next question . . . from Barrington High School

THIS IS ENTRY TWO in my series of questions and answers from senior creative writing students of my alma mater, Barrington High School.


I DON'T KNOW ANYBODY in Barrington anymore except for my high school girlfriend, Claire, and my favorite English teacher, Dale Griffith. So I spent the night in the Barrington Motel, and took a cab over to the high school. My cabbie dropped me off at the wrong entrance, by the gym and the senior lockers, but the garrulous security guard had the authority—after checking his computer—and the technology to scan my Colorado driver's license and print me a visitor's ID sticker. Then another security staffer escorted me to the main entrance, and a third called Dept. Chair Jack Bowyer, who collected me and led me up the stairs that hadn't existed in my day.

Here's the second question that teacher Maggie Olberg gave me from the class:
What influences you? (Style & content)
Everything I read influences me a lot—or everything I read that's good and substantial, because the stuff that isn't just passes through me without leaving an impression. When I read, the language echoes in my mind. So I have to be careful what I'm reading when I'm writing.

Right now I'm reading I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, and I can hear his voice, very lyrical. The good stuff becomes part of me, the characters are real people inside me, the worlds that are created become real places within me. I like writing that has a deep sense of place, urban or natural or both, and I like characters with a lot of love in them, or perhaps sympathy—with other people, with nature, with music and stories and all the arts. There will be alienation, disconnection, despair—but without what I'm calling love or sympathy, the alienation has no consequence.

Sometimes the language itself expresses love. I think Hemingway did that. One of my favorite stories, which is in a book that I borrowed from the BHS English resource center and never returned, is "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." It amazes me that I was so attracted to that story at so young an age, and I believe that even very young people often sympathize with the loss and disappointment of the age. The sympathy of the waiter in that story, the old waiter, carries the story—and the reader despises the young, self-involved waiter because he has none. Though the old waiter is preoccupied with nothingness, with emptiness, his emptiness is not nihilistic because he still feels the emptiness and sympathizes with those who also feel it.

Was this supposed to be style OR content? I think they are of equal importance. There is no style without content, and since the content is expressed via language, it can't be communicated without good writing (which is one way to define style) or without a voice that arises naturally from the subject and expresses the content.

And everything influences me. My best friend Sam, whom I met at BHS when I was a junior and he was a soph, influenced and continues to influence me. He's now the editor of Willow Springs and the author of an excellent novel called Safe in Heaven Dead.
But "everything under the sun", as it says in the finale of Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon, influences me. Growing up in Barrington, coming back, meeting new students . . . I could go on and on. (And usually do ☺)