You may find your voice by immersion into the voices of others, the notes, chords and threads that stick with you and haunt you and of which you would never have been aware, or exposed, or blessed had you not opened the pages and explored the workings of their minds.

I refused to read Vonnegut because, well, because, and yet when I was forced to read Breakfast of Champions for a class I met a kindred spirit whose voice can be heard through my voice almost fifty years later. I read Joyce because, well, he was the example wtiters read. (I discovered later I read Joyce but others claimed to have read him). I've been blessed by writers I was eager to explore and by writers I would rather have avoided.

Shame should not motivate so much as the desire to discover trails paved by those who share the voices of authors long ago lost as will, one day, we will lose many of the voices of authors we explored.

Joyce, Hemingway, Lessing, Proust, Yeats, Eliot, Stein and Sexton, Roethke, Brautigan, Vonnegut, Coover, Barth and Barthelme, Perkins Gilman, Sebold, cummings, Wealty and my favorites O'Connor, Percy and Pynchon. Even Connie Willis and Wallace Wood. You might find echoes of all of them and hundreds more in my voice, but not because I held him in the high esteem I hold Yeats.

We explore and sample not because literary writers are better than us but because we find in their words the inspiration to fashion our own and the cradt to polish them with care.