If you Could Meet one Author, who would it be?

I really mean author/writer/poet. Past or present. Dead or alive.

If you glance over at my Bookish Bucket List you’ll see that there are a few authors I want to meet. It’s a nice little list of different authors, but there’s one I’d like to meet over all the rest. I talked about him yesterday. Robert B. Parker.

He’s influenced the entire genre that is detective fiction. I can see bits of his characters and style in most detective stories I read. And I’ve read interviews from bestselling authors of today who admit that their detectives were heavily influenced by Spenser. Parker shaped the modern detective story like no one else has.

But the thing is that I wouldn’t want to pick his brain about his characters or stories or any of that stuff. I’d just want to have a conversation with him. About anything. I might ask him about his family. Or about why he started writing in the first place. Or what he viewed as his single greatest accomplishment, writing-related or otherwise. I’d simply want to get to know the man behind one of the great characters of the last fifty years. But at no point would I ask for writing advice, because he’s more than just an author to me. He managed to influence me without ever knowing it in many more things besides my own writing.

What about you? If you could meet one writer/author/poet from any period, who would it be?

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On this day in 2014 I published Listen While you…Write?.