MARK JARMAN: I encourage students to read extensively and to not worry about being influenced. If they were in any other art, learning to play music or compose it, dancing, playing a musical instrument, they would be encouraged to listen and watch other performers. It seems to be only in writing that you encounter the student who says, I don't want to read too much. I'm afraid of being influenced. And my answer to them is that you can't be.
If you read a great poet like Elizabeth Bishop, and even try to write like her, you never will. You will write like yourself. But you will find that she has shown you the way on certain, things that for otherwise, might be dead ends. So there's that purposes of craft, learning the craft.
But the other thing is that, if I learned most of what I know about life from reading all kinds of things-- novels, poems, all kinds of things. That's where you learn about the wider world.
So the other thing that sometimes is difficult to deal with is with the student who can't relate to a work of literature because it does not correspond with his or her experience. And I say to them, that's why you read it, to find out what it was like to live in a household in Moscow during the Napoleonic Wars. None of us knows what that's like to be the Rustovs or to live in a small French provincial town in the middle of the 19th century, like Emma Bovary. We want to find out what that was like.
So there are two great reasons to read. One, that's how you learn your craft. And two, that's how you learn what life is about at all times and places. The remarkable thing, though, is you find out that it hasn't changed much.