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

ANN PATCHETT

 © Francesca Rheannon

MARY BETH KEANE: The first time I read Bel Canto was for pleasure. I picked it up at a bookstore and likedthe first page. I didn’t know a thing about opera—  still don’t—but I quicklylearned that my ignorance didn’t matter. I read Bel Canto the second time to figure out how in the world Patchett pulls off such a perfect book given the limitations she set for herself. Virtually the entire story takes place in a single room. People cross thatroom, and cross again. They eat. They sleep. There’s very little flashback. Anyaction had to be plotted within those walls, with big moments—the momentsthat must move a novel—captured by small triumphs. And she pulls it off!Within that small space—the Vice President’s home—is contained passion,romance, hope, despair, everything a novel needs in order to be great. And this
novel is great. Whenever I’m frustrated with my own progress, and start feeling
that my characters should do more, should see more, should move more, I think
of Bel Canto and remember that
everything I need is contained within, not without.

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS

© Granta.com 

NICHOLAS MONTEMARANO: I came to Black
Tickets when I was twenty-five and about to head to Prague to take a
workshop with Jayne Anne Phillips. By then she had published four books—two
novels and two short story collections—but I was unfamiliar with her work. Not
long after opening Black Tickets I
recognized its “dazzling virtuoso range” (Tillie Olsen), its “crooked beauty”
(Raymond Carver), and its “knockout prose” (Annie Dillard), a rare case when
hyperbolic blurbs are accurate. It remains a seminal influence on me as a
fiction writer for many reasons, but here are two. First, Black Tickets is more than a collection of short stories; it is, in
its structure and thematic unity, very much a book. It doesn’t feel patched together but conceived. The
collection, with its rhythm of longer stories and micro fictions, hearkens
Hemingway’s In Our Time. After
reading Black Tickets, I never again
wrote short stories outside the larger vision of a book. Second, and perhaps
most important, is the voice—rather the voices...