My Influences

In the very first blog post for this site, I answered the question “who am I?” So, I thought that rather than writing an “About me” page, I’d share my literary journey.

The earliest book I remember becoming deeply attached to and allowing to alter my relationship with the world is The Velveteen Rabbit. All my toys were real after that book, and I still have my childhood copy. Corduroy only deepened this conviction that my toys had rich personal lives. (Jim Henson’s “The Christmas Toy” is also a major contributor, but that’s not book.)

My desire to collect and horde books can be traced to my best friend having more Berenstain Bears books than I did. I wanted to own all the books pictured on the back cover. I am proud to announce that, as a parent, I have successfully fulfilled that ambition! I have not collected all the books, but all the ones that were available when I was kid. We have close to fifty, and I’m still collecting.

The first book with characters I fell in love with was The Secret Garden. Oh how I loved Dicken. I’ll be honest, I wanted to be Dickon. I wanted the secret garden, sure, but I wanted the moor and the animals more. And, well, Mary’s loneliness was something I understood. I just didn’t have a rich uncle with a hundred rooms for me to explore.

Then, when I was in fourth grade, I found a book in the school library. I knew nothing about it. The only reason I borrowed it was because I’d read all the books I did know about, and this one had a purple cloth cover. It was Pollyanna. I fell in love. I knew I wasn’t her. I couldn’t be her. I could never achieve that level of circumspect optimism or make friends that easily, but I could try. It took me so very long to find a copy of that edition as an adult, but I did it! A few years ago, I acquired my beloved edition of Pollyanna.

Next was The Mixed up Files of Miss Basil E Frankweiler. I read it in fifth grade, I think, and oh, I was so jealous. I wanted to runaway and live in a museum like they did. I wanted to meet a wonderful old woman who would take an interest in me and make my life interesting. It was another example of how a book can just…reach you.

The next several books all became a part of my life somewhere in late childhood. I don’t know what order, but the effects were profound.

My dad had started reading The Hobbit as a bedtime story a few times when I was little, but we always got distracted, so I decided, since I was old enough, I would just read it myself. It was glorious. Smaug. Bard. The little bird. This might have been the start of my preoccupation with supporting characters and small details…

My mom introduced me to the Anne of Green Gables series. I loved Anne. Much like Pollyanna, I knew that I could never be her, but I loved her. I loved her adventures, and I loved that I got to with her. Her little neighbor Elizabeth. The little girl that felt like a Beth some days, a Liza on others, but never Lizzy. It made me love my own name, my middle name, anyway, and wish I could go by it instead of my first name. (As soon as I was away from home, that’s exactly what I did.) And then, oh, and then I got to the last two books in the series. I may never have been able to identify with Anne, only dream of being her friend, but her son…Walter. Oh, I felt Walter.

And I escaped to Pern with Menolly. The Harper Hall trilogy gave me somewhere I could run away to. And I ran to Pern over and over. Thank you Miss McCaffrey, from the bottom of my heart.

And I read Little Women. Maybe for school, maybe because my mom gave it to me, but Jo. And Amy. And the need to just keep doing what was right when it was hard. And no, I never felt bad for Laurie. I loved Professor Bhaer. I felt Laurie and Jo ended up with the people they needed. I read the whole trilogy. And yes, I’ve learned as an adult how Louisa May Alcott felt about the books, but I don’t think it takes away from them at all. I think it just speaks to her talent. (Perhaps it was pandering, hackish writing meant to sell, but does anyone believe, had he been convinced to write for profit, Tolkien would have been able to exclude or disguise his convictions and passion? I posit that neither could Alcott. And I think the number of film adaptations alone speaks to heart in the writing, and its complexity and subtlety, each taking a different point of view, each emphasizing a different theme. I also suspect Greta Gerwig’s adaptation presents it from pov Alcott herself would truly appreciate.)

Then I started to grow. I started to understand that books were more than just new friends, new families, new lives to live and worlds to escape to. I started to understand they could mean something.

We read The Giver in school. It sits with me.

We read To Kill a Mockingbird. It sits with me.

I learned about satire. I read Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce. I read H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. I read Fahrenheit 451 , (which got me into Bradbury, which got me into Sci-fi the way The Hobbit got me into fantasy). My dad handed me a book called Erewhon and warned me, “It starts out slow, but it’s worth it. Keep with it.” I did, and he was right. It was worth it. It taught me that narrator can tell a different story than the author.

