All right, I have a question for you to perk up our summer writing doldrums:
Which ten books are the books that have inspired the most writing from you? The books you read that you couldn’t wait to put down so you could write afterwards? These aren’t neccessarily your “favorite” books, but the books that have helped you generate the most new work. If you are a poet, they do not have to all be poetry, they can be fiction, non-fiction, etc.
Here are my top ten “inspiration-generating” books so far:
-Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands
-Hayao Kawai’s The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan
-Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen
-The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors, Edited by Terri Windling
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves
–Humphries’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
–Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II
–Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde
-I’m going to cheat and allow film in this list: Hayao Miyazaki’s entire oevre
-HD’s Collected Poems
-My mother’s copy of XJ Kennedy’s Introduction to Poetry, circa1969, including all her notes
I’d love to see your lists!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
