Re: New Thread--Who Inspired You

**"* S* <m*@gmail.com>**

On Jan 4, 2008 5:40 AM, <loisdan@juno.com> wrote:

>  Now to the creative side.  Who or what inspired you to write, speak
> > or perform?  From where did the spark or epiphany come?
>
> I feel a bit odd, responding to this, because I do more lurking than
contributing on the list. However...

Like everyone else who has responded, I am a life-long reader and writer. My
first influences range from E. Nesbitt (*The Story of the **Amulet, The Five
Children and It, The Enchanted Castle*), T.H. White (*Mistress Masham's
Repose*), to Dr. Seuss's *To Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street*. By the
time I was ten, I was devouring what are now referred to as classics in
American and British literature and was an avid  reader of "Fantasy and
Science Fiction," "Amazing" and other pulps of that ilk. (My dad was a
science fiction reader and sometime writer, so the magazines were always
around.) But it was T.H. White's physical description of Maria's governess
that inspired me with the wish to portray reality with such clarity that it
became "more real than real." --At the time, that was the phrase I used to
describe what I thought of as good writing.

I wrote plays from the time I was in elementary school and enlisted my
brother and whomever else I could find to put them on--we got good at
playing multiple roles and doing very quick costuming changes, and I wrote
with those limitations in mind--foreshadowing being able to write under
publishers' limitations, maybe. I also wrote my share of poetry and stories
and started god knows how many novels before the age of 16. I won the a
prize from Scholastic for a story when I was in the 4th grade. At the age of
15, I was accepted as an apprentice with an equity summer stock company and
fully believed that I would become a stage actress. And...life intervened in
various ways that I won't go on about. Ten years later, I was living in
Canada, unmarried, and pregnant. Obviously, theatre was no longer a good
option--not much was, as a matter of fact. So I walked down the road and
talked to John Harrison, the manager of Mylora Farms. He was an organic
produce farmer who had converted in 1936. We hit it off--my mother ran a
small nursery and never "went chemical," so I knew the techniques and was
already a competent grower--I had been her right hand for many years and had
absorbed the skills. John hired me to help him teach farming skills to
people who wanted to "go back to the land" but who had never been there in
the first place--this was 1971. So I began my career as a horticultural
teacher and farmer in that way. I didn't even think about writing more than
grant proposals and research reports until I was pregnant for the second
time, in 1979, and was forbidden to lift bales of peatmoss or carry crates
of squash. Forced to sit down, I put my greenhouse course into book form. It
took a few years to get it published, but in 1984, Rodale took it. Since
then, I've written horticultural and agricultural books on and off and have,
in the last few years, broadened to editing a fairly wide range of
nonfiction books. I feel the impulse to write fiction stirring again, too,
so it could be that I expand again in the next couple of years.

Miranda
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