THE MUSICIAN WHO MOST UNEXPECTEDLY INFLUENCED MY WORK

This would be Bruce (as in Springsteen). As anyone who's lived a little while knows, life takes the most unexpected turns, and brings the most unexpected people into your life. One of the unexpected people whose music has entered my life has been Bruce.

In the eighties I'm afraid I never paid much attention to him-I was far too much of a Durannie!-but I liked most of his songs that I heard on the radio.

Through the most unexpected of circumstances I saw him perform live for the first time in 2002 (I saw him two more times in the next three years, each concert completely by chance) and started listening to his music. I never expected to get into his work--aside from Born to Run, which I along with a gazillion people loved, I thought his songs would have no effect on me, as my background and generation are totally different from his. To my utter surprise, I connected with practically all of his songs.

His music kind of fell into my life as I was writing my collection of short poetic fiction, The Grace of Small Ghosts. I consider this collection more an album of songs, as several pieces are very short, dense, and lyrical. Nearly all are meditations on the nature of faith and its obstacles-namely fear, impatience, and the self. One of the pieces has several references to his own lyrics, and three others are somewhat influenced by him. But perhaps more than the influence his writing style has had on my work, it's his philosophy on writing which had a huge impact on me. Simply put, he just kept writing. I haven't read much on him, but from what I've heard, he just wanted to give his work away to the world. And I understand that.

Favorite Springsteen lyric: There are far too many to mention here! But for this occasion-the creation of my own website to give my work to the world, after 8 years of sticking to my path through endless rejection and without a single word published----it would have to be the following lines from "Growin' Up"

"Well I strode all alone through a fall-out zone and came out with my soul untouched......

Well, my feet they finally took root in the earth, but I got me a nice little place in the stars....."

Need anything more be said?