meme

[rm]

The problem with Livejournal is that we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. Hence, I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Then post this in your LJ (if you want to) and find out what people don’t know about you.

Okay, I loathe the wording the meme, but I'm at work (waaaah), and people have been asking questions lately that I've now lost track of where they were to answer (someone asked about perfume a few days ago, that sticks in my mind). So if you're so inclined, have at.

Comments

[podle.livejournal.com]

I have admired your writing for quite some time now. I am particularly impressed by the quality of vulnerability and openess without cynicism. I would love to know what writers you are influenced by and enjoy (giant question, I know) and when you began writing about your life.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I never really had a choice about beginning my writing life. I had two hour essay examinations in every school subject but mathematics by the time I was ten. I was required to take Latin, studied speeches by Cicero, so for as fucked up as my educational environment was, I learned to be very persuasive from a very young age -- which is sort of twisted in its own right. Who wants a ten-year-old who can argue like that?

I think the first short story I wrote down was in third grade, for a class. I don't really remember it, although there was a unicorn in it. In high school I wrote a novel (by hand!) about a boy I had a crush on.

Mostly though, I only did academic writing until I got on the Internet, and then I would talk about my life on this BBS I was on. And people hated me for it -- I was boring, I was pretentious, HOW FUCKING DARE I? and god, I'd cringe at huge swathes of that stuff (lost to the ether) now I'm sure, but that's how I learned to tell my story. I'm always writing with the idea of speech-making in mind. It's all written for the ear.

My mom read a lot of biographies when I was a kid, and read them aloud to me sometimes, so that's a lot of how I learned about this idea of just telling the stories of a life.

Oscar Wilde was a huge influence on me growing up. Not Dorian Grey so much, but the plays, that reflected something of the weird social status I grew up in, and also his essays and letters.

Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat was really important to me as a writer, because it was the first time anything had ever said to me that it was all right that the world felt so grand to me. I was allowed to say it. So that gave me a lot of freedom.

Robert Olen Butler, whose work I can barely look at now, has a wonderful sorrowful cadence to his work, that really helped me hone a natural tendency in my own stuff.

Steve Erickson really helped validate my impulse to write in a circular way and to focus on serendipity. His density of language, his sorrow, and his unrepentant mixing of fact/fiction and true/real has also been huge for me -- he has conversations with Sally Hemmings in his non-fiction political work; he is a character in several of his own novels. He also went to a school for stutterers growing up, and no one believed he wrote the papers he wrote because of it as a child. No one believed in my skills as a kid either both because of the speech therapy and because people don't expect much of anything from "ugly girls".

I love the brutality in C. J. Cherryh's fiction. Elizabeth Hand's interest in ritual is huge to me.

Robert Fripp's essays mean a lot to me both as a person (I used to do Guitar Craft) and as a writer.

The poetry of Lucie-Brock Broido has really given me a framework for talking about things like the formality of distance and of bowing before things.

I think that's the best I can do off the top of my head.

Oh, ETA: Annie Ernaux, why is quite clear if you read Simple Passion.

Who wants a ten-year-old who can argue like that?

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

The ten year old!