One Word- Issue 2: Influence

Issue 2

Summer 2019

One Word a literary endeavor

in·flu·ence

(in-floo-unhs) noun

(1) THE CAPACITY OR POWER OF PERSONS OR THINGS TO BE A COMPELLING FORCE ON OR PRODUCE EFFECTS ON THE ACTIONS, BEHAVIOR, OPINIONS, ETC., OF OTHERS (2) THE ACTIONS OR PROCESS OF PRODUCING EFFECTS ON THE ACTIONS, BEHAVIOR, OPINIONS, ETC., OF OTHERS (3) A PERSON OR THING THAT EXCERTS INFLUENCE

Looking beyond the dictionary...

Created by

Jacob Maren Contributors Jess Walter R.O. Kwon Emma Straub Nick Flynn Sophie Cabot Black Peter Ho Davies Amitava Kumar Elizabeth Gilbert Francisco CantĂş Meg Wolitzer

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Introduction

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ver since starting this magazine two years ago, I have been on a search for influences. One Word has felt, to me, like a response to a teenage crisis, if you could call it that. A crisis of voice.

A crisis of influence.

In middle school, and the beginning of high school, I had a worldview that was solely developed by other worldviews. It was inherited. I would listen to MSNBC instead of Fox News because my father did. I was a Democrat because my parents were Democrats.

I listened to rock and hated rap because that’s what my father listened to. I did yoga because my mother did yoga. I liked the Red Sox, not the Yankees. It wasn’t because I liked the color red more or because I was from Boston, but because I was told that the Yankees sucked, and that I had to root for the Red Sox, my dad having grown up in a suburb outside of Boston. I was born in New York, not in Boston. So why did I like the Red Sox? I have been influenced and encultured by my parents throughout my life. I took these lessons and their worldviews as my own. And as I made my way through high school, these worldviews were on my mind. I wrote in a way that my parents would have wanted me to, both in terms of technique and content. When I would be asked to make a creative project for class, I would make a film. My dad was a filmmaker. We watched films nightly, so I instinctively wanted to make films of my own.

Before my senior year, I had a hard time creating anything. When I would sit down and attempt to write a paper, I felt that I was incapable of doing so. There was a chorus of voices in my head.

“You’re too young,” I could hear one voice say.

“No one cares what you think,” another said.

These voices felt real. When I created anything, the praise I received from the adults around me didn’t feel genuine – it felt sort of condescending, like “yay, you!” even though that wasn’t the intention. I may have finished a film, or written a short story, but it was as if I had assembled the Star Wars Lego set.

These voices I heard set me off on a journey. I felt as if I wasn’t a grown up yet, and in many ways, this was true.

I was in boarding school, where the faculty were “in loco parentis.” In place of parents. This phrase implied that I still needed people to look after me. I wasn’t yet an adult, and to me, that meant I hadn’t yet developed

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a full worldview. And in order to create, I needed to develop a deeper way of thinking. I needed to search for something, as one does during a crisis. So, over the summer before my senior year, I knew that I needed seek influences. I needed to be drowned in the words of others. How did the words on the pages of the books I read make me feel? How did they live in my body? How might I explore and react to different worlds in order to discover my own?

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hat is the mission for this magazine. Every adult I talk to wistfully desires to re-do their college days. They want to take classes and have the opportunity to learn again. In short, they want to fall under the spell of influence. By creating One Word, and approaching some of the writers who influence me in order to ask what has influenced them, I can extend the spell a bit longer. I can cherish this opportunity and offer it to others.

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NotE TO READER: For those of you reading this online, I would prefer for you to print it out. It is conceived to read on a device, so by pressing command-p or running the document over to Staples,

you are doing what this magazine is designed to do. There is such beauty in what is physical. What

you can hold in your hands. It is there, like a library filled with thousands of books, waiting to be made alive simply by opening them.

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An Interview with Francisco CantĂş

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I met Francisco Cantú, known as Paco, during an amazing and life-changing internship at Aspen Words.

Paco was the June writer in residence. I got to know him as he occasionally came to the office for lunch and hung around at events during their annual literary gathering, Summer Words. As I talked to him and read his memoir, a beautiful account of the time he spent as a border patrol agent and the effects it had on him afterward, I immediately arrived at the second word for my magazine: influence. I wanted Paco’s take on this word. As I took his wisdom with me after my internship was over and processed his book, it became easy to come up with many questions as we talked on the phone in the fall.

