About my reading
Being a writer, of course I am a reader too. The stories I write are the kinds of stories I love to read: stories about the surprising gifts of ordinary people, the thorny love of families, the longing for some barely glimpsed and seemingly unattainable revelation, the ways and secrets of small towns, people negotiating hardships of their own and others' making, the struggle for redemption, and the unexpected grace that elevates ordinary human lives.
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I also am drawn to stories that are "regional" in the best sense, where the landscape is part of the consciousness of the people and essential to the unfolding story.​​​
​​Some of the fiction writers who have influenced me the most: Charles Baxter, Robertson Davies, Ivan Doig, Molly Gloss, David Guterson, Barbara Kingsolver, Wally Lamb, Craig Lesley, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stegner, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Steinbeck, Jane Smiley, and Elizabeth Strout.
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As for nonfiction: Marcus Borg, Joan Didion, Brian Doyle, Jon Krakauer, Madeleine L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Wallace Stegner again, Lewis Thomas, and E.B. White. I love many other authors, but these are the ones with permanent homes on my bookshelf, to whom I turn time and again for instruction, inspiration, and the pure pleasure of their prose.
