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

KATHRYN DAVIS

© Emma Dodge Hanson

MAUD CASEY: With Kathryn Davis there’s a wonderfully strange, smart sensibility at work—hers is roving and odd, too, mystical even. In The Thin Place, everything—dogs, the cosmos, people, nature—gets its due, is given equal attention. But the influence her work has had is even more specific than that. Her novel Versailles was a big part of how I began thinking about the *range* of historical fiction and, in particular, the sort of historical fiction that imagines its way into the gaps, wedges its way into the history we know and cracks it open. Here, Davis imagines her way into Marie Antoinette’s soul, for god’s sake! And so springs her from her corset of facts. I was—am—amazed by the daring of that book, but also by its careful, deliberate attention to the facts. That novel enters into a conversation with the facts, and in the end, the novel says: there is more to our lives than just the facts. But the facts—all the incredibly intricate, beautiful details Davis has clearly researched about Versailles itself—are crucial to this vision. The facts juxtaposed with the soul that eludes the anchoring impulse of facts. That novel was a big part of how I found my way into the novel I am finally (!) finishing. Davis’ boldness in general has had an important influence on my recent development as a writer, I’d say. I mean, one is always, like it or not, kicking and screaming, developing as a writer. Davis has an amazing sense of architecture in her novels as well. Every work invents the novel all over again. Hell, for example, with its three weird households juxtaposed and circling one another—a dollhouse, a 1950s family, and the cottage of a nineteenth-century expert on domestic management. There’s a lot of artifice but everything—a la the Julian of Norwich mystical thread in The Thin Place—is alive.

DAWN TRIPP: Kathryn Davis kicks all the windows open. That was the thought I couldn’t shake when I discovered her work. Nearly fifteen years ago, a close friend pressed her copy of The Walking Tour into my hands and said, “This book will say something to you.” I was writing my own first novel when I...