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Influenced By JANUARY 21, 2015 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 ETHAN CANIN © Red Diaz BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON: Before I read Ethan Canin, I didn’t understand what was possible in a short story. I’d read the requisite Hawthorne and Poe, then plenty of Faulkner and Hemingway and even, I think, some Wharton and Dinesen. Of course these writers are important, timelessly so, but their stories didn’t simultaneously break and heal my heart. They didn’t liberate my imagination. They didn’t, and this is paramount, surprise me. Those classic pieces of literature made me feel like a student; I worked to find symbols and fancy themes, and the stories provided ample material. When I read Canin—specifically the story “Pitch Memory” from his magnificent first collection Emperor of the Air —I felt vulnerable, deeply and inescapably human. The story that did it for me might be called a Canin B-Side. Although “Pitch Memory” appears in his first and astonishingly good collection Emperor of the Air , it isn’t a story people usually cite when they laud Canin’s work. They tend to focus on “The Year of Getting to Know Us” and “Emperor of the Air”; they talk about the glorious novellas that make up The Palace Thief ; and they talk about his affecting novels like Carry Me Across the Water and America America. I admire all of his fiction, and I’ve read most everything at least twice, but for me it all comes back to the exquisite little story in which a woman returns home for Thanksgiving and discovers that her mother is stealing again. In “Pitch Memory,“ as in most of Canin’s fiction, there is a revelation on just about every page. These feel neither engineered nor sentimental; rather, they are inevitable, essential to the characters. And there are other hallmarks of Canin’s fiction at play in the story: the clean and incisive prose; the attention to the passage of time, how the past forms and informs the future; the seamless narration, the profoundly humane lens through which the story is perceived; the way minor trespasses reveal our deepest wounds, the way our infractions betray our various losses and fears; the satisfying structure and the emotion that upholds the architecture; the way the revelations feel so inevitable and authentic that you sense they must have surprised the author, too, that they were born of purest empathy. But all of this is the language of book reviews and workshops. Here’s what I want to say: I remember that the story made me want to write. I remember marveling at how a story so short could contain such multitudes of emotion. I remember recognizing the characters’ hearts, their longing and coping, their brief hopes for solace. I remember scribbling down the author’s name with a plan to scour bookstores and libraries for more of his work. I remember needing to be somewhere—to my job, actually—but instead of leaving, I flipped back to the first page of the story and read it again. So I was wrong earlier. Reading Ethan Canin didn’t show me what a short story—what fiction—can do. Reading Ethan Canin showed me what it must do. STUART NADLER: I’d read Ethan Canin’s short stories years before I ever thought of getting an MFA, and certainly before I’d tried to go to Iowa. I can remember vividly the feeling of reading the first two stories in Emperor of the Air, both of which use similar devices of putting their narrators into the position of hiding out in the story. In Emperor of the Air , the narrator’s gone out to hide in his neighbor’s tree. “In The Year of Getting to Know Us,” which is my favorite story of his, and which I go back to, over and over, the narrator, as a teenager, has stowed away in his father’s Cadillac as his father goes to meet his mistress. As a reader, there was the sense of anticipation that I’d remembered when I was young: that urgent need to know what happens next. When that happens in literary fiction, you’re either allowing yourself to be manipulated, or you’re in the hands of a terrific writer. Or, if you’re lucky, both. He was my first workshop professor, and I suppose, saw something in my work that I didn’t, or that I’d hoped was there but wasn’t yet. There isn’t really much to learn in an MFA aside from learning how to keep working, which is an act of faith more than an article of craft. Ethan read everything I wrote those two years in Iowa, and was tough with me when the work was terrible, and complimentary enough when the work was decent, and I needed, simply, the illusion of progress to keep going. This is what a young writer needs. His work, though––those two collections of stories––held up, even as I got to know him. He was always emphasizing structure: the idea that structure was the core element to a good story, the place to focus one’s energy, both during the act of writing, and in revision. It’s where I spend the most of time now. Fussing over plot and point of view and pacing––all of these elements that had first gripped me in his writing, and which, when he was reading my writing, he forced me to confront. ANNA SOLOMON: I remember gasping the first time I came to the end of “Batorsag and Szerelem,” a deceptively slight novella by Ethan Canin. This wasn’t a quick gasp, of mere surprise, but a deep, life-affirming inhale I felt in my bones. As a human being, I shuddered; as an aspiring writer, I wanted to cheer. What a completely unexpected yet entirely right (and by right I mean true) ending to this story! How did I not see it coming? How, once it came, did I feel as if I’d known it all along? What was Canin doing to manipulate his characters, his plot, his pacing, and me (!) with such precision? Lucky for me, I had a chance to find out when I took a Novella Workshop with Canin at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Not that he broke it all down for us––one can’t, with a really good work of fiction. But more than some of my other teachers, who had other, also helpful, more ethereal feedback to offer, Canin really treated writing as a craft. I still think of him describing the “clothesline” that must run through the center of any story– –if it’s taut enough, he would say (and I say to my students now), you can hang anything off it. He offered tips and tricks and concrete instruction, and though some students and teachers of writing shy away from this sort of “prescriptive” advice, I found it not only helpful but comforting, as well. While some parts of fiction writing (a strong imagination, for instance, or a feel for language) are largely instinctual, there are other elements (structure and plot chief among them) that many of us want––and need—to be taught. Acknowledging that writing is a craft as well as an art is, at least in some circles, a bold stance, but those teachers who take it provide many of us with a critical foundation for the stories we hope to tell. In this way, I’m indebted to Canin for his teaching, and his work. URBAN WAITE: In many ways I owe Ethan Canin my career. I was twenty-four or twenty-five when I first read his story “Emperor of the Air.” At the time I was a writer but I wouldn’t have called myself that. I was just a young kid who liked to write. It was a pastime to me—something I did in my spare time, as casual as going to the park to sit in the sun, or grab a beer with a friend. Like most great pieces of writing Canin’s story opened up something in me. I can remember finishing “Emperor of the Air” and simply sitting with it. The collection by the same name closed in my hands. I was running the themes around in my head. I was thinking about the dialogue and the characters. I was for the first time in a long time completely in awe of a piece of writing. I think on it now and I feel as if I closed Canin’s collection and in the same moment opened the pages on the rest of my life. Writing—reading—trying to get the details of a life down on paper, and in many ways live up to what I hoped someday to be: a writer like Ethan Canin—a writer who stirs something to life inside his readers. PETER CAREY © Flora Hanitijo KEVIN BROCKMEIER: I begin to recognize myself in my reading choices around age nineteen, when I discovered Peter Carey’s story collection The Fat Man in History by chance the summer after my freshman year of college.
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