Joyce Carol Oates on Influences 7-25-21

 Another find on Narrative Magazine: Joyce Carol Oates' In the Absence of Mentors/Monsters; Notes On Writerly Influences, She wrote that she never exactly had a mentor, but she describes instead a rival and a friend as influential people. Then she describes her greatest early influence - and explains at length the strengths of this influence:

Most of the children’s storybooks and young-adult novels my grandmother gave me have faded from my memory, like the festive holiday occasions themselves. The great single—singular—book of my childhood, if not of my entire life, is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which my grandmother gave me when I was eight years old, and which, with full-page illustrations by John Tenniel, in a slightly oversized edition with a transparent plastic cover, exerted a powerful influence on my susceptible child’s imagination, a kind of hypnotic spell that lasted for years.

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