Meet Joseph Citro

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joseph Citro. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joseph below.

Joseph, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I had been writing a series of Vermont-based novels, thrillers, derived from legitimate local history and folklore. “Shadow Child,” “The Gore,” “Lake Monsters,”. “Guardian Angels,” and so on. While researching them and while interacting with audiences at readings, I realized there was far more oddball and mysterious local history and folklore than I would ever be able to adapt into fiction.
It was then that I realized something important. In all the 250+ years that the state of Vermont has existed, no single author had ever collected and assembled the state’s weird tales. We have a rich history of paranormal events: ghosts, haunted houses, monsters, madmen, treasures, and all manner of things that go bump in the Green Mountains.
With that revelation in mind, I did some soul-searching. I knew my Vermont-centric novels would never be best-sellers; they are too laser-focused on the state. So, in 1994, I decided to put novels aside and started collecting Vermont’s weird tales. No one else had done it. So it was my thing, my mission, and ultimately, my contribution to my home state.
In 1994, my last novel came out: “Deus-X: the Reality Conspiracy.” That same year — 1994 — my first collection of Vermont stories hit the stands: “Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls, & Unsolved Mysteries,” illustrated by a Vermont artist, published in Vermont, by Vermonters! And it’s still in print! Many more have followed.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

There are a lot of strange tales buried in Vermont’s colorful past. Some may be well-known, while others have slipped from memory and are in danger of being forgotten altogether. I have seen it as my mission to collect as many of these as possible because they are all part of the folk fabric of our culture.
Some are tales of high adventure, others are mysteries, supernatural tales, or comic episodes.
I have collected the tales and I apply the skills I developed during years of writing fiction to tell them in entertaining ways so they can live again in today’s popular culture.
I have watched the power these tales have. They can arrest the attention of a classroom full of surly middle-schoolers and maybe inspire a few of them to dive into the history books to see for themselves. Or they can bring a wistful smile to the face of an elderly person, who’ll then say, “You know, that reminds me of something I heard when I was very young….”

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

This is a tough one to answer because the various skill sets are so closely intertwined that it is difficult to separate them. Essentially, there are two important qualities for what I do: (1.) curiosity, and (2.) the ability to tell a good story. The first is innate, the second takes practice.
I suspect most people who want to become writers are, at first, readers. I believe we learn a lot about how to write simply by being lifelong readers. We learn subliminally. But putting what we’ve learned subliminally into practice can take time. Developing the skill to write or tell an entertaining story takes commitment.
As I used to tell my writing students, if you’re sitting down at the piano for the first time, you can’t expect to play. Same with the keypad and writing a good story. Allow yourself time to develop.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

This is a scary question because in reality, I probably have only a decade, maybe less, before I check out. Professionally speaking, I am working to be sure all my books remain in print and available to readers. They will be like little tombstones displaying my name long after I’m gone.
Additionally, I have several more books I’d like to finish before I exit. I’m always measuring prospective life span against things to accomplish. Only time will tell…

Contact Info:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joseph.citro.9/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDZxvD0O-74&t=12s

Image Credits

Emily Howe