As the weekend was celebrating mothers and mothering by others, I was thinking about literary mothers. Those figures that feel like they had some sort of guidance and direction on what we create. While mostly these mothers would be defined as women, sometimes they are men, which I supposed makes them fathers, but as a group, they feel very much like parents of the creative you eventually become.
As a poet, I've always considered Poe a father figure of sorts, those being the first poems I encountered in school. The first things to catch my attention in literary vein, not to mention I already was enraptured with horror, both written and on the screen (so maybe a more fitting early creative father may have Stephen King who I was obsessed with.) Then came college and a love of Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickinson. In general, the Greeks, Mary Shelley, Henry James, EM Forster, and the Brontes. In grad school, my singular obsession with "The Wasteland" and Eliot that opened up my first insight into what poetry could be rather than just what it was. Later, there were other influences, in both poetry (many my contemporaries) and lit in general (Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier, for example, who I came to love in my 30s.)
Outside of lit, there were other creative influences in other media. The singer/songwriters who populated by plays lists through the 90s and beyond.(Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Stevie Nicks, Sam Phillips, Suzanne Vega, Lisa Loeb, Jewel, Heather Nova.) Bands like Concrete Blonde, Hole, Belly, and Veruca Salt. It was a long time before I would come to realize what had been there all along...that music probably fed the muse just as much as lit. That what I was listening to over and over formed my personal voice just as much as what as I reading. Or what I was watching, horror films always being a big influence on my creative process, even the stuff that doesn't specifically talk about horror movies among my work. Joseph Cornell had an influence on my writing as much as he did my art. While I finished the project specifically dedicated to his work in the mid-aughts, the collage process and fragmentation is something embedded in my process in all genres.
As a mix of influences, I think they all speak well to each other somehow, strange bedfellows as some may seem, in the work that comes out of my head and hands...
