We asked our graduating creative writers about their influences and inspirations, and how those may have grown over the course of the two-year MFA degree.
When I came into this program, I was fairly new to literary fiction. I’d only been reading and studying it for a handful of years. I’d known since I was in elementary school that I wanted to be a writer and my earliest influences were the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series. Genre fiction was what drew me to reading, and later on, writing. But once I started reading literary fiction in college, writers such as Charles Baxter and ZZ Packer, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily a certain genre of fiction I was drawn to. It was complex, intriguing characters.
My fiction is definitely character driven. I love delving into a character’s ambitions and desires, their flaws and fears. I also love fiction that is a little bizarre, that has elements that are a bit different or other, that explores people, places, and histories with a dark twist. During my time in the MFA program at UNCG, I discovered authors such as Carmen Maria Machado and Chloe Benjamin, both of whom use a combination of these elements in their fiction. Ottessa Moshfegh and Mary Gaitskill became my go-to writers when I needed inspiration to create weird characters and guidance on how to thrust them into even weirder situations without turning my readers away. Rebecca Makkai’s novels helped me understand how the history of a place or between characters could have a direct impact on modern day tribulations.
These last two years certainly helped me figure out what I was drawn to in fiction and how I wanted to incorporate those elements into my own stories. Everything I brought to workshop was received with overwhelming support and encouragement, and I never once felt like there was an idea that was too weird or too daring to submit. My instructors and cohort seemed open to the idea of experimentation and genre-bending fiction, which gave me the room to figure out who I was as a writer.
Ashlee Shefer is an MFA graduate in fiction from UNC Greensboro. Her work has appeared in The Allegheny Review. She spends her days in a small apartment with a black cat named Salem, drinking too much coffee and creating strange stories to avoid the outside world.
