At Pitt’s Fuel & Fuddle reading series, which I cohost with Adri Ramirez, we asked attendees to write down the name of their favorite writer. (On nametags, which they wore, and later we had a drawing for the night’s prize). The room was full of creative writing grad students — poetry, fiction, and nonfiction — and this is who they became:
Orson Scott Card
Bernard Cooper
John D’Agata
Don Delillo
Joan Didion
Annie Dillard
Ernest Hemingway
L. Ron Hubbard
Etgar Keret
Tracy Kidder
Haven Kimmel
Yusef Komunyakaa
Milan Kundera
Ben Lerner
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Vladimir Nabokov
Marcel Proust
John Steinbeck
James Tate
Kurt Vonnegut
Richard Yates
With the exception of a joker or two, I like this as a syllabus. It’s more diverse and contemporary than the readings I’ve had to read so far in school. And now that I think about it, I’d take them all — reading L. Ron Hubbard could actually be interesting.
It’s compare and contrast. In order to fully appreciate a Hemingway or Nabokov, it helps to read … well, put your writers to avoid here.
That’s where Hubbard would fit in, fo sure.
Only correction to the list I’d make would be to put Gaddis in instead of Yates.