Nash Summers asked Amy Rae Durreson:

Reawakening changed my perspective on reading and writing in the best way possible. The writing alone is enough for me to gush over, but I'll try not to. What has been your biggest influence to date that's influenced your writing?

Amy Rae Durreson Firstly, thank you. That's a wonderful and rather humbling thing to hear. Secondly, I must admit that I couldn't name any one influence which shaped my writing. I'm a gluttonous reader, and it all feeds into my writing eventually. I love good craftsmanship in writing (at the moment, I'm very slowly working my way through Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel books, which are too well-written to rush). Fantasy-wise, Patricia McKillip taught me how to be lyrical (The Cygnet and the Firebird was the book that convinced me that dragons belong in deserts), but I could just as easily point at Diana Wynne Jones or EM Forster or Ursula K Le Guin. I suppose, if I had to pick one thing, I'd probably point to reading Le Guin's The Language of the Night when I was fifteen, because it was the thing that hit me over the head with the realisation that stories about dragons could also be (in fact, had to be) stories that mattered (if you've never read any of her writing about fantasy, start here, with "A Message About Messages". I don't write like Le Guin, but she shaped the way I think about writing.

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