Jacob: With this issue of One Word, I’m focusing on influence. I have a few questions about the influences you had before, during, and after your time in the border patrol.

So what influenced your career decision? How were the seeds planted for this during your childhood, and later, during college?

Paco: I think a big thing that influenced my decision was growing up with a mother who was in the park service. Because coming of age as a child, forming my first memories, I was always in these outdoor spaces. And I think when your consciousness is shaped in an outdoor environment versus an indoor environment, it changes the connections of the different synapses in the brain. And so I always felt an intimacy in the landscape. I always felt the landscape held some sort of mystery. You had to be close to the landscape or in the landscape in order to understand different kinds of realities. Political realities too. So fast forward to me being in college and me studying border issues and immigration, even though I wasn’t an enforcement minded person. I was in school in DC which is very severed from the place I was studying and the place where I had grown up. So I think when it ended up time to finish school, I knew that I wanted to continue learning about immigration and border issues. I knew that I wanted to go back home to Arizona and felt that there was this big missing piece of what happens out on the border in the desert, which is this place where all of these people are dying and where all these fences were being built and all of these new enforcement technologies were being deployed. So I had it embedded in me that you needed to be close to the landscape to see how that was playing out. And then there was all of this idealism and naiveté that was wrapped up in that decision, thinking that I could join this agency without being implicated in participating in the violence that it deploys.

You are trained that these are law breakers. You’re trained to see them in a certain way and to see them dispassionately, and to go about your job with a certain amount of callousness and detachment

Jacob: So now you are in the border patrol and meet co-workers and superiors. Did you go into the border patrol knowing that you were looking for people to influence you? What I got from the book is that you were looking for help in finding your path. So did you use your influences to help find your motivation?

Paco: I definitely joined looking for all of these answers. I sought the job as a way to get answers that I had never been exposed to while reading and studying the border. I thought that I could figure out a way to apply these answers to different policy debates. I imagined that I could leave the border patrol after working there for three or four years and then go on to deploy this secret bag of tricks. I guess that I didn’t expect that there One Word | 5

would be these different people that would have these answers for me. I just expected that I would be exposed to them and see them and witness things that couldn’t be understood or witnessed in any other capacity.

There were definitely co-workers who influenced me, but I think there was also a danger in that influence because of the hierarchical, militaristic way that the border patrol and border patrol training is structured. It doesn’t leave room for the same kinds of classroom, intellectual inspirations that you would get from a mentor in college. It’s much more about listening to your superiors. Maybe they influence you in the fact that they are good at their jobs, that they are squared away, that they take orders and make the right decisions. But then I think there is a lot of danger in that because as you are moving through the training, both at the academy and in the field, you’re being conditioned to accept and participate in all of this violence that is being normalized at the same time. You’re sort of being exposed to, what I look back on, as being a very destructive and institutional culture. So I remember being in the field and seeing our senior agents, who were supposed to be training us and who we were supposed to be looking up to. There is this scene in the book where we catch up with this group of drug smugglers, they scatter off into the desert, and our training agent lets everyone crush the food and dump out their water and leave all their trash and belongings in the desert. They take the marijuana bundles and don’t chase them down. What he’s teaching everybody is that these lives aren’t worth pursuing and that these are people that can just be left in the desert. The desert is this disposable landscape that can hold all of the trash. I can remember seeing senior agents lighting cactus on fire. Destruction was being modeled for us. So to take inspiration from that is really dangerous. But that is the inspiration and model that is provided to so many agents. And they take it. I was inspired by those agents who served a long time, who were Mexican, and who treated people with a certain amount of respect and humanity. Those people in those moments were small inspirations. It taught me that there could be some kind of compassion in this cruel system.

Jacob: You just talked a little bit about your influences in the border patrol. But how do you feel that you were influenced by people that you arrested on the border?

