Long before I ever heard of such literary giants as Faulkner and Joyce who would someday influence my writing as an adult, I encountered a book called, Go, Dog. Go!, by P.D. Eastman. The bold imagery of, "Green dog on a yellow tree," the poetic resonance of, "Now it is night. Night is not a time for play," and the pulse-pounding climax of, "A dog party! A big dog party!" hooked me for life. It was the first book I read all by myself. I was four years old, and it cemented my love of reading.
When I was six years old I read my first Roald Dahl book, James and the Giant Peach, during summer vacation while sitting in a swing in my Great Aunt Zo's back yard. I felt I had found a kindred spirit: someone who saw the world as an absurd, often cruel, but somehow sweetly hopeful place. I read all of his books and felt inspired to write. By the time I was eight I'd written a stack of my own short stories.
When I was ten, To Kill a Mockingbird changed me forever. I read it four times in a row, unwilling and unable to leave the characters and that place. Harper Lee started a lifelong love of southern writers for me: Truman Capote, William Styron, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and probably the author I admire most, Flannery O'Connor.
The southern writer's strong love of place and language and legacy is something I share.
In high school and college, I discovered J.D. Salinger, Nathaniel West, and James Joyce who, along with Flannery O'Connor, are the authors who have had the most impact on what I try to bring to my own writing.
The Catcher in the Rye, The Day of the Locust, The Dubliners, and A Good Man is Hard to Find are novels and short story collections I reread almost every year.
What all four of these authors do brilliantly is bring significance to the insignificant. They take misfits and regular folk and make them intriguing. They take trivial, everyday actions and make them important. They take the most unpleasant character and make him someone a reader can understand even if the reader can never excuse him.
Their ability to condemn while showing compassion, to admire characters they pity, to blend hilarity and suffering are the guideposts for my own writing.
A few other authors whose novels have made great impressions on me are Robert Penn Warren and the lyricism of All the King's Men; Kazuo Ishiguro and the restrained perfection of The Remains of the Day; Emily Bronte and the tortured psyches bound to a tortured place in Wuthering Heights; Patrick McCabe and the likable horror of The Butcher Boy.
I also believe, though, that a writer is influenced by more than just other writers.
Every writer has a world they portray best but before they can begin to write about it they have to feel for it. They have to possess the passion and empathy to capture a place, a culture, a people with an honest completeness. A writer needs to have not only an understanding of the world she writes about but a very real place within it.
Keeping that in mind, I have to add my late grandfather, H.E. Burkett, to the list of people who have influenced my writing. My grandfather was a country banker in western Pennsylvania who filled me with stories of people in the region and the troubles they faced when the coal and steel industries pulled out. He showed me how hardship can make character, or break it. He helped me understand how good men could be driven to do bad things by the simple relentlessness of responsibility and arrested pride. He taught me to evaluate a person not only by his words and actions but by his history and his circumstance.
During his lifetime my grandfather never felt a need to venture outside his valley and during fifty-five years of marriage, he never felt a desire to be away from my grandmother for more than a workday. His love for her and his patch of Pennsylvania has inspired and sustained me always.
Get more resources on Back Roads, an Oprah's Book Club selection.
View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
When I was six years old I read my first Roald Dahl book, James and the Giant Peach, during summer vacation while sitting in a swing in my Great Aunt Zo's back yard. I felt I had found a kindred spirit: someone who saw the world as an absurd, often cruel, but somehow sweetly hopeful place. I read all of his books and felt inspired to write. By the time I was eight I'd written a stack of my own short stories.
When I was ten, To Kill a Mockingbird changed me forever. I read it four times in a row, unwilling and unable to leave the characters and that place. Harper Lee started a lifelong love of southern writers for me: Truman Capote, William Styron, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and probably the author I admire most, Flannery O'Connor.
The southern writer's strong love of place and language and legacy is something I share.
In high school and college, I discovered J.D. Salinger, Nathaniel West, and James Joyce who, along with Flannery O'Connor, are the authors who have had the most impact on what I try to bring to my own writing.
The Catcher in the Rye, The Day of the Locust, The Dubliners, and A Good Man is Hard to Find are novels and short story collections I reread almost every year.
What all four of these authors do brilliantly is bring significance to the insignificant. They take misfits and regular folk and make them intriguing. They take trivial, everyday actions and make them important. They take the most unpleasant character and make him someone a reader can understand even if the reader can never excuse him.
Their ability to condemn while showing compassion, to admire characters they pity, to blend hilarity and suffering are the guideposts for my own writing.
A few other authors whose novels have made great impressions on me are Robert Penn Warren and the lyricism of All the King's Men; Kazuo Ishiguro and the restrained perfection of The Remains of the Day; Emily Bronte and the tortured psyches bound to a tortured place in Wuthering Heights; Patrick McCabe and the likable horror of The Butcher Boy.
I also believe, though, that a writer is influenced by more than just other writers.
Every writer has a world they portray best but before they can begin to write about it they have to feel for it. They have to possess the passion and empathy to capture a place, a culture, a people with an honest completeness. A writer needs to have not only an understanding of the world she writes about but a very real place within it.
Keeping that in mind, I have to add my late grandfather, H.E. Burkett, to the list of people who have influenced my writing. My grandfather was a country banker in western Pennsylvania who filled me with stories of people in the region and the troubles they faced when the coal and steel industries pulled out. He showed me how hardship can make character, or break it. He helped me understand how good men could be driven to do bad things by the simple relentlessness of responsibility and arrested pride. He taught me to evaluate a person not only by his words and actions but by his history and his circumstance.
During his lifetime my grandfather never felt a need to venture outside his valley and during fifty-five years of marriage, he never felt a desire to be away from my grandmother for more than a workday. His love for her and his patch of Pennsylvania has inspired and sustained me always.
Get more resources on Back Roads, an Oprah's Book Club selection.View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
Published 05/26/2000
