Dear Glimmer Train Readers and Writers,

From Writers Ask, on the influence of reading:

MARY GORDON, interviewed by Charlotte Templin:

How do you start a work?

I think I have an intense relationship with writers whose voices can be what I call a “tuning fork.” There’s a funny period before I really get started in a work—you know how dogs run in circles until they can figure out the exact spot where they need to lie down? I’m kind of like that until I can find the writer whose tone of voice really gets me going, and for each little project (a part of a book or a whole book or a story), I need almost to hear the tone in my ear. I have a very dependent relationship on the writers, but it’s not like I’m going to copy them, or like I can’t do something different from them. It’s like having an older sister or brother start you on the road, because the road is dark, and you don’t know where you are going. I feel like I have a very dependent—and mainly oral—relationship to the writers who have gone before.

GORDON, Mary. Novels: Pearl, Spending, Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side. Novella collection: The Rest of Life. Short-story collection: Temporary Shelter. Essays: Good Boys and Dead Girls. Biography: Joan of Arc. Memoirs: The Shadow Man, Seeing Through Places. Barnard College.

ANDREA BARRETT, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:

What drew you to writing about the events of Grosse Isle and the Irish immigrants who suffered from fever?

That was one of those strange, wonderful serendipities. Two things converged: one is that I’m a great admirer of the Irish writer William Trevor. He has a beautiful story called “The News from Ireland,” a long story, about forty pages, with multiple characters and multiple points of view, about the famine as the people on a Protestant estate in Ireland experienced it. It’s a story I teach often. I was teaching at Warren Wilson and I had a student who wanted to write her critical essay on that story. As her supervisor, I asked her to read some material about the Irish famine so that she’d have a better understanding of both how well, and how extremely economically, Trevor had managed to work the historical facts into that story. Then I had to read the same books because I didn’t know the facts either. This is what I mean about learning a lot when I’m teaching. I assigned her a couple of books, and then I read the same books, which were largely about the Irish famine in Ireland. One had a brief chapter about what happened at Grosse Isle, though, and it hit me like a hammer between the eyes. I knew I had to write about it.

BARRETT, Andrea. Novels: Lucid Stars, Middle Kingdom, The Forms of Water, Secret Harmonies. Short-story collections: Ship Fever, The Voyage of the Narwhal, Servants of the Map.

CHARLES BAXTER, interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies:

I discovered, on this Lila Wallace grant, that in all the little communities where I was going, there were many, many people who wanted to write, who wanted to have fellow writers reading their work and to help them along, and that there wasn’t a community without people like that.

Wow. That must have impressed you substantially.

It did impress me. I’d be happy to know that they were also active readers. And I couldn’t always be sure that they were. It can be worrisome if all the people you talk to who say they want to be writers also say, “I don’t read.” That’s like saying, “I’d like to be an electrician but I don’t know much about wires.”

There’s a certain stage of writing that comes out of self-involvement and narcissism. And if you’re going to become serious as a writer at all, you have to get beyond that, so that you are concentrating less on yourself and on the story, and more on the writing itself. You simply have to move yourself out of the way. Even if you’re writing a memoir. You have to think at least as much about the language as you’re thinking about your own history. You have to think about the way in which the story’s being told.

BAXTER, Charles. Novels: Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Feast of Love, First Light. Short-story collections: A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, Believers, Harmony of the World. Essays: Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction.

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:

Who are some of the writers who’ve influenced you?

A whole gamut of people. Initially, and still, most of them are writers who broke the rules in one way or another, or who made their own rules. Writers like Faulkner, Burroughs, Bruno Shultz, Flannery O’Connor, a lot of the Southern writers for their connection to the physical world, and for their enslavement to it. A lot of the central European writers, such as Kafka, for their anomie, or that almost existential separation from the world, and a lot of language-oriented writers, such as James Agee, just because language was my way into writing. Spiritually, I’m attracted to writers who seem to have gone somewhere, who’ve been to the other side, and come back to bear witness to that event, that is, writers who can represent other dimensions of being in language, like Katherine Anne Porter, William Maxwell. For instance, a story like Cheever’s The Swimmer, in which a metaphor represents a whole journey into death, compresses time almost miraculously.

PHILLIPS, Jayne Anne. Novels: Shelter, MotherKind, Machine Dreams. Short-story collections: Fast Lanes, Black Tickets. Work in Granta, Harper’s, DoubleTake, Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Brandeis University.

PAM DURBAN, interviewed by Cheryl Reid:

What about Chekhov’s work can you point to as an influence?

His point of view. His objectivity. His big, loose stories. The possibilities of the story.

His use of time is very large and sometimes very minute.

Yes. His variety. Whenever I am tired of fiction, I turn to him to refresh my ideas of what I can do.

His point of view is objective—you may not get close into the character's mind, but you get a sense—

Of who they are. And he’s willing to let them see themselves as they see themselves. I’ve also learned a lot from him about structure. What’s possible in a story. It doesn’t have to be some tight progression of actions toward epiphany. It can be much looser than that and still get somewhere and be about something, and hold some kind of shape.