Paco: What happened in those encounters for me, because I could speak Spanish and because I had lived in Mexico, was that I had been in some of the places where these people were coming from. So all of the structures and the strictly constructed elements of the institution and how the institution dictates encounters and—in the police sense—where you secure the scene, make sure everything is safe, and then apprehend these people. You handcuff them, put them in the car, bring them to the process center. All of that, for me, would fall away in many of these encounters, especially when I was encountering these by myself. I also saw this as I was driving someone for a long period of time. Your role, the power differential is always present, so that never falls away. But you are able to hear why people are coming and who’s waiting for them 6 | One Word

here. It’s like their daughter in California, or their husband in Phoenix. And then you are hearing that they have been processed many times. Or its their first trip. Or it’s, “I’m pregnant. I grew up speaking English.” All of this helps me break out of these strict confines of this sanitized encounter. And it really pushes back from all these things you learn from your training. You are trained that these are criminal encounters. You are trained that these are law breakers. You’re trained to see them in a certain way and to see them dispassionately, and to go about your job with a certain amount of callousness and detachment. I think that, for me, I’d come back from these outings and I would have to write them down in my journal because I knew that if I didn’t write them down, I would forget those conversations because there was so much in the institution and in the job that was constructed to minimize any human encounters. So I knew that I would show up the next day, and that I would be sent out into the field and all of this stuff would fade away and that I would forget it. And so I wrote a lot of this stuff down in the journal, and this is where a lot of the encounters and scenes in the book come from.

Jacob: Another important element of your book comes in the last part with your friend José, who is not allowed to return to the U.S. after an emergency visit to his home country. In your interactions with him, it feels like you both learn from each other. Not necessarily from just each other, but from the influences you have gained throughout your different lives. And your lives come together in these scenes that seem very special. So how did you feel that you could process all of these influences that you had and put them down on the page in that part of the book?

Paco: That’s a really good question because José is someone who influenced me profoundly. That experience and friendship was built over the course of two years. I met José a couple of years after I had left the border patrol. And so I thought that I had moved on or extracted myself from that world, job and life. And all that came with it. I met José just as I started grad school. I was in this totally different world, landscape, and social situation than I had been a few years earlier in the border patrol. When José left the country and then was arrested and thrown into the immigration complex and the deportation industrial complex, all of a sudden, all of these things came back to me. All of the ways that I had been a part of these systems that were now positioned against someone I deeply cared about and someone who was a friend. And then to have all of that, between you and that person you cared about. I couldn’t talk to José except for one time that I had seen him in prison. I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t see him except for these couple of moments in a court room.

And then I became close with his family because I knew about the structures he was attempting to navigate, and I was helping his family navigate these structures, figuring out when he was going to be in court, finding a lawyer, figuring out how to visit him in jail. You get to see the violence. It’s like looking behind this curtain. Because I had the experience of encountering so many people in a similar situation years before, day after day, then seeing this one story unfold in a different way, seeing the person that you are becoming close with along with his family. And then if you magnify that, and times that by hundreds of thousands and millions of people and lives and stories, you realize that is the violence and trauma that you see affecting this family is being multiplied. That was really profound. That was overwhelming because you know you have to stay focused on this person’s story because this is a person you care about and this is the person who the universe has put in front of you and who you’ve become friends with. You can’t lose meaning from the individual story but at the same time, you also can’t think that this person doesn’t have a completely unique story and that he is not the exception. He isn’t the

So for me, the violence of these structures and institutions became very palpable and real to me in a way that had only been glancing before

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exception, that’s almost the rule. For me, it was like seeing how the border, even if his kids were all US citizens (he had three kids who were all born in the country), all of a sudden was thrust into their lives through all of these structures and systems and institutions. So for me, the violence of these structures and institutions became very palpable and real to me in a way that had only been glancing before. You know?

Jacob: My last question bring all that together. In the epilogue, you talk about a conversation you had with a man who rode on his horse and asked if you were an immigration officer:

“On a hot Texas evening at the edge of Big Bend National Park, I watched a man ride his horse across the Rio Grande. After traversing a riverbank teeming with locusts, he ushered his horse up the small hill where I stood overlooking the darkening valley. Buenas tardes, I greeted him.

He eyed me from his saddle. You speak good Spanish, he said, are you la migra? No, I answered. A ranger? No, I assured him, just a tourist.”

Did you feel like you were writing the book as a citizen? How did that all come together when you had to process your influences and everything else that was going on around you?

