Writers are great lovers*

"Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. Your ability to love another's writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won't make you a copy cat. The parts of another's writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with....


...And don't be be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us."

- Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

She's here in town. I attended her reading and book signing tonight, and for the next two days I have the privilege of attending her writing retreat. I am so energized and inspired after far too long a hiatus from writing creatively. 

Tell me, who do you love? Whose mind do you study through their words? 

I think back through the years, and just a few spring that spring to mind: Blake, Thoreau, Robert Frost, Jane Austen, Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg... the list is deep and wide.

Even our contemporaries, writing I have discovered online -- I read their poems and essays and the poetry that sings through their stories and I come away gifted. Amber Haines, Krista Knott, Kate Ingles, Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz, Amy Turn Sharp, Bon Stewart... again, just skimming the surface of the ocean of inspiration out there.

So tell me, what writers do you love? Whose words lit you up as a child or teen or for the first time last week? Who should I be reading, whether novels, poems or even blogs?

*title of post from "Writing is a Communal Act", an essay in Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones