I am listening to my Grandfathers and Grandmothers who have walked these trails before to get a clue, a sense, a hint at something true, a message, some critical piece of insight that has passed me by in the neutered, algorithmic modern drudgery of my simple, suburban life. 

I think once you’ve written enough you can’t not write like yourself. So I never worry about influence as much as embrace influence.

There is a limit to what we can experience on our own, to what we can know, to what our minds and our bodies make sense of, an edge up to where we can go, a door that can never be open. Literature opens that door. It erases that limit.