Paco: It felt like I was writing the book as this exorcism. I was trying to make sense of this world that I had participated in. A world that was now distant from me, but I still carried around. At first I was trying to get all of that out and on to the page so that it could live somewhere other than inside me. So I could explain it first and foremost to myself. I wanted to look at something that was incomprehensible and lay it out in some sort of way that somehow made sense, and wasn’t swimming around and clashing and crashing in my head. And then, of course, the decision to publish and rework something into a shape that is comprehensible and impose a narrative arc; to share that with others and to invite other people into this exploration and into this questioning, sense-making journey. So yeah, I didn’t feel like I was writing it as a border patrol agent. I didn’t feel like I was writing it as a student. One of the most liberating things was making the decision to fully commit to being a writer or an artist. And deciding that this story could be framed in a way that, hopefully, other people could connect to and have a lot of their assumptions challenged. Because these stories are always so absent from news media. In our outrage at immigration policy and enforcement and the rhetoric of all of this, a lot of times, stories and actual people are absent. A lot of times we’re outraged on behalf of these people who are nebulous and unknown to us. And I think it’s really important to know people and to have faces and names and stories, because that makes outrage this lasting thing that will endure, as opposed to something you just glance at on social media.

Jacob: Yeah I feel like I have the same thing. My dad was a journalist in Kenya and Somalia, so I always feel like it’s important to go out and see a current event. Especially as a student and seeing what is going on in Washington D.C. and on the border, it often doesn’t feel real. And I’m guessing it made it feel real for you. So thank you so much for making it feel real for all of us, as much as you could!

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What are your influences and how do you carry them with you?

Amitava Kumar

Dear J., On the day before I got your note asking me about influences, I had taught an essay in my class by Raymond Carver; it is titled “Fires” and I try to have my students read it in pretty much every creative writing class I teach. It is a dark and honest piece, so dark that I often think of it as slightly poisonous. I love it. Carver begins to talk about influences and makes it clear that the main influence on his writing is a dark and oppressive one, and it has been in the form of his children. There’s a harrowing scene about a young Carver, who at that time was working several menial jobs to put food on the table, waiting for a dryer to become available at a laundromat. His wife, similarly overworked, is at another job; his kids are being taken care of by a friend. A dryer is about to stop. It stops. But the woman using it puts two more dimes into the machine. That sense of waiting, that sense of never having the time to write, of not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel—the whole essay reeks of despair. It makes you aware of the odds and the striving that goes into the making of a writing career. I’m telling you all this because I’m never sure what it is that I should be teaching my students: on the one hand, how to have the discipline and the stubborn ambition to make it as a writer, or, on the other, what kind of models to choose to emulate and how to read widely and deeply enough to make good choices. Regarding the latter, I really think it depends on the kind of book I’m writing at that time. I remind myself to choose my influences: I keep a row of five or six books on my shelf. I have just finished writing a book on style; this book is intended as a corrective to academic stodginess. I’m making a case for blurring the lines between creative and critical writing. My influences for this project were Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage), Claudia Rankine (Citizen), and Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts and Jane: A Murder).

Emma Straub

Before I worked in a bookstore, and long before I had my own bookstore, I thought of influences as things you were supposed to ignore in public, like someone cutting their fingernails on the subway. Talking about one’s influences seemed pretentious. Tacky!

But when I started working at a bookstore and found myself surrounded (literally!) by books, I realized that influences were the greatest gift a writer could have. One could have influences for structure, influences for language, influences for wit, influences for career paths, influences for author photos, influences for everything.

Now I’m swimming in influences, happily.

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Elizabeth Gilbert

Somewhere around the age of fourteen, I experienced a massive moment of transition in my reading habits. I’d always been a bookish kid. I grew up on a farm without a television, and there weren’t any neighbors my own age to play with, and so reading was pretty much the only entertainment available. Thus, I ate books the way a spoiled heiress might eat bon-bons: constantly, ravenously, popping one after another into my mouth. I had long ago gobbled my way through the children’s section of our local library, and I had also recently consumed whatever passed for Young Adult Literature back then. (Back in the 1970s, teenage readers had nothing like the cornucopia of brilliant novels that kids these days have to choose from, but I digested whatever was available.) I’d reached the end of the banquet; there was nothing left for me to read. And so I decided it was time to become an adult — or at least an adult reader.

One night, I went to my father after dinner and asked him for advice on where to begin reading books written exclusively for grown-ups. There seemed to be so much of it! How would I know what was best for me? To his credit, my dad took my question seriously. He walked over to our bookshelf and spent a long time gazing at the contents. Then he pulled down Hemingway. His own copy of The Sun Also Rises, to be exact.

“I think you could read this,” he said.

