Twenty-five writers

in

From Geoffrey Philp:

The deal is to name 25 writers who have influenced you, and then tag 25 people.Hear ye the gospel according to Fragano: "Influence" does not mean the same thing as "enjoy a lot."

(Just to note -- this is going to be cross-posted with Scavella's Blogsphere so I can cross both my writing networks)As with everyone else, before, in no particular order:

  1. T. S. Eliot - for blowing my mind
  2. Kamau Brathwaite - for blowing my mind again
  3. Ngugi wa Thing'o - for inspiring me to write plays
  4. Chinua Achebe - for Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People
  5. Toni Morrison - for just being
  6. William Shakespeare (no, for real) - what I said about Morrison
  7. W. B. Yeats - for channelling ghosts and writing great verse
  8. C. S. Lewis - for Narnia and concision
  9. Bronislaw Malinowski - for participant observation, the Trobriand ethnographies, and theory I can believe in
  10. Claude Levi-Strauss - for Tristes Tropiques
  11. Victor Turner - for the ritual process, for liminality
  12. Edmund Leach - for the structural circles of language
  13. Marcel Mauss - for the gift
  14. Maurice Bloch - for ritual violence
  15. Marion Bethel - for singlemindedness
  16. Winston Saunders - for Horse
  17. Lanford Wilson - for The Rimers of Eldritch
  18. Obediah Michael Smith - for his epiphanies
  19. Earl Lovelace - for the Dragon
  20. Ian Gregory Strachan - for Just Doing It
  21. James Baldwin - for language and the courage to leave
  22. George Lamming - for blowing my mind
  23. August Wilson - for all of them. All of them.
  24. June Jordan - for teaching me essays could be interesting
  25. Virginia Woolf - for influencing my style even though I hate to read hers

My 25 tag-ees:

... I can so count.25 is a long, long list.Add yourself if you want to. Comments are open, wide wide open.