New Thread--Who Inspired You

**"* H* <g*@charter.net>**

We've had a wonderful discussion during the last weeks about business plans and business side of garden communications.  Thank you everyone.  I learned much.

Now to the creative side.  Who or what inspired you to write, speak or perform?  From where did the spark or epiphany come?

In my case, it was John Steinbeck.  He wrote so vividly about the Monterrey Bay and Salinas areas of California that it awoke my latent writing ability.  It was easy to mimic him by writing descriptive narratives.  In my case, at 16, I wrote about the towering Ponderosa pines that grew around our family home that backed up to Angeles Crest National Forest.  And, I wrote about my fantasies...growing flowers, cutting them, arranging them.  My Dad was strictly a vegetable, grass and flowering shrub guy, and my mother never gardened.  But, I loved flowers.  So I fanaticized on paper.  Next thing I knew, I was elected editor of the high school newspaper and my writing career was launched.  

When I was 25, I talked my new husband into taking a trip up the coast to Monterrey Bay so I could see where Steinbeck's characters in Cannery Row and Sweet Tuesday lived.  The commercialization of the area hadn't taken place yet.  We spent the night in Pacific Grove in a hotel where we could hear the lighthouse fog horn and see the ocean lap against the shore, I retraced the steps over the railroad tracks, past the rusted cannery pipes to the chicken coop Mack and the boys called home.  I spent hours that night in the hotel writing my thoughts down in a journal.  My new husband was less than thrilled, but I couldn't stop writing.

There is only one other writer who has moved me as much as Steinbeck.  James Lee Burke writes of the Louisiana bayous with such passion that you can easily look past the violence in his characters.  His narratives make you cry, because they are so vivid and touching.  He's influencing my latest writing for the web.

I'm done telling my story.  Tell us yours.
Doreen Howard
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