Yesterday I took a master class with Kathryn Davis, through A Public Space. It was based on her theory that the first book a writer loves as a child will appear in some form in everything that person writes for the rest of their lives. I signed up for the class because I’m a big fan of Davis’s work, and would gladly hear what she had to say about anything at all about writing, really. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with her theory of the long-lasting impact of first bookish loves, but I went into it with an open mind, completely willing to let her convince me. I mean...she’s Kathryn Davis. She’s a genius. Unfortunately, the structure and length of the class didn’t really allow her the time and space to fully make her argument. It felt like we barely scratched the surface. I went into the class unsure if I agreed and left it still unsure.
When I read the course description, I immediately thought of Knee Deep in Thunder by Sheila Moon. I loved that book in fourth or maybe fifth grade. I remember that I borrowed it from the library because I liked the title, and I ended up falling hard for the story. I renewed it many times, reading it over and over. Now, though, all these years later, I found that I couldn’t remember anything about it except for the title and the last line of the epigraph. Could that count, then, in terms of Davis’s theory? It is the first book I remember loving, and I did read it many times, so I think it must count. Even if I’d retained nearly nothing from it, surely it’s still in there somewhere in my subconscious. Per this theory, it would be a foundational influence on my fiction.
In preparation for the class, I bought a copy of the book to reread, to see if I could indeed find the seeds of my fictional preoccupations in it. I had trouble getting into it, I think mainly because I’m not ten years old anymore. I’m simply no longer this book’s audience. But I wasn’t looking to see if I would still love reading it; I was looking at its fundamental parts, to see if I recognized my own writing in them. It turns out that it’s a novel about a thirteen-year-old girl who runs out of the house to escape her parents’ arguments about money, finds a mysterious stone, and ends up in an underground world with a dog-sized beetle for a guide. This was 100 percent up my alley as a kid. I was totally into books that transported me to strange worlds. If there was an animal or insect guide involved, all the better. But do I find residue of that in my work now, as an adult?
Well... The prose sounded nothing like mine. Okay. Fine. That’s not really the measure. The main character, feeling lost and overwhelmed but also curious and open to adventure... That’s interesting to me still, but not really present in my own work. Being out of step or out of place and needing to rely on an unlikely source of help? Okay, yes, I can see that. I feel like I’m grabbing at straws here to try to make connections between my writing as an adult and Knee Deep in Thunder. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that my writing does carry remnants of this first loved book, and it’s just that I’m not able to recognize them for whatever reason. Let’s say I did recognize common elements, or maybe someone pointed them out to me. What would that tell me, and what would I do with it, as a writer? How much of the creative work that’s going on in my subconscious does it serve me to drag up into the light?
A more interesting question to me is why a person’s favorite book from childhood became a favorite. What in it resonated with who they already were and the way they understood the world at that time? And isn’t it those things that come out later in the writing? Is it maybe that the books that become favorites do so because of how they speak to the things that are already central to us? The things that we will continue to come back to, either out of love or a need to work through them?
Though, maybe Davis’s theory holds true in the sense that the books we love first teach us a certain lens of viewing the world, and a certain logical structure to organize it. Perhaps we understand the world and storytelling however we do because those early books modeled that. But then...doesn’t every book we love throughout our lives also become an influence? I certainly learned and continue to learn to write by reading widely, and I can find much more of Michael Cunningham and Doris Lessing’s fingerprints on my work than Sheila Moon’s.
I don’t know. This isn’t a critique of the class, or of Kathryn Davis. This is me trying to think through here what I had hoped to think through with her as my guide. I went into the class wanting to be convinced, because I love her books, and she is clearly so smart. I think I just misunderstood the goal of those two hours. I wish the class had been longer, and lecture-based. I wish she’d had a chance to win me over.
What do you think? What was the first book you loved, and do you find that you carry it with you still in whatever art you make?
I can see the influence more in my life than perhaps in my work? Secret Garden, My Side of the Mountain, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Jane Eyre -- each of them about kids (young women) building a home out of unlikely materials, finding their people, and those people are never the "adults". Absolute fracture between world of adults, where danger and punishment live, and the world of nature where you might die, but it wouldn't be from malice (see Blair Braverman on this topic).
This is really fascinating to think about..