Mentors, Muses & Monsters
30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives
Introduction
Mentors, Muses and Mozart
The response to my invitation was overwhelming. One after another, in e-mails, on the phone, and in person, in a matter of weeks, two dozen fiction writers said yes, they wanted to contribute to this anthology. Some days I would hear from two or three or four people, saying yes, count me in. Of course, I was delighted -- and slightly flabbergasted by the wellspring of enthusiasm. I seemed to have hit a nerve.
Several knew right away whom they wanted to write about -- Mary Gordon on Elizabeth Hardwick and Janice Thaddeus, Jay Cantor on Bernard Malamud, Lily Tuck on Gordon Lish, Jim Shepard on John Hawkes. But quite a few said yes, emphatically, without knowing their subject for sure. Early on, Jonathan Safran Foer was deciding from among Joyce Carol Oates, with whom he studied at Princeton, the artist Joseph Cornell, whose famous boxes enchanted him at a young age, and the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. At first, Margot Livesey wasn't sure whether to choose her adopted father -- ... read full excerpt from: Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives ebook
