Influences

• My influences are chiefly dramatic. They include mentors like Maria Irene Fornes and Mary Ann Colias. Playwrights like Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams. Bertolt Brecht and Shakespeare. The Jacobean tragedians. The Greeks: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. And current colleagues like Erik Ehn, Denis Johnson, Sarah Ruhl, and Culture Clash.

Favorite Books

• So many. Where do I begin?

  The Iliad. The Odyssey. The Aeneid. The Divine Comedy. Shakespeare. Moby Dick. Light in August.

  The poetry of Sharon Olds. And Jean Valentine. And Robert Lowell. And Federico Garcia Lorca. And Seamus Heaney.

  The writing of Richard Feynman.

  The novels of Cormac McCarthy. TC Boyle. Marilynne Robinson. Joseph Conrad.

  The Good Soldier. A Streetcar Named Desire. True West. Saramago's Blindness. DeLillo's Underworld. A Coney Island of the Mind. DiPrima's Loba. Angels in America.

Favorite Authors

• I mentioned some: Faulkner, McCarthy, Olds, Boyle.

  But also Murakami, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Sam Shepard.

What I'm Reading

• I just finished "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson. Before that, Boyle's "Water Music." And before that, "The Secret Agent" by Conrad. I also reread an old favorite, "Life Studies and For the Union Dead" by Lowell.