MQUP Top 5: A reading list for Adrian McKerracher’s “What It Means to Write”

Below we present another installment of our monthly blog segment, the MQUP Top 5. Each month we ask an MQUP author to compile a list of five books that inspired, informed, or pair well with their most recent publication with us.

For April, Adrian McKerracher shares five works that in some way influenced his new book, What It Means to Write: Creativity and Metaphor.

I think of books as prisms. Each one is made of surfaces of light, a composite of other books. From different languages, times, and places many books refract in a new book, making the book possible, bringing it into being. The new book spins. The other books travel wild and fast across the walls of the room, across the windowpane, dizzying the world with light.

My book asks, what is creativity? and it uses metaphor to imagine possibilities. One response is that creativity is a process of combination. Bring two ideas together and you get a new idea. Bring more ideas together and you might get a new way of thinking. The result is greater than the sum of its parts. To me a book is the same: it’s a gathering place, a conversation, between the care and curiosity that has come before it. As the author, I feel like the host, or the one who hangs the prism. I am also the one who spins it.

So much light converged to make my book possible. For years I collected little rainbows of thought from writers I admire. Sometimes I can say exactly what colour, what words, they gave me; other times it’s just a feeling, a sense of movement, energy, luminescence. One of those early books was Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar (Pantheon). Remember Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books? This one is for grown-ups. It invites you to throw the stone of your reading again and again across the pages, making each time a story as unique as the reader. I remember finding Hopscotch after an eight-month trip from Chile to Mexico, astonished that books like this were possible. I didn’t know it could be done that way. Maybe I could do it that way too.

Years later I read a book that shared a spectrum with Cortázar’s: The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño (Picador). Told in the form of a diary and 52 monologues, it patches together the adventures of two young poets finding their way in Mexico City and beyond. The cadence is hypnotic. A sense of momentum plunges ever forward. Each account has a life of its own, yet together new meaning is made. Could I do that with a question?

Another rainbow of light was tucked away in my suitcase when I went to New York for three months, and only allowed myself one book to read: The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector (New Directions). Her voice is intimate and alien at the same time. I have the feeling she understands me better than I will ever understand her. Each time I study her prism, it seems a different colour. I get the sense that she is writing her way through being, that writing is for her always attempting something impossible and there is beauty in the inadequacy of language. She gives me a world where I want to linger.

It was Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical writing, especially “A Berlin Chronicle,” that showed me how to walk with a prism in my hand. The way he explores a city, in memories and in maps, shows me a method for how to be in two times at once: the past of experience and the present of refracting meaning. I wondered, could I do that with Buenos Aires? Could I be there and remember it at the same time?

Another ray of light swung into my life with The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf Press). In form and content, it reminds me that ideas and experience are complimentary. Merging visceral life with lucid thought, she shows that the essay-memoir is alive and kicking, that it can do things that neither mode can do on its own. She uses urgent, electric fragments. Something speaks across the silences between the vignettes. Juxtaposition, placement, and timing matter. I have rarely seen a small book that feels so big.

These are only five dots of whirling light that have inspired my book. There are so many more. No doubt you’ll see others refracted, even ones I don’t know. When I set out to examine how metaphors limit and liberate ways of understanding creativity, I had no idea how intimate and personal the story would become. Looking back, I can see how indebted I am to the lights that brightened my way. It is humbling—and so very exciting—to imagine that What It Means to Write might light someone else’s way, too, one day. Until then, spin this prism with me.