Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

.for me it's simple...Henry Miller..........in the early 70's he took me to the gate and showed me a lifetime path........o there are many influences on this wired man.....henry was the one who lead me to the WAY!

my first biggest was Virginia Woolf - she opened her stream and let it flow

then came e.e. cummings - he opened all doors and turned on escalators to everywhere

then came kazantakis with his passion

then came kafka with his absurdity

and ginsberg with his in your face passion

how many biggests does it take to change a lightbulb?

who influenced me was Judy Blume and later Jerry Spinelli. My love for children's and young adult fiction stems from my formative years. And now I write along that vein of literature. I love it.

I'd have to say, the writer than influenced me the most was Cecil B. Lee...

He turned me on to zen, Basho, Paul Reps, Alan Watts, Richard Brautigan, etc. Haiku made me feel that I could write. But I have always been a writer, I even journaled in grade and high school.

"He may not be famous now...he will be some day...and I knew him when..."

SooZen

robert anson heinlein

probably more a storyteller than a literary giant, his thoughts on societies, cultures, and politics (interpersonal and otherwise) probably did more to shape my young brain than anyone else, so i must consider him my biggest influence

kerouac was first to really show to me that literature could be fun and poetry integral to an entire lifestyle.

camus and sartre opened up the world of philosophy via literature.

marx and engels changed forever my view of society n politics; freud my understanding of human relationships and motivations.

Possibly Mervyn Peake, who showed me that wordiness doesn't always mean that an author is sloppy or verbally flatulent; that adjectives are not the evil that teachers at high school said they were; and that a person can be explicitly descriptive and yet simultaneously mysterious. He led me on to Christina Stead, John Crowley, Dickens and Bruno Schulz.

Irivne Welsh, who showed me that there is beauty in the ugliness.

Douglas Coupland, who showed me that both my city and my generation were legendary, and that my impressionism was of great value, and needed to be dealt with.

Anais Nin, who literally showed me what it was to be a woman, and to speak and to think and to write in faithfulness to my own intuition.