A friend of mine made me promise to read Ender’s Game, and I did. And I read the rest of the series. And I read the Shadow series. The philosophy in these books, the imagery…

I read The Lord of the Rings and loved it even more than The Hobbit, but only because there was more to love. Radagast, Bombadil, Fangorn, Faramir and Eowyn. Frodo’s dream of the grey havens, and the crown of flowers growing of the fallen statue of a king. (Mostly Faramir and Eowyn though, I could do a lecture series…)

A friend of mine wanted me to see this movie she’d found in which, no really, it’s true, Alan Rickman played a good guy. A fall in love with him kind of guy. So we watched Sense and Sensibility. I was a little angry. Why hadn’t anyone told me Jane Austen was a thing? (You can keep Emma, though I’m glad I read it once, but I love Mansfield Park. I’m that kind of Austen fan.)

I wrote my eleventh grade English paper on Catch-22. I adore this book as much as I adore E. E. Cummings. The structure. The absurdity. The heart. (The anger.)

The only other kid in the class writing a paper on a book that wasn’t one of the listed examples was reading Foundation. I read Foundation as soon as I was done with my paper. Then I read the rest of the trilogy. Then I read the rest of the expanded series. Then I read the Robot novels. Then, because the Empire novels were harder to find, I read as many short stories by Asimov as I could.

I read Peter Pan in college and couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it earlier. I read Narnia late, and was amazed that it had slipped by me. (I then read the Space Trilogy and told everyone who would listen that they should read it, too.) Somewhere in here I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. About six months after the first movie came out, my husband handed me Harry Potter, and I became one of the fans counting down to the next book releases. (We can have a conversation about enjoying the ideas in a flawed execution if we must, but to be honest, sometimes I think the best literary conversations are about an authors weaknesses. Also, this is my history, not a vote of support for an author who, at the time, I knew nothing of as a person and have since learned to avoid.) I don’t even know how, but I came across The Firekeeper sage by Jane Lindskold. I hope you’ve heard of it. Frankenstein, and Dracula. One Hundred Years of Solitude.

These books made me think. These books made me dream. These books taught me things. Things about life. Things about books (they don’t have to be perfect to be good, they can look like so many different things, they can be so many different things!)

And then. And then. And then a friend picked up Good Omens. It got passed around the whole lot of us. I’d heard of Terry Pratchett, been meaning to get around to his books, but that Neil Gaiman guy? Who was he? But the book was good. And my husband’s father had a book by that Gaiman guy on his shelf, something called American Gods, and we like mythology…and it was good. And Stardust was being made into a movie, and it looked good, and my husband thought Neverwhere sounded like something I’d like. And Neverwhere…that book is special. And then there was that movie on my shelf, that movie a friend had given me for my birthday two years before that looked…strange, and, I mean, his taste was questionable…but I checked, and it was by Gaiman. So I finally got around to watching it. And, really, if you haven’t, go watch Mirrormask. Even if the art style isn’t your favorite.

I had never been able to say who my favorite author was, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, it became undeniable that it was Neil Gaiman. I wish I could have an imagination quite as free as his the same way I wish I could be like Pollyanna or Anne, but at the same time, somehow, he set me free to be me. I don’t have to fit into a mold. I don’t have to follow the precepts of a genre or style. I can just…write. I can find my own voice. I’ll forever be grateful for that, even if he did turn out to be someone who, rather than healing from his wounds, turns around and hurts others. (I never expected him to be perfect, kind of expected him to be a bit of an entitled jerk, but damn.)

Since then, I’ve found Erin Morgenstern, and oh my, the surreal beauty in her writing makes me so jealous. I’ve gotten into Rick Riordan with my oldest. I found Howl’s Moving Castle, better late than never.

And books continue to make an impact. New books. Classics I finally get around to reading. The Hunger Games. The Maze Runner. The Last Unicorn. The Chronicles of Prydain.

But books aren’t the only stories we consume. The X-files is probably the first television show I was a fan of, but then there was Sliders, and I was off to new worlds with the show and on my own. The Ray Bradbury Hour was as wonderful as his print stories. I longed to step through the stargate. I loved Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing, this strange little Canadian show called The Odyssey (it has Ryan Reynolds and Jewell Staite in it as kids!) I loved Gilmore Girls, and Supernatural. Buffy, Firefly, Dollhouse. I loved Trigun andOutlaw Star. Merlin, Doctor Who, Leverage, West Wing. I really can’t list them all. And that doesn’t even touch the movies, of which I just have to say: Sabrina, Ever After, 10 Things I hate About You, and Penelope. STORIES.

This is not an exhaustive list, by any means. It doesn’t get into poetry. These are just the books and stories that sank deep, that sit with me still and always will, that are dear.