This year I’m affiliated with a humanities institute. I get a gorgeous office and lots of time to do my own writing, in return for participating in the intellectual life of the center. Monday afternoons are one of the times we have events, and yesterday was an installment of the Distinguished Writers Series. Maud Casey and Karen Russell came to read and discuss their work. In advance of the event we were given Karen Russell’s most recent book of short stories, called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I’m not much of a short story reader (I love novels, but I generally avoid short stories), but since I had the book and since she was showing up, I started reading it. I was immediately captivated – all the stories in the book were inventive in unexpected ways (young Japanese girls being turned into silkworks; a stable in which half the horses were former US presidents) that, against all odds, completely worked. The reading was great – Maud Casey read from a forthcoming novel inspired by an actual man who wandered Europe in what later came to be named a fugue state, at the dawn of the age of psychiatry. I loved the rhythm of her words, and paid attention to how she used repetition and change in the rhythm of language. Karen Russell read the first half of the last story in her book (which I hadn’t yet gotten to, so it was great to hear it first in her voice). One of the things I love in her writing is her offhanded comments that shine a laser on the point. One of the vampires says to the other one “soo . . . I guess you’re not a morning person,” or Rutherford B Hayes as a horse, trying to make sense of the barn he finds himself in (and trying to figure out if it is the afterlife) thinks of the man in the stable “Surely God would not have faded crimson dots on his underclothes?” But what really struck me when she read was that, despite how mundane the action might be, she somehow had us on the edges of our seats, wanting to know what came next in the plot. It was also fascinating to hear the two of them talk about their writing processes. They touched on how their early work was necessarily derivative of the writers they were reading, and how you learn to get past that. Maud mentioned, though, that she had to do a lot of research for her new novel, so the trick was to absorb the information, but then get far enough away from it that she could write it in her own voice. Hearing Karen speak was particularly captivating. She’s really young and extremely accomplished and yet was completely humble and (genuinely) self-deprecating. And enthusiastic – she had questions to ask of Maud during the Q&A, and it was clear that she was just so in love with the world of writing and wanted to keep learning more, despite having achieved more than most writers would even dream of. I realized that, in addition to just enjoying the readings and conversation in their own right, I was listening to all of this as a songwriter. Loving the sound of the words that Maud put together, and the deep engagement with characters and plot that Karen could generate in the shortest of stories. And, in particular, marveling at their engagement with their craft – their love of what they were doing, their willingness to revise and revise and revise and then put their unique, quirky, voices out there. I want to continue to learn from the writers (of all sorts) who inspire me, and enthusiastically embrace my own voice.