It was an inspired choice. Hemingway is simple and direct: A clever fourteen year-old would never encounter a sentence that would flummox her. If you can read the English language, you can read Hemingway. (Thank God Dad didn’t hand me some Faulkner!) So I started with The Sun Also Rises and then read everything Hemingway had ever written. He was my gateway drug into adult literature. And I believe that he influenced me deeply. The simplicity of those sentences has stayed with me. I remember feeling a kind of quiet gratitude as I read those books — gratitude for the fact that I could understand them at all. Over the years, as I became a writer, I tried to keep my own prose as clear and simple as I possibly could, because Hemingway taught me that you can tell a great story without putting too much filigree and embellishments on the page. Even to this day, my editing consists of going back to a paragraph again and again and asking if myself there is any way I can make it more clear, more direct, more simple. The artist Paul Klee said that a drawing is nothing more than a line that you take for a walk across the page. Hemingway showed me that a novel is just the same. A novel is a story that you take for a walk across the page. Keep the line as simple as you can. Walk straight from here to there. Just say what happened. And never leave your reader behind.

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Around the age of fourteen I, too, experienced a massive moment of transition in my reading habits.

However, it was a much different kind of shift. Growing up, I was not much of a reader. I didn’t read Harry Potter or any of the other young adult books my friends would read. But as I entered high school, I began to find that reading became my escape. It saved me and was there for me when I needed it the most. I never did read children books and went straight to adult books.

This has been my reading corner this summer, as my family has ended up spending the summer in New York, a drastic shift from rural Connecticut, where I grew up. This dislocation has been due to the recent hospitalization of my dad. In the last few months, I have truly realized the extent that books can save us. Most recently, I have been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami, who has been a push away from the ground of reality at the right time. He has become one of my great influences, teaching me that some of the best books are those that bend reality just slightly and has taught me that these worlds are closer together than we think. This is the power that books can have.

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Jess Walter

It’s 1984 and I’m a nineteen-year-old working-class, first-generation college student whose girlfriend is pregnant. I get a job at my hometown newspaper to support this sudden family, and before I can drink legally, I’m a workaday guy, covering school board meetings while secretly burning with the desire to be a novelist. There is nothing realistic about my dream. I don’t know any writers. I’ve never been to New York, or, for that matter, on an airplane, or anywhere east of Wyoming. This wish to be a writer is pure aspiration, pure daydream. But the good thing about daydreams is that they are immune to careerism—to the infections of impatience, greed and entitlement. So, in my twenties, I keep my ambition quiet and I read and write fiction every night after work.

I navigate my dream like an ancient sailor, alone on a raft, no instruments, just the night stars to guide me. There are six thousand stars visible to the naked eye, and of these, fifty-seven so-called navigational stars are bright enough to fix your position at sea. Coincidentally, those are the exact numbers required to become a writer. You must read six thousand books and, of those, find precisely fifty-seven authors whose work will serve as a beacon, shining in the distance as you drift alone, night after night, on your raft. Among these celestial bodies, of course, are three huge points in the sky—the sun, the moon and Polaris, the North Star—that are especially helpful.

Just about any time of day or night, you can quickly find your position using one of these three and the horizon. In my twenties, my three fixed points are: Kurt Vonnegut, hilarious and humanist and plain-spoken in his admonitions (“Give characters something to want, even if it’s just a glass of water”); Gabriel Garcia Marquez, all mystery and magic and sweeping emotional range (“Inspiration comes from finding the right theme”); and Joan Didion, descendant of my beloved Hemingway-Noir-Western style, whose clear-eyed sentences are sabers aimed at her subjects and herself (“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking … and what it means.”) A decade later, after my first book is published, I write her a fan note. I tell her how much her sentences mean to me and I ask if she has a specific intent when she begins an essay. She writes back that she doesn’t intend anything when she starts, and that usually she is just lost and trying to find her way. Nothing about writing will ever sound more right to me.

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R.O. Kwon

Oh, I have so many influences. I often suspect that anyone I’ve ever reread is an influence! I love reading, but I love rereading more—that’s where the real, lasting magic happens.

Sophie Cabot Black My favorite etymologist reminds me that the word influence is not just about the fluency, or the inflow, of the world—but that the idea of influence also held sway in our perception of human destiny. For quite some time we believed the stars determined our fate: our lives ruled by their emanation. Now in the 21st century to hear who you are is ever difficult— the quiet of the world ever harder. For me, the inflow is constant, and I am always in wonder about what stays, what goes.

