Influenced by

A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers

Listening to writers read and discuss their work at Newtonville Books, the bookstore my wife and I own outside Boston, I began to wonder which living, contemporary writers held the most influence over their work. This survey is not meant to be comprehensive, but is the result of my posing the question to as many writers as I could ask.

—Jaime Clarke

WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

© Kent Lacin

KIM ADDONIZIO: I know William T. Vollmann’s work only through a fewstartling stories and a very short novel. That’s my Vollmann, though for othersit may be his long, ambitious (is there any other adjective for fatnovels?) books that come to mind—The Atlas,The Ice-Shirt, The Royal Family. I did buy TheRoyal Family, a 774-page doorstop of a book, and it sits on my shelf still.I confess to never having read it past the first thirty or so pages. I would have
read more, if it had been, say, 374 pages, but I knew I was doomed to defeat,
so I stopped. And anyway, with writers who trigger my own work, I tend to put
them aside to get something down myself. Vollmann was a trigger sort of writer
for me. The short novel, Whores for
Gloria, is a vivid, grimy little slice of the Tenderloin district in San
Francisco, a neighborhood of whores, pimps, refugees, drinkers and drug dealers
and addicts, transvestites, and the vulnerable elderly. It’s a world Vollmann
knew well, and like other worlds—that of San Francisco skinheads, say, included
in The Rainbow Stories—he was embedded there. He worked like a journalist,
which he also was, and is. When I was writing My Dreams Out in the Street, a
novel set in the Tenderloin, he read a rough draft of the opening pages as a
favor, being the friend of a friend, and suggested that I spend the night in
Golden Gate Park (my main character was a homeless woman). He also suggested I
stay in a res hotel, and offered to stay with me. This might sound calculating,
but I’m sure it was genuine. He was just that kind of writer. Now I wish I’d
taken him up on it. Instead, I spent time with his work, absorbing the style of
his sentences, and my novel was the better for it.

TIM HORVATH: In one section of his sprawling, sui generis,
palindromic slab, The Atlas, “Outside and Inside,” William T. Vollmann
writes about one of its less extreme, more mundane locales—Berkeley,
California, in 1992. He sets the scene thus:

“Outside the vast...