On Bebelplatz and 25 Most Influential Writers

Being tagged to list the twenty-five writers who have influenced me the most caused me to remember a place and time when the words of writers floated as ash into the darkened sky…

On Bebelplatz

On sunny days
on Bebelplatz,
the burning room
reflects a soft blue sky
as travelers gape to see
an empty shelf.
Ghostly volumes, dimly glimpsed
amidst the rush, reflect
faces of the curious
eager to be off
to find the next big thing.
One man, unawares,
steps hard on echoes
of the burning leaves,
while far away
under an Appalachian sky,
a child peers up
through burnished leaves
that dapple tales
of her dark knights
on sunny days,
never once in her wildest
dreams perceiving
that books may burn
or man may step on thoughts
or smoke may stain the
soft blue dreamer’s sky.


25 Most Influential Writers

When K. Lawson-Gilbert of Old Mossy Moon challenged me to list the twenty-five writers who have influenced me the most, I knew what a difficult task was before me. Deep and wide exposure to good literature has certainly influenced my thinking, which in turn, influences my writing.

As air is to breath, literature is to writing. Reading and writing for me are recursive processes: I read, I write, I read again. My own writing informs my thinking, just as my thinking informs my writing, but my thoughts have also been formed by the West Virginia hills, the people whom I love, the roads I have traveled, and the writers whose works I have inhaled my entire life long.

Narrowing this list was nearly impossible, and I apologize to all my dearly beloved authors whose names do not appear below:

William Shakespeare

Homer

Charles Dickens

William Faulkner

John Keats

Percy Bysshe Shelley

William Wordsworth

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

William Blake

Thomas Hardy

Emily Bronte

Emily Dickinson

Edgar Allan Poe

Alfred Lord Tennyson

John Steinbeck

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Gerard Manly Hopkins

John Donne

T.S. Eliot

Walt Whitman

William Blake

Virginia Woolf

Toni Morrison

E.B.White

I challenge Sarah Hina, Rachel Westfall, and Julie Buffaloe-Yoder to show us your lists!