My mother’s heartbeat (louder than my own) was my first music, then also the inflow of landscape (which was a cityscape for my first five years) and then of course words, by themselves, together. Mother Goose, lyric to a ballad, anything that resembled language and that repeated. I own all that as influence. But then what got me later, playing with words and putting them together in my own certain order, were other voices such as Emily Dickinson (required reading early on), Leonard Cohen (heard in Paris when I was thirteen) Adrienne Rich (my mother’s classmate) and Seamus Heaney (whose book North my father brought home from Ireland after hearing him in a small town gymnasium).

Sometimes the difficult part, as they all pile up, is to find room in the room for all that you love, and then to hear yourself above the din. And to be ruthless about this hearing. Something called us to that room. Letting yourself go to it, is a good idea; finding yourself through the noise, a great one.

Nick Flynn My influences are those that somehow contain—or wrestle with—both the sacred and the profane….Johnny Cash, Caravaggio, James Baldwin….Tilly Olsen, Amy Winehouse….

Though really the greater influences are those who I am in daily contact with, my tribe…who also seem to contain both shadow and light.

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Translating and processing influences: An interview with Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer deals with influences in many forms. As I read The Female Persuasion, I recommended the book to all my friends. It felt as if Meg had created an influence for all of us to learn from. And then I watched The Wife, and was wondering about what it was like for Meg to sit and watch Glenn Close in the stunning portrayal of a character that she herself created. Meg deals with influences in many forms in her work, both in the creation of characters and in the ethics of influences.

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Did you base the fictional relationship between Faith Frank and Greer Kadetsky on an influence in your own life? If so, how did you transform that influence or relationship into fiction? If not, could you describe how you created the characters of Faith and Greer?

No, I didn’t base it on any particular influence in my own life, although I did have a couple of people early on whom I later realized had been mentors. And because of them, I wanted to re-create that very specific feeling of being seen by someone you look up to. But to me, invention is so important, and I wanted to entirely create a new character.

I know that many of my friends who have read The Female Persuasion felt that Faith Frank became real to them, and, in a way, became an influence. Certainly Faith is an influence for Greer — but in writing the novel, did you imagine that Faith would become an influence for readers?

Oh, I’m glad to hear that they said that. I try not to think of what readers might think of a character when I’m writing; I try to stay in the world of the novel as completely as I can, and the characters help me explore what’s preoccupying me.

In The Wife, you explore the ethics of influence. The fine line between one person helping another, and taking over—and taking credit. Did you begin the novel with clear thoughts about influence in this regard, or was that something that developed over the course of writing the book?

I don’t think I’ve ever begun a novel with entirely clear thoughts. All my thoughts are generally pretty open to being changed, and it was no different here. I was definitely interested in how we influence each other--how we persuade one another, to allude to the title--but I honestly didn’t know the exact ways that that would happen in the book.

Although The Wife was published in 2003, it seems even more relevant when we think of today’s pressing societal issues regarding the gender gap and the #metoo movement. This can also be seen in the movie adapted from your book, which came out last year. How did the film version of The Wife cinematically deal with these topics? Do you think the subject of influence was dealt with differently in the book and the film? If so, in what ways?

The Female Persuasion looks at female power, among other subjects, and The Wife looks at male power and a female response to it. The Wife flashes back centrally to the 1950s, when we can see the openly disparate treatment of men and women, which sets the course for this particular marriage.

Rage is explored in both the novel and the film, although in the novel we learn of the title character Joan Castleman’s rage right away, and she announces that she is going to leave her husband on the first page. In the film, we rely on the nuances of Glenn Close’s facial expressions to tell the story, which includes rage as well as a range of other emotions.

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Peter Ho Davies Writers are probably not to be altogether trusted about our own influences.

Between our blindspots and soft spots we have a tendency to only own up to the flattering one (the rare and refined) and the safe ones (that everyone else cites).

One class of influencers we rarely talk about are the books and authors we hate, even though they’re as likely to have shaped us as those we love. What we’re repelled by, after all, shapes our course as much as what we’re drawn to. The works we admire may inspire us to emulate them, but those we disparage tend to embolden us with the vital (if frequently false) sense that we can do better. We’re used to the idea of the “anxiety of influence” - the fear of being overly influenced by writers and works we love – so perhaps we could dub this counter-movement the “audacity (or arrogance!) of influence”…

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Jacob Maren (What are my influences and how do I carry them with me?)

