Intro
Wherein Michael A. Ferro regales us with tales of reading anti-plotter David Foster Wallace. Chris Campanioni makes up words (a tactic I hold in high esteem) as he discusses everything from digestion to the nature of possibilities. Poet, editor, and award-nominated thriller writer Erica Wright talks about Flannery O’Connor. Timmy Reed goes all in with John Gardner, both his theories and his monsters. Genevieve Hudson gives us a beautiful take on why Dorothy Allison is so meaningful to her. Last, and first, as it turns out, Chaya Bhuvaneswar invokes both prose witchery and decidedly nonwestern mythical archetypes in her appreciation of Louise Erdrich. Read, please…
Louise Erdrich
by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
Whenever I sit down to write, I am influenced by the Louise Erdrich of Tracks – uncompromising, bewitching, and with the character of Fleur Pillager, building a new archetype of motherhood from stories that glory in their non-Western, indigenous origin. Her prose is unapologetic, emotionally-charged, dark and vibrant, truly gripping yet true to her particularity – no glossary, no historical footnotes, no “mediating” character who like a mythical Squanto forms some bridge to the whites. Nothing turns the reader’s gaze away from the evil of genocide, both in its sudden, vindictive steps, and in the slow crushing of hope across generations.
Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, The Millions, Joyland, Largehearted Boy, Chattahoochee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, sidereal, Natural Bridge, apt magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. She is a MacDowell Fellow, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection prize under which her debut collection White Dancing Elephants will be released on October 9, 2018. Twitter: @chayab77.
David Foster Wallace
by Michael A. Ferro
I read David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, before I read Infinite Jest. One thing was clear to me in reading Wallace’s debut: the power of the MacGuffin in literary fiction. Though he’s more well-known for the elusive “entertainment” in Jest, it’s the meandering search for the missing great-grandmother in Broom and how quickly it becomes irrelevant to the book’s true soul that flabbergasted me. Wallace’s audacious choice to convey the more engrossing story of Lenore’s mid-midlife crisis through arguments of linguistic logic and tragic satire, while allowing the “great-grandmother plot” to fall into the background, impressed the hell out of me. Sure, plots are sexy, but there’s something intoxicating about a writer that commands your attention with ideas and substance alone.
Michael A. Ferro’s debut novel, Title 13, was published by Harvard Square Editions in February 2018. He has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award, won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Michael’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Born and bred in Detroit, Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional information can be found at www.michaelaferro.com and @MichaelFerro.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
by Chris Campanioni
When I read Guillermo Cabrera Infante I not only saw myself in a writer but heard his voice as my own. It wasn’t just Cabrera Infante’s voice that I recognized but the tenor and pitch; the form of voice and how it became a reaction to a cultural displacement we shared among the Cuban diaspora: equal parts excess and assemblage—something I call language dosplacement; the multiple infinitive iterations of a single word, character, scene, story. Language is a banquet where, as Cubans say, everything goes through the mouth—se la comió!—and comes out through the assay, an attempt to expand or enlarge a text before the text converges back upon itself, each part re-formed and re-fashioned to create a utopia that has no location but the location of the text: the possibility of excess, yes; but also an excess of possibilities.
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of the Internet is for real (C&R Press). His “Billboards” poem that responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable—and often muted—identity in the fashion world was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. A year earlier, he adapted his award-winning course, “Identity, Image, & Intimacy in the Age of the Internet,” for his first TEDx Talk. He edits PANK, At Large, and Tupelo Quarterly and teaches Latino literature and creative writing at Baruch College and Pace University.
Flannery O’Connor
by Erica Wright
When I arrived in New York City at eighteen, I was brutally homesick, and an observant grad student teaching my creative writing course (Hi, Greg Pardlo!) introduced me to Flannery O’Connor. He suggested I start with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and my young mind exploded at the sheer talent and audacity on display in those pages. While I would put the music of O’Connor’s writing up against anyone’s, I like that something happens in her work. There’s momentum, almost as if the stories are hurtling forward, aware somehow that this great artist wouldn’t live to see forty.
Erica Wright‘s latest crime novel is The Blue Kingfisher. Her debut The Red Chameleon was one of O Magazine’s Best Books of Summer 2014. Her follow-up The Granite Moth was a 2016 Silver Falchion Award Finalist. She is also the author of two poetry collections, Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned. She is a senior editor at Guernica as well as a former editorial board member for Alice James Books. She grew up in Wartrace, TN and now lives in Washington, DC.
