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
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!