When I think of the word influence, my mind turns to the question of how we’re influenced subconsciously. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’ve been influenced until it becomes retrospective. In the moment, we are too preoccupied to even know we’ve been influenced. This brings me to a major question that I’ve been thinking about over the past few months: How does our environment influence us?

This goes beyond our own vocabulary. It’s a question that we are unable to answer because we’re too inside of it. I immediately felt this as I moved my belongings into New York City for the summer. I have always felt that I belong in New York. I was born there, after all.

But I will never be able to recall that time. Not one moment. This is because my family moved out of the city when I was three. We moved to the country before I had the ability to say no. And even if I did, no one would take input from a three year old about what’s best for the family. Because of my parents’ decision, I grew up in Connecticut, where, looking back, I was influenced heavily by my environment. But what I felt and how I was influenced? Who knows...

When I was looking at colleges, I wanted an environment where my whole self felt comfortable. It wasn’t just about the programs the college had, or the size of the student body, or any of the categories listed in college guidebooks. I decided that I’d let myself go on that journey and react to each environment. And I knew I would be influenced in some way, wherever I went.

And that’s why influences are so important. Influences are our DNA. They are what we are made of, even if we don’t have the words to understand. These are people, places, and everything else we see in our lives. We are built of influences. And as I go forward in my life, I plan to carry my influences with me, and gain more. But I also don’t want take them for granted.

18 | One Word

Dad Father

Home

High school Jason Isbell and the 400 Millbrook

Mother

As You Like It

Dogfight

Some of my Influences Jason Isbell

My family, school, home, and the arts are just a few

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Notes on Contributors Jess Walter is a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is the author of six novels, one book of short stories and one nonfiction book. His work has been translated into 32 languages, and his fiction has been selected three times for Best American Short Stories as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading.

R.O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries. The novel was an American Booksellers Association Indie Next #1 Pick and an Indies Introduce selection. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Los Angeles Times First Book Prize.

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Modern Lovers, The Vacationers and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Vogue, New York Magazine, Tin House, The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and The Paris Review Daily. She also is the owner of Books of Magic with her husband, one of my favorite bookstores in the U.S. Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet. His most recent publication is The Reenactments, which chronicles Flynn’s experience during the making of Being Flynn, a film based on his acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.

Sophie Cabot Black’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Tin House, among other journals. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, among them Best American Poetry, Fatherhood, Doggerel, and Poems About Horses, anthologies from the Everyman’s Library Series.

Peter Ho Davies is the author of two novels, The Fortunes and The Welsh Girl. Davies is also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a winner of the PEN/Malamud Award. He is currently on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Amitava Kumar is the author, most recently, of a novel Immigrant, Montana. Kumar has written several works of literary non-fiction, including the prize-winning book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. He is currently a Professor of English at Vassar College Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which spent many years on the New York Times Best Seller list. In 2010, Eat, Pray, Love was made into a film starring Julia Roberts.

The book became so popular that Time Magazine named Elizabeth as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her most recent novel, City of Girls, was published in June of 2019.

Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and an Art for Justice fellowship Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings, The Female Persuasion, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City.

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Jacob Maren is a rising sophomore at Wesleyan University. He’s from Bethlehem, Connecticut, but his heart still resides in New York City.

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From this Issue

One class of influencers we rarely talk about are the books and authors we hate, even though they’re as likely to have shaped us as those we love.

Peter Ho Davies You must read six thousand books and, of those, find precisely fifty-seven authors whose work will serve as a beacon, shining in the distance as you drift alone, night after night, on your raft.

Jess Walter A novel is a story that you take for a walk across the page. Keep the line as simple as you can. Walk straight from here to there. Just say what happened. And never leave your reader behind.

Elizabeth Gilbert But when I started working at a bookstore and found myself surrounded (literally!) by books, I realized that influences were the greatest gift a writer could have.

Emma Straub Though really the greater influences are those who I am in daily contact with, my tribe…who also seem to contain both shadow and light.

Nick Flynn My favorite etymologist reminds me that the word influence is not just about the fluency, or the inflow, of the world—but that the idea of influence also held sway in our perception of human destiny.

Sophie Cabot Black I always felt the landscape held some sort of mystery. You had to be close to the landscape or in the landscape in order to understand different kinds of realities.

Francisco Cantú