Writers are forever being asked about where their ideas come from and what part inspiration plays in their work. It’s a funny word, really, in its associating the act of breathing with the act of creating.
We are nothing if not a storytelling species, which means we all have stories to tell. Some are transcendent, others banal. Some are driven by the artful play of words, others by the raw power of the story.
Photo © Abe Frajndlich
Look around, listen in, stories are everywhere—coffee shops and nail salons, nestled in the intimacy of kitchen tables, reverberating at rock concerts. Built into the fabric of a story, maybe even sparking it, giving it pulse and texture, is the music I listen to, the art I look at, the books—fiction, poetry, essays—I read. There are times I can’t help feeling as if I’m inhaling words on a page so perfect in their pitch, even more so when it comes to the music and lyrics of my singer/songwriter heroes. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. Patti Smith. Bruce Springsteen. Bonnie Raitt. The voices of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and Etta James. Blues guitar. Bill Evans piano. All things Chopin.
My messy bookshelf …
So many books have shaped, and continue to shape, me as a writer. I could easily go back in time to the books of Beverly Cleary, and all things Nancy Drew and Silas Marner and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Years later would bring another profound and beautiful war-years journal, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, followed by her Letters from Westerbork.
Take a peek at my bookshelves and you only scratch the surface.
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Stones from the River, Ursula Hegi
The Neopolitan Trilogy, Elena Ferrante
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
To the End of the Land, David Grossman
The stories of William Trevor and Anton Chekhov and Katherine Anne Porter and Lydia Davis and Grace Paley and I.B. Singer and Edith Pearlman
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers
A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich
The Solace of Leaving Early, Haven Kimmel
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers
A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
The White Album, Joan Didion
The Writer on Her Work, Janet Sternburg, editor
Reading like a Writer, Francine Prose
On Writing, Stephen King
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
What Is Found There, Adrienne Rich
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Given Sugar, Given Salt, Jane Hirshfield
The Book of Nightmares, Galwey Kinnell
What Work Is, Philip Levine
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, Adrienne Rich
Transformations, Anne Sexton
What the Living Do, Marie Howe
What We Carry, Dorianne Laux
The Collected Sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Self, Terrance Hayes
Not for Children Only
It’s often said that we teach to learn. In my years of conducting curriculum-based writing residencies, I found illustrated children’s books a perfect tool for stimulating poems and stories via the mix of image and text.
The Bat Poet, Randall Jarrell/Maurice Sendak
I Live in Music, Ntozake Shange/Romare Bearden
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at All, Maya Angelou/Jean-Michel Basquiat
The Dream Keeper, Langston Hughes/Brian Pinkney
The Shoe Bird, Eudora Welty
The Widow and the Parrot, Virginia Woolf/Julian Bell
I Saw Esau, Iona and Peter Opie/Maurice Sendak
This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World, Naomi Shihab Nye
The Complete Poems to Solve, May Swenson/Christy Hale
