Sources of Inspiration

I've been thinking lately about where my inspiration for certains stories or poems comes from.  Sometimes I just get a feeling and then a thought follows that, and that thought births other thoughts and then there's a big thought family that I have to excise from my brain in textual form before these thoughts commandeer all my other brain functions.  But why/when does this happen?

Well I've figured out two of my inspiration sources: nature and music.  I grew up in a nature-loving, musical family, and so--whether by genetics or conditioning or both--I grew up to love both in my own way.  I grew up going on family camping trips and hikes, and roughing around my best friend's farm: rafting down his creek, riding his horses, leaping around in the hayloft.  I came to appreciate nature in all its shapes and forms, finding beauty in all things small and large which many people would dismiss or even find repulsive.  And then once I started thinking more deeply about things, I saw connections in what I found in nature with things in real life.  And thus most of my poems were and still are formed.

My Mom was a music ed major in college.  She heads our church choir and she gives lessons in piano, guitar, and voice (and she still has a pretty good voice and piano hands herself).  My sisters both sing, and one plays piano and clarinet.  I sing and play the trumpet, a little piano, and recently picked up the tenor recorder.  Even my dad used to play trumpet, and still knows stuff about music.  All my exteneded family have some musical abilities.  It's in our blood.  I get a lot of (vague, preliminary) inspiration for stories from listening to instrumental (especially orchestral/symphonic) music.  It has to be wordless, because I'm an advocate of the old adage "where words fail, music speaks." I still love my indie rock bands and local acoustic groups for their deep, poetic lyrics and quirky sound, but that's more for entertainment's sake than deep reflection or inspiration.  When I listen to instrumental/symphonic music, I tend to hear it as a soundtrack, and a vague narrative tends to form in my head depending on what the music sounds like.  Many people experience the reverse of this: they see a movie, love the soundtrack, then purchase the soundtrack: then when they