Meet Cindy Marabito

We were lucky to catch up with Cindy Marabito recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Cindy , appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Pure hard luck. The more I get knocked back, for some reason, I come back even stronger. I believe in myself, and that is my greatest strength. I recently read a book, Mentor by Tom Grimes. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve come across on the craft of writing and how it fits into the bigger scheme of things. Life lessons learned the hard way. Plus, it’s so well written that I practically finished it in one sitting. I’m also encouraged by any stroke of luck or hardship as a potential story I can write about. I never thought I’d be digging through my past looking through events that were once incredibly painful to me and using them in my writing.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

My life is filled with rescue activities. I live with dogs and other animals that no one else wanted and some have been terribly abused. It’s my purpose to give them the comfort they’ve been denied. I look at the work not so much as vocation, but as a special gift. It keeps me grounded and grateful. The animals are the center of my world. What joy I receive from them at feeding time or outdoors enjoying the nature around us. I learn something new every day. Most of the dogs had never slept on a warm bed or eaten healthy foods that they were intended to eat. How enjoyable it is for me to give them a rawhide or bully stick, an activity toy with doggy peanut butter.

It’s a good life, my life and I published my first book, Pit Bull Nation, about saving these dogs. Stories about how we learned together all about canine life. So I spend my spare time writing. I’ve published several books and am in the process of writing a dystopian novel, Project 25. It’s set in the near distant future in a world run by an oppressive government. The protagonist is a woman who escapes from a factory farm prison and hits the road. Animals play a big part in the story as she meets up with a fellow escapee, a pig named Herbert.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

My instinct has been my greatest strength. We all have instinct, but learning to listen to that quality is the trick in my opinion. It gets a little easier with practice, but never once has steered me wrong. My own instinct has served me well in both rescue and in my writing.
Empathy has enabled me to flourish in my work. The definition of an empath is “(chiefly in science fiction) a person with the paranormal ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual.” How amazing it is to me that this special gift of sensitivity helps me understand the animals in my world even though we are members of different species. And the bonus of its paranormal meaning is the focus of my newest work in progress, of which the theme is how animals try to tell humans we are destroying the earth.
Last but certainly not least is the strong play of synchronicity in my world. Not a day goes by I don’t experience the magic of psychic phenomena and wild coincidence in my path. I think of that old movie Repo Man. Otto, the lead character is standing over a burning trash bin talking to another character, Miller. Otto is holding a book I learned was made up for this film called Dioretix: The Science of Matter over Mind by X Rum-Bubba. Miller explains serendipity to Otto. “Suppose you’re thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o’ shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for one, either. It’s all part of the cosmic unconsciousness.”
Like instinct, I believe we all have these fortunate and unusual strokes of events in our lives, but too busy and move too quickly to fully appreciate the experience. I personally thrive on these episodes which often turn my whole day around and fuel whatever endeavor I’m attempting. I cherish these moments and if I go a full day without encountering a phenomenon, I feel almost cheated.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

I’ve read a couple of great books recently which have inspired my writing. Mentor: a Memoir by Tom Grimes is the story of a friendship between two writers. The writing is so personal and exact, it pulls the reader into the whole of the thing, drawing upon the same fears and qualities we all have. Great writing, to me, does this. Appeals to that everyman in each of us, the sameness and need to belong, to find like souls and certification for our own desires and what drives us. Besides being a great read, the book is one of the best guides on how to write I’ve come across. In a world filled with infinite books, classes, online courses on how to write, that’s saying a lot.
The other author whose book Future Home of the Living God I just finished is Louise Erdrich. The story entails a woman in a dystopian society who’s become pregnant and sets out to find her birth parents. The glory of the book is in its character details. You want to know everyone Erdrich writes about. Everything is so real. What inspired me to select this book on a recent visit to the library was this one review: “”Erdrich is a seer, a visionary whose politics are inextricable from her fiction…[Future Home of the Living God] is an eerie masterpiece, a novel so prescient that though it conjures an alternate reality, it often provokes the feeling that, yes this is really happening.”— O, The Oprah Magazine” Yeah, Oprah of all places. I wanted to read the book based on this one take and it was pinpoint exact. I too, felt like Erdrich was so plugged in to the characters and the story that you get the feeling she’s a medium of sorts, recounting actual events to the reader….in wildly good prose. And the cherry on top is her method of recounting character and adventure in an alluring and genuine manner. Again, drawing on the reader’s like meets like inclinations.

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Cindy Marabito

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