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

RICHARD FORD

©  Eamonn Mccabe

KATHLEEN ALCOTT: I nurture quite a fondness for Richard Ford. He writes the stillness of American life in a way many try to but few actually achieve: he can describe an economically depressed airport bar or stretch of highway so well that the scenes feel like memories being systematically implanted in my brain. Much has been written about the staleness of lyrical realism such as his, but I will defend Ford until I die. Writing like that takes the patience of a saint, and patience is the foundation of any great work. Joy Williams, who occupies another plane entirely, is an inspiration because her work feels like it lives entirely without influence. Emotional truths exist alongside occasional physical absurdities in between extreme discursions—and still she is totally in control.

LAUREN GRODSTEIN: Richard Ford’s Independence Day and The Sportswriter were sitting on my desk, getting read and reread, as I wrote A Friend of the Family. Like Ford’s books, Friend is an intensely first-person exploration of middle-aged malehood. It’s very talky, very ruminative. Whenever I felt at sea with my own novel, I read a few random pages from either of those books and let the voice of Frank Bascombe, Ford’s cranky, regretful narrator, lead me forward.

JOSH WEIL: I’d have to say the greatest influence on me and work at this moment is Richard Ford. That’s because, a few months ago, I read his collection Rock Springs for the first time. And, in each story, I was struck—as I am by the work that moves me most—by an inability to see at first exactly how it works. There’s such a naturalness to the way the events follow each other that they don’t feel planned. There’s an almost uncanny verisimilitude to the way the characters speak; the dialogue feels as real as any I’ve ever read. And, perhaps even more baffling and impressive, the thoughts of the characters feel to me as real as any I could ever know. Baffling because, at the same time, I am always aware of the craft, the skill that’s gone into shaping each of these things. To pull that off—making what’s on the page feel...