sun rose every day on the chance for fresh adventures.

©Copyright 2002-2006 Terry Marotta, All Rights Reserved.