My second short story stole its structure from the Wandering Rocks section in Ulysses, only in my story it was downtown Seattle (my big swerve). I walked the length of the Belltown neighborhood with my notebook, trying for some of that Joycean precision. My third story was a cringy piece about the Irish Troubles called “Ourselves Alone” (Sinn Fein, get it? I know, so bad). My point is that Joyce is a life-long literary love. My obsession with novel structure was born with Ulysses. Whatever formal radicalism I aspire to have came from that book (plus Faulkner and Woolf). Eventually this lead me to more contemporary writers like DeLillo. My first short story, in case you are wondering, was not Joycean. It was about a girl’s obsession with a long-dead Montgomery Clift. This was inspired by one faintly erotic scene in A Place in the Sun, a scene I could not shake. So my first literary impulse came out of George Stevens.Ī Jamaican writer called Andrew Salkey… wrote a YA novel called Hurricane before YA was a term. I remember it as the book that made me want to write. He was the most wonderful writer for children. He died in 1995.Įileen Myles: Little Women, Louisa May Alcottĭo you remember what books you encountered, growing up in Massachusetts in the 1950s and 60s, that might have inspired you to want to become a writer? I just found what looks to be a sequel, Earthquake, on an old-books stall on West Third, and I intend to read it to my kids. The 50s is childhood up to age ten, so myths, sci-fi. Those didn’t make me want to be a writer. They made me want to do drugs or have adventures, travel. Maybe Little Women made me want to be a writer because Jo, the star of it, was a writer. I didn’t understand yet that that was the author. I liked Franny & Zooey, really everything by J.D. I realized it was important who was talking.
If you could tap into that you could get a flow going. He wrote in a complaining, American working class speech. It reminded me of Somerville, where I came from. He made it clear that an unprivileged American could be a writer and could have a lot to talk about. He switched constantly from speech to surrealism. That shift was important to me because an unstable self was what I had to use. I love so many different writers from different eras. But a few-of, really, zillions, so this is an incomplete list-would be Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Philip Roth and Junot Díaz on the novel side and, lord, the poets-too many to even mention. But right now I’m re-reading and re-reading Robert Hayden’s poems, which are absolutely beautiful and brilliant. And about to read, for the first time, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And just beginning a book of poems by a young poet named Valzhyna Mort that looks exciting. Just finished Victoria Chang’s new book, and about to pick up a new book by Ronaldo V. Wilson called Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man. I think Amiri Baraka’s work made me want to write poems too. Especially his beautiful poem, “An Agony. Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write? Sue Monk Kidd: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë As Now.” A really, really beautiful poem. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which I first read in college. The story of Edna Pontellier’s struggle with the limits her culture placed on women made a deep and lasting impression on me. Peter Levi: the poems of Sir Walter Scott Jane Eyre was the book that made me want to write. I don’t know why people become writers but I can tell you how I became a writer. When I was about nine or ten at boarding school I was imprisoned in a room called the “Round Room,” shaped rather like the top of an old-fashioned key.