Suzy Wall Trotta comes by her gift naturally.
“I have always loved to tell stories,” she says. She credits her father, “a natural storyteller,” with instilling the drive to write in her. “I learned that telling our stories can be not only entertaining, but healing,” she says of that connection.
Still, she didn’t really start writing until the COVID-19 pandemic. Before then, she said, “I let myself believe writing was a waste of time,” given our culture’s emphasis on money and productivity. But starting in 2020, Trotta “wrote mostly to stay sane: daily rants on what was happening in the world or what I saw in the grocery store.”
Those “rants” led to a resolution to write every day, and that resolution led to sharing her stories with a wider audience.
Now she has a book under her belt (Open House: Mostly True Tales of Crazy in Southern Real Estate) and several other publications, as well as regular participation in local readings, such as Curated, held monthly at The Bird and the Book.
Trotta’s favorite thing to write is short-form creative non-fiction, or personal essays. She explains, “I love to take a story from my own life and tie it into the bigger framework of humanity.” That’s the crux of Open House. Within the loose theme of real estate, she says, those tales “also shared a larger theme of people’s emotional reactions to money and stress. And they all proved that we’re all a little – or a lot – crazy.”
She’s challenging herself this year with another daily-writing resolution, and she’s also working on a long-form memoir, a new genre that she finds daunting. But it’s important for writers to grow by challenging themselves and stretching their skills, she believes.
It’s no surprise that Trotta is also a voracious reader – about a hundred books a year! She can’t pick just one favorite, but she has a special love for Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, a genre-defying work that Trotta finds especially relevant today. Her comfort read is Agatha Christie, whom she first discovered as a child and re-read during the pandemic. (She hints that she might have attempted a mystery novel of her own, but she warns that we won’t ever get to read it!)
When it comes right down to it, Trotta sees writing as a way to connect people. In sharing our own stories, she says, we encourage others to share theirs, which leads to “all of us realizing we’re not all that different from each other.
“Stories, ultimately, bring us together.”
Find Suzy Wall Trotta’s book Open House locally at Southland Books or online from Howling Hills Publishing (www.howlinghillspublishing.com). She also has pieces in Howling Hills’ two anthologies of spooky Appalachian stores, 23 Tales and 24 Tales, available from the same sources. You can find her advice on essay writing included in Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay: Crafting the Story Only You Can Write, available from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
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