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

CHRIS ADRIAN

© Gus Eliot

NELLIE HERMANN: Why do we write?

It’s an age-old question, one with a million answers and the whole weight of human history behind it, one that each of us answers for ourselves, perhaps in our work, perhaps in the depths of our solitary nights. Libraries have shelves of tomes of aesthetic theory that attempt to answer it, and many anthologies and MFA program symposiums attempt it too. As with all of our most difficult questions, it is so complex to answer, so deeply unsayable, in many instances, that it is perhaps most often not asked and not answered at all.

In my day job, I teach creative writing to health care practitioners and other folks who may not practice it in their daily lives. I encourage those who are not used to exercising their imagination to try out their muscles, to embark on the creative process and see where it takes them—to use the imagination as a tool towards understanding, to exhibit and unleash its powers for processing questions and unimaginable things. I have learned that the average person feels uncomfortable with the notion of being “creative,” thinking that it is something foreign, when in fact they are creative in a million ways every day. How does a physician or a nurse wrestle with the awful truths of body and soul that they confront daily? However s/he does it, there is creativity in that wrestling, I guarantee. I tell them: this is why we write. Caregivers and patients alike, this wrestling is what it is for.

Chris Adrian makes plain the wrestling—his work says all that I’ve ever struggled to say in the classroom, and without directly addressing any of it at all. His work says: of course we wrestle, for wrestling is the moral, and the mortal, thing to do. If we stop wrestling with the world we are dead. His work does what all good writing should do, which is to answer the questions we didn’t know we were asking, and to answer them in such a way that the work is the answer, beyond the need for any other words. A boy is troubled by the death of his brother, and so by the death of everyone, and grows up...