Tell Your Story

Gabriel says that the most refined instruction he received here was from Adam Johnson, Professor of Creative Writing in the Stanford University Creative Writing department, with whom he studied for several years. Adam is the author of The Orphan Master's Son (which won the Pulitzer Prize), and the story collectionFortune Smiles (which won the National Book Award), among other works. Adam has an uncanny and sometimes disturbing ability to enter into the mind's of deeply strange protagonists, guided by a deep understanding of the yearning that drives character. He changed the way that Gabriel writes stories, by teaching the craft of fiction through the lens of the yearning of character. Each of the following writers broke open a new dimension in storytelling for Gabriel. James Baldwin, whose searing self-awareness and social awareness shines a light on his own deep interior terrain, and what it was like for him as a black intellectual in the United States. George Saunders writes of a ludicrous alternative reality on the cusp of absurdist science fiction whose borders come to more and more closely resemble our own. What he wrote 15 years ago that seemed absurdist now seems more like prophecy. Toni Morrison taught Gabriel how to write a trauma narrative. When we experience overwhelming events, they break linear time, and defy logical explanation. Toni teaches us, among other things, the art of telling these stories. If we continued to the next plane of citing influences, people whose writing we thought was fantastic, the list would expand to probably fifty writers, so lest we leave someone out whom we admire, we'll yield here.