I tried to list my 'Influences' on Goodreads this morning... the software limited me to about 30 characters. Writers are influenced about once a minute! I don't think I've ever read a book or seen a painting...or for that matter had a random conversation at the hardware store...that didn't influence me. The story of any writer's --any person's-- influences, is the story of their life, a double-helix that spirals out of the earliest beginnings and touches on every experience and relationship that person has.

I thought I'd talk about some of my influences here, week by week-- thinking that this might inspire others to consider their own.

First: The natural world. I grew up at the end of long, dusty road, in a valley between two forested hills. A brook ran down through a series of waterfalls on one side; on the other there was a marsh ringed with cattails and a long series of overgrown fields. There was not another house in sight. Our car was old and cranky, and we used it once a week to get groceries; I met the schoolbus a half mile away on the paved road.

I loved that land without knowing it, out of a deep familiarity. I knew every angle of light, every smell, the twist of an opened milkweed pod, the spectral sound of an evening thrush calling in the woods. I read The Yearling The Yearling in one long day, on a little island in the middle of the brook, feeling as if I could understand life in the backwoods of Florida because I knew the backwoods of Connecticut. The first record I ever bought was Elton John's first album. "A cluster of night jars sang some songs out of tune; a mantle of bright light shone down from the moon." The song fit me exactly....my sense of the mystery of life, of all that I dreamed as a young girl who knew very little of the outside world but everything about the few acres around her.

A few years later that house was repossessed by the bank; I went to college and then grad school and landed on Cape Cod, where there's another ornate and fascinating wilderness to take part in. And I discovered that a sense of place is one of the most important parts of writing for me. The books I love almost always lead the reader into a new world, a very particular world that shapes the lives of the characters. Fiction brings different places, times, and societies more alive to me than travel ever can. And fiction saves them, saves the time and the feeling as nothing else can.

It has been a wildly good year for beach plums. I made a batch of beach plum cordial yesterday for the first time. I won't be able to try it for two months, but when the sun came through the bottle this morning, illuminating all the plums suspended in the liquor, I was moved as I am when I read something wonderful: there they were, whole, beautiful from every side, nearly weightless. It feels good, in the midst of all that is lost in a life, to know that something has been preserved.

The Yearling Elton John