DURBAN, Pam. Novels: So Far Back, The Laughing Place. Short-story collection: All Set About with Fever Trees. Work in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, New Stories of the South. University of North Carolina.

TOBIAS WOLFF, interviewed by Jim Schumock:

If someone were taking a year off to learn to write short stories...

Just a year? Make it twenty.

What stories or collections would you recommend?

Dubliners. Chekhov’s stories, as many as a person can read. Tolstoy’s Master and Man and The Death of Ivan Ilych. I would recommend a good selection of Maupassant stories. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, and In Our Time and Up in Michigan by Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories: The Rich Boy, Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Crazy Sunday, and An Alcoholic Case. Katherine Anne Porter’s stories, just about all of them. Flannery O’Connor’s stories—stories like "Parker’s Back," "Revelation," "A Good Man is Hard to Find," "Good Country People"—classics of the genre. Raymond Carver’s stories and Richard Ford’s Rock Springs. I would also recommend Dorothy Allison’s great collection Trash. It’s a much-ignored book which she drew on very heavily for Bastard Out of Carolina. I think the book of stories is the better book, myself. Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. Thom Jones’s The Pugilist at Rest and Cold Snap. Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and Lorrie Moore’s Like Life, especially the title novella. I could go on and on.

If you were to be abandoned alone in a cabin in the North Cascades for the rest of your life, and could only take along two books and one piece of music, which ones would you take?

I would die trying to choose.

WOLFF, Tobias. Novels: The Barracks Thief, Old School. Short-story collections: The Night in Question, Back in the World, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Memoirs: This Boy’s Life, In Pharaoh’s Army.

To view more complete survey results from our last Bulletin, look for Bulletin 4 at the top of the page and click the links to text and graph responses.

Cormac McCarthy would be pleased to know that his name came up a LOT! Here are a few of the authors/books on your nightstands. More.

Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach, Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter.

Good Lord, if the stack fell over in the night, it'd kill me. I keep a good chunk of my collection near the bed... maybe a hundred books looming, waiting.

Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andre Dubus. Also, really want to reread The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje (not on my nightstand yet, but will be as soon as it is published later this month)

Sight-Readings: American Fictions by Elizabeth Hardwick.

The Road, by McCarthy, then Running With Scissors, then a book by Amy Wallen.

As for all-time favorites, these authors/books sat at the top of many lists: Ernest Hemingway, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, and, nearly tied, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, To Kill a Mockingbird, William Faulkner, and Kurt Vonnegut. More.

Anything by Charles Baxter, William Trevor, Amy Hempel.

Stories: "Terrific Mother" (and almost everything else) by Lorrie Moore; "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" by George Saunders; "My Mother's Dream" (and almost everything else) by Alice Munro; "The Cemetery where Al Jolsen is Buried" by Amy Hempel; "In the Ravine" by Anton Chekhov; "Bliss" by Katherine Mansfield, etc., etc. Books: The Known World by Edward P. Jones; Pnin (and almost everything else) by Vladimir Nabokov; Emma by Jane Austen; The Secret History by Donna Tartt; Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham; East of Eden by John Steinbeck; etc., etc. Authors: Richard Powers, Dan Chaon, Zadie Smith, Maile Meloy, Mavis Gallant, Kathryn Davis, and on and on and on.

My all time favourite has always been To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I read it first when I was a teenager and has influenced my thinking every since. My sense of right and wrong were defined by this book in a way that no other book has.

David Sedaris is always a favorite to read and teach, as is Aimee Bender, and Brent Staples. Life of Pi and True History of the Kelly Gang are probably two of the best 'stories' I've read, but when asked for favorites The Bone People, The God of Small Things, and Beloved always come to my mind. Having said this, I can't forget to mention...Do you see where this is going?

Eager to get back to reading ourselves, we stopped tabulating, but the lists of what you've been enjoying recently were impressive. More.

People I Wanted to Be by Gina Oschner

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion

I recall the hours of last month where I was absolutely knocked off my feet, brought to my knees by superb writing. I lead off with Wendell Berry's The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter and a collection of five short stories, Fidelity. In a quick follow-up, knowing I'd be back to Berry in a shot, I was buried in J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, Disgrace, and Slow Man. I finished my month with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I don't know how many times I was mesmerized, but I will go back over a most significant path of personal pleasure, going right back to Wendell Berry, where one man touches perfection.

Raymond Carver - Where I'm Calling From, George Saunders - Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Henry Roth - Call it Sleep

Recitatif, by Toni Morrison

Where You’ll Find Me – Ann Beattie

We've recently accepted these stories for publication in Glimmer Train Stories (note):

• "Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass" by Thisbe Nissen
• “Hurricane Man” by Alvin Handelman
• “Rocky Gap” by Patricia Henley
• “After the Flood” by Hugh Sheehy
• “Concussions” by Kurt Rheinheimer

It’s June! We wish you a lovely one.