Assignment: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.


Result:
1. God (if you count Him as the author of the Bible, then I have to include it)
2. Judy Blume (very funny to write that right after God)
3. Anne Lamott (seriously love that woman)
4. Jane Austen
5. C S Lewis (I still remember my 4th grade teacher reading The Magician's Nephew aloud to us and I hung onto e-v-e-r-y word)
6. Michael Pollan
7. Jimmy Carter
8. Betty Friedan
9. Whoever wrote "What To Expect The First Year" because I pretty much lived on that book after adopting Carver. I had no idea what I was doing.
10. Robert McCloskey
11. Beverly Cleary
12. Jim Wallis
13. Flannery O'Connor
14. E B White
15. J K Rowling (you didn't think I'd forget her, did you?)

Can you tell my favorite genre is children's literature? It just brings back so many warm memories of feeling safe and secure in a book, being caught up in a good story. To this day, few things delight me more than re-reading Ramona The Brave or Charlotte's Web. It's soothing. And other author's on my list helped me define my life choices, philosophies, and faith. It was hard to stop at 15, though. I think 75 might have been a better number.