Writers

Deborah’s Recommended Reading:

• All Dogs are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão.
• Cocaine Nights by J. G. Ballard
• The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Recommended Reading:

• Want a comic that you can fall in love with?
  Craig Thompson’s epic autobiography of his first love and his religious childhood, Blankets, will make you laugh and cry.

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
   Few novels capture the furious strangeness of youth like Capote’s lonely coming of age story. I re-read it if I loose inspiration.

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino
2. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
3. The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. The Poggenpuhl Family by Theodor de Fontane
2. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
3. Stoner by John Williams

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. Peig by Peig Sayers (1936)
   Life story of Blasket Islander and seanachaí Peig Sayers, written from her recorded and dictated memoirs. Other kids at school hated it. For me it opened up the world of the past, and made the Irish language worth learning.

Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
2. Satan Says by Sharon Olds
3. The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge
   Reading this book cemented in my heart the idea of interlinked short stories. I had already started to write books (a number of them) where short stories led into each other, but had had a lukewarm response from early readers. Strout’s book is consummately well done: it is a sleight of hand to give the reader a short story collection, and then for the reader to find they have read a whole life of a town.

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro
2. First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan
3. Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. Although I go on about it, ‘Tristram Shandy’ continues to inspire me in the most practical ways. Recently I have finished a long re-imagining of ‘Don Juan’, which Byron called “a poetical Tristram Shandy” and am about to start work on a project with the artist Philippa Troutman involving physical digressions from Shandy Hall, where the brilliant curator Patrick Wildgust (Stephen Fry played him in the film ‘A Cock and Bull Story’) continues to extend Sterne’s heritage. So many things make it contemporary, but in the context of all the recent controversies in poetry about plagiarism, I love the fact that the denunciation of it in ‘Tristram Shandy’ was lifted verbatim and unacknowledged from Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’…

Top Five Tips:

1. There is no one way to write, there are no rules, everyone does it differently. Pick and choose from other people’s writing tips or make up your own, and find the way that works best for you.
2. When you write, don’t forget that everything is up for grabs: characters, setting, plot, structure, voice, style, beginning, middle, end. Nothing is sacred, it’s all in the service of the story.

What’s on my pile…

• Poems 1962-2012 Louise Glück.
• Short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.