Tim Weed and the Ecstasy of Influence

In the 10th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Tim Weed, author of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing (Green Writers Press), discusses eleven books that have inspired his writing.

Which books inspired you the most? Which authors have been your role models? I’ve been surprised by how difficult questions of influence are to answer. Even easy questions such as, “What was the best book you read in the past year?” may cause an embarrassingly long silence as I rack my brain. Putting together an accurate top-ten life list would probably take me a week of thumbing through overstuffed bookshelves—likely supplemented by visits to various online book outfits for memory-jogging summaries and reviews.

It’s just so hard to say. There are so many great works of fiction. It’s difficult to narrow the ones I’ve read down to a list of favorites—harder still to speculate about which authors have had the greatest influence over one’s work as a writer. I like the analogy of books as fossil fuel: lush vegetation trampled down in an ancient epoch only to bubble up years later in a spontaneous wellspring of newborn prose. Who can say whether that font of bubblin’ crude, that metamorphosed Texas tea, was once a royal palm or a tree fern?

Still, I’m going to give it a try. So here are eleven books that have most influenced me as a fiction writer (I tried for ten but just couldn’t squeeze 'em in):

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
• Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
• Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
• Paul Bowles, The Delicate Prey
• Mary Renault, The King Must Die
• Robert Stone, Outerbridge Reach
• Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
• Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall
• John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Looking back on these books, and thinking about the reasons they have stuck in my mind, I think of irresistible characters, high stakes, and immersive storyworlds. I think of Tolkien’s wondrous Middle Earth, of LeGuin’s bold reimagining of human sexual dynamics, and of the unforgettable sunlit intimacy of Renault’s mythohistorical vision. I think of the limpid, merciless clarity of Paul Bowles’ exotic tales, and of the storytelling genius of Robert Stone and Edith Wharton: the relentlessness of her ratcheting tension and the pitiless journeys their protagonists must undertake. I think of the profoundly affirmative versions of human consciousnesses passing through rich sensory worlds painted by Jim Harrison, John Cheever, and Larry McMurtry. And, especially with Cormac McCarthy and Peter Carey, I think of the sublime possibilities of language. Its sheer, terrible beauty.

I note somewhat sheepishly, that only two of these books are story collections (three if you include novellas). The truth is, while as both a reader and a writer I love short fiction, I’ve been more influenced by novels, possibly because the form allows for a more profound immersion in the storyworld—or, if you prefer, for a more intense and long-lasting measure of escapism. I use the latter word intending none of the negative connotations often associated with it.

The poet David Baker once said that all poetry can be divided into two categories, the ironic and the ecstatic. If we assume a continuum rather than a dichotomy, I think the same can be said of fiction. The Greek origin of the word ecstasy is “ekstasis,” meaning “to be or stand outside oneself.” Ecstasy is transcendent, implying a state of trance, vision, or dream. Irony, on the other end of the continuum, is social, worldly, and rooted in the intellect. Irony is essential in literature of course, as an antidote to sentimentality. But for me, the best-remembered fiction—the work that sticks with me long after I’ve put it down—is to be found on the ecstatic end of the continuum. The kind of story where one forgets all about those black marks on the page and enters the narrative as one would enter a trance, a vision, or a dream.

At various times and in various ways, all of these authors have done that for me. It is a gift for which I owe them a lifetime of gratitude. And I hold out the cautious hope that I can, therefore, claim them as influences.

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Mark Brazaitis on Influences, Conscious and Not

In the 46th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables (University of Notre Dame Press), discusses the influences he—and others—have seen in his work.

I have never been good at detecting the influences on my writing. It’s not that I don’t accept that I have been influenced by other writers; it’s that I can’t recognize where and how I’ve been influenced.

Sometimes I feel like my older daughter did when she was three years old and went Trick-or-Treating as an apple. Upon opening their doors, people cooed, “What a cute tomato!”

“I am not a tomato!” she insisted.

I would like to think my writing is always dressed up to look like Mark Brazaitis (earthy if elegant, accessible if subtle). But sometimes I notice when I’ve put on another author’s gloves or scarf or basketball shoes. Or I think I do.

After reading my short story “Gemelas,” about Guatemalan twin girls and the parallel lives they live even after one of them dies, the poet Gillian Conoley said to me, “I detect a Kafka influence.” This stunned me. (I am not a tomato!) If anything, I was sure that in “Gemelas” I was guilty of swiping Gabriel García Márquez’s guayabera and Panama hat.

But without knowing my reading history, Gillian had discerned one of my favorite writers, someone I read obsessively when I was younger and still read (and teach) today. If I had been asked to list the authors who influenced “Gemelas,” however, Franz Kafka wouldn’t have appeared in my top 100. In retrospect, however, he should have been in my top five. (The story is dark, labyrinthine, fatalistic—Pandora would have nailed the influence instantly.) As for García Márquez, as much as I love him, the most “Gemelas” has in common with his great work is a Latin American setting.

A decade ago at the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, I read the opening of my novella “Bathwater.” A member of the audience approached me afterwards to say, “I heard an Edgar Allan Poe riff, a ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ vibe, in your story.” Like Poe’s narrator, I thought, you’re out of your mind. But when I reread “The Tell-Tale Heart” the next day, I nodded at its rhythmic similarities to passages in my novella. Prior to this, it had been years since I’d read Poe’s story, but his mad narrator evidently had been camping in my brain, waiting his chance to whisper into my words.

Reviewers of my books have been remarkably accurate in pinpointing my literary lineage. I was sure one reviewer missed the mark, however, when he detected a Raymond Chandler sway over my prose. Then I remembered the hard-boiled summer between my junior and senior years in college when I said hello to Farewell, My Lovely and every other Chandler novel I could find.

I could guess the literary influences behind the ten stories in The Incurables. Kafka might be on the scene of “The Bridge,” observing its mysterious, unnerving suicide epidemic. Jane Austen might have touched “This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town” with her sense of courtship’s comic awkwardness, although by its end, she surely has given way to Richard Wright or Toni Morrison or William Faulkner. There’s a little of John Updike’s frankness about sex in the title story, but its ending jumps off the page and onto the screen. It’s Vertigo’s finale rewritten! Maybe!

I can state this with certainty: The biggest influence on my fiction is my life. In the case of The Incurables, I wish it were otherwise. The protagonists in my collection contend with mental illness—its humiliations, its paralyzing power, its rare moments of levity—as I have. In this, I—we—are not alone. In any given year, 14.8 million adults, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population 18 and over, suffer from major depressive disorder. Other millions endure a range of mental illnesses, from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. Ninety percent of people who commit suicide suffer from a mental illness.

If I didn’t know mental illness up close and personal, I never would have written The Incurables; I certainly wouldn’t have felt free to write the stories the way I did, in equal portions of black humor and sympathy. If William Styron and Kay Redfield Jamison, the authors of extraordinary memoirs about their experiences with, respectively, clinical depression and bipolar disorder, provided me in their work the courage to write honestly and unsentimentally about mental illness, Nikolai Gogol and Samuel Beckett and Lorrie Moore gave me permission to use comedy to explore dark subjects.

Did the above authors actually influence the stories in The Incurables?

Your guess is as good as—no, it’s better than—mine.