John Gardner
by Timmy Reed
I never met John Gardner. (He was dead by the time I got here.) I don’t even write books that particularly resemble his, but Gardner’s my literary hero all the same. It’s about dreams really, his thought of fiction being a continuous dream in the reader’s mind (from On Becoming a Novelist) is something I keep with me always. And then there is Grendel, a book I have re-read many times, in many different moods.
When I am feeling alone in a bleak world, the monster’s outlook on the absurdity of the dumb, sad, unlikely nature of life often mirrors my own. On my best days, there is the beauty of Gardner’s sentences and the humanity of his monster. Hands down, Grendel is the greatest mother-son existentialist monster story derived from an Old English epic. It’s also the only one I know.
Timmy Reed is a writer, teacher, and native of Baltimore, Maryland. Timmy is the author of the books Tell God I Don’t Exist, The Ghosts That Surrounded Them, Miraculous Fauna, Star Backwards, IRL, and Kill Me Now. In 2015, he won the Baker Artist Awards Semmes G. Walsh Award. He was again a finalist for the Baker Artist Awards in 2018. He teaches English in Baltimore and is represented by Madison Smartt Bell at Pande Literary Agency.
Dorothy Allison
by Genevieve Hudson
Cicada cries. Moon-made booze. Cows tipped by teen hands. Strange sadness. A few scenes from my Southern childhood. I hated the South and loved it. I read Faulkner, Lee, Twain and found my stories only half there. Enter Dorothy Allison. Allison writes about Southern life in a way that, when I first read it, fed a hunger I hadn’t known I had. Here was Southern queerness rendered real. Her books Trash and Skin struck me with familiarity, like catching your reflection in the passing window of a fast car. She summoned queerness from the shadows of the palmettos and onto the page and into my line of sight. She showed me that there is room in the Deep South’s canon for stories like my own.
Genevieve Hudson is the author of A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018) and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). Her writing has been published in Catapult, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and artist residencies at the Dickinson House, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She splits time between Portland, OR, and Amsterdam.
Outro
In 1907, Freud gave a now famous lecture on creative writing and daydreaming (published in 1908 in German as Der Dichter und das Phantasieren), one that applies his earlier work on dream theory to the artistic process. In that lecture, Freud likened the creative writer to an infantile egotist involved in the processing of memories and dreams into societally acceptable fictionalized fantasies. Later, Freud would write in detail about a tripartite psyche of id, ego, and super-ego; a concept that echoes his notions about creative writing and has clear application to Under the Influence.
Think of the id as Freud’s infantile egotist. The id writer is convinced he’s bound for greatness based on talent and his unique view of the world. Common not only in undergrad writing, MFA, and PhD programs, but in the segment of the DIY community that looks down on those same undergrad writing, MFA, and PhD programs, id writers can be a lot to take, especially in workshops. Fortunately, most of them move on to the next phase of the literary psyche, the ego.
The ego-stage writer knows no one springs from the ground like some literary Olympian (I’m talking Zeus, here, not Usain Bolt.), ready to lay down a few sonnets if he could stop pissing himself long enough to figure out how to use a pen. He knows that only through the acknowledgment and appreciation of work that’s already been done, over centuries and millennia, can we hope to achieve our best.
This ability to appreciate other writing worldviews is, I think, what writing programs should foster, though their failure may help to explain the low opinion of them in the DIY community. Here in Under the Influence, I hope we’re presenting a diversity of influences, shared in each contributor’s own words. I hope we’re learning what other, working writers value as we look to the (gender-neutral) masters that have gone before. Which brings us back to Freud and the third part of his psyche, the super-ego.
As far as the literary psyche is concerned, the super-ego is constructed out of legends, a mythology populated by the influences that give this column its name. Not real exactly, become as they have composites of their work more than anything else, these writers are the ideal, the aspiration, not only in our admiration for them but in the sense that they pass, in terms of their work, beyond the physical world. Whether living or dead, the influences that give this column its name have, in a sense, become text. And isn’t that what we want as writers: to transform our thoughts into text, text that will outlive us, text that will take our place when we’re gone?
