I did a lot of studio art prior to writing full-time, and a professor of mine offered a piece of advice that has stayed with me: don’t just go to museums and large galleries; be inspired by artists no one else has heard of.
His point was that while you can be inspired by canonical artists, the qualities that make their work groundbreaking no longer feel the same way when you employ them in your work, unless you take that inspiration in a totally different direction.
I think about this a lot in relation to writing, as someone who has to constantly remind myself to read not just my standby favorite authors or the current NYT bestsellers, but authors fewer people have heard of. I’m in the middle of reading a bunch of small literary journals right now (more on that in a future post) at a time when Lahiri, Robinson, and Ishiguro have all recently published novels, and with the limited time I have, it often takes self-discipline to read writers who are still finding their footing versus ones who already have a more fully-formed sense of what they bring to literature.
Yet as a writer, I feel a particular excitement in discovering and taking inspiration from new work. Reading writers I didn’t expect to encounter shakes up my internal mechanisms in unexpected ways, and taking inspiration from them makes me feel less like a supplicant kneeling at the feet of a master and more like having the writing equivalent of coffee with a very smart friend. I’ve always preferred coffee to lectures (okay that’s kind of a lie but going with it for the sake of my metaphor).
For me, the best way to encounter writers outside of my circle is to read journals cover-to-cover, because this compels me to engage with work I wouldn’t otherwise seek out on my own. Then when I find authors who compel me, I often seek them out and read some of their other published work, which often leads me to discover new journals, and the cycle continues. It feels like a cross between going on a treasure hunt and being a small band’s groupie. Needless to say, it’s a lot of fun.
~M.
P.S. Speaking of writers I didn’t expect to encounter, I was so fortunate to get to work with Morgan Thomas when I taught at a residency in summer of 2019. Now they have a story collection called Manywheres forthcoming from MCD/FSG, and their latest story has just been published by The Atlantic!