Influential Reading

I’m about halfway through Alice Sebold’s memoir, Lucky. This is where she has returned back to university in Syracuse and has bonded with her poetry professor. As happens whenever I read books that feature poets, it makes me want to write poetry.

The same thing happens whenever I read The Woodwife, by Terri Windling. The Woodwife is a contemporary fantasy about a poet who’s trying to solve the mystery of the death of another poet. It never fails to make me yearn to simplify my life and live out in a cabin in the wilderness and write poetry.

That being said, while I find I get the urge to write poetry when reading about poets, this does not hold true for the rest of my writing. When I’m writing fiction, I do not read the type of books I’m trying to write. For example, if I’m writing about shapeshifters, then I read everything but shapeshifter books.

This could be why I’ve never had the urge to write about vampires. I read so many vampire books that I never have the chance to start thinking creatively about them. Besides, there’s already so many good vampire books out there that I think you’d have to come up with something pretty spectacular to break into the field.