The Ecstatic Embrace of Influence

Back in my MFA days, we read Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, and I learned for the first time writers were embarrassed to admit the influence of others. “I come down from the past, the past is my own,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens. “I know of no one who has been particularly important to me. My reality-imagination complex is entirely my own.” ( The Secret of the Original Idea .) I was baffled: Should I not admit my influences? Why else would we be devouring published works if not to soak up influence? Was I resigning myself to being a derivative writer or not making the cut of what Bloom called a “strong” writer, whatever that means? That waffling was very short-lived because I wanted to be influenced. I wanted to be cracked open to absorb what I didn’t know. To leave the small confines of my past behind and expand far beyond my little self. The early writing days were sometimes brutal but also beautiful. They left me wide open to so many influences—Alice Munro, William Trevor, W.H. Auden, Denis Johnson, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Gina Berriault, oh, the list is long. It’s painful and exhilarating to become permeable, which is the only way to learn. The more I stayed open, the more I was influenced, thank god. For my short story collection, In This Ravishing World , which won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature, I have no shame or anxiety about admitting the influence of picture books, yes, picture books that I read as a young girl, and then again as a mother. Those books are full of talking rabbits, dogs, mice, turtles, and Frog and Toad (remember?), poor Solomon, the rabbit who turns into a nail. These nonhuman beings who want, need, feel, schem,e and plan—such rich inner lives. The world, all of it, is animated. I confess openly, happily, that those early years influenced me, and in this collection, I animated Nature. I let it speak, hoping to let others experience Nature’s aliveness. I was influenced by […]

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