Charles Jensen | Writer

Here are the things that impacted me as a writer this year and influenced my work in my new manuscript. In no order:

• Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
• the Todd Haynes film Poison (thanks again for sending it, Em; it was life-changing)
• Juliana Spahr’s thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs
• Panic! At the Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (in terms of narrative)
• The Blair Witch Project
• Denise Duhamel’s poem “Carbós Frescoes” in Two and Two
• A telephone romance
• The Luca Cambiaso exhibit of “Venus and Adonis” pantings at the Blanton art museum in Austin, Texas.
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and his interviews with François Truffaut
• Memories of my high school physics class
• Rereading the journal I kept in 1998
• Paul Morris’s frequent conversations at work about false documents in literature and film
• the ghazal
• The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.
• Conversations about poetry with Stephanie Lenox and Richard Siken
• Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
• the production design from the films The Rocketeer and The Manhattan Project
• the photo shoots on America’s Next Top Model and runway shows on Project Runway