Writers Recommend

In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.

Matthew Dickman

3.25.09

“If I ever get stuck writing a poem, I will play some Talking Heads. That band is the poet I want to be! The album Stop Making Sense is especially meaningful to me. Although pop music might not always be clever or complicated, it is deeply honest and open. Like the band Vampire Weekend sings: ‘First the window, then it's to the wall / Lil’ Jon, he always tells the truth.’ Lately, and not only because our names look weirdly similar, I have been reading Matthew Lippman’s The New Year of Yellow again and being deeply moved and jealous.

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Rolf Potts

3.18.09

“I hate to sound so directly instructional, but a book I’ve found immensely useful is Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide From the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

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Afaa Michael Weaver

3.11.09

“I assemble things to maintain a place in my creative thinking, a little like stumbling around in the undergrowth of a slightly wild place.

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Preeta Samarasan

3.4.09

“When my writing stagnates, I do occasionally turn to fiction for motivation or inspiration: I might read a favorite passage, say, the epilogue to A. S. Byatt’s Possession, or a random page of Bleak House. But I’m actually much more likely to read poetry—Yeats, Eliot, Auden, e.e. cummings, and Seamus Heaney are favorites—or listen to music to unstick myself. I love the baroque period—J. S.

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H. L. Hix

2.25.09

“I find it easier to follow form to content than content to form (forgive the false dilemma), which means I depend on discovering an essential rather than an accidental relationship between the two

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Martha Ronk

2.9.09

“Baffled by my obsession with writing about objects both in poetry and fiction, I discovered The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects by Peter Schwenger.

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Rishi Reddi

1.30.09

“When I despair about my work, I dig out a book that I discovered years ago in college: Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. Her essays explain how creativity in any form—writing, planting a garden, starting a business—is crucial for leading a good life. The book is anti-critic and anti-publishing world and this is what I like about it. Not because I don’t want to impress the critics (I do), but because Ueland writes so eloquently about what happens at the core—that scary moment when the author is alone at her desk with only a blank page before her.”

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Adam Braver

1.26.09

“Go to a museum. Not to find ideas or to seek inspiration from what hangs on the walls, rather to be in a place that’s purpose is for responding to art and artistic thought. The arts, in general, have become more and more marginalized; their value measured by commodity (especially writing, given its obsession with ‘publishable’). In the gallery, your relationship to the work is its vision, energy, technique, and, of course, its aesthetic—not its commercial promise. Go to a museum. Breathe in a place that’s only reason for being is art. Then go home. Then make art.”

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Robyn Schiff

1.12.09

"When I’m stuck in a poem it usually means my engagement with the subject is lacking intensity, and instead of fully entering the material, I feel like I’m at the doorway tentatively knocking in that lazy way we do when we don’t actually want to be admitted. One piece of writing that can reliably revive me from this state is the title essay in Guy Davenport’s Geography of the Imagination. In the grand finale of this short essay, Davenport looks at Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic. But here looking is the most active, most adrenalized, most divine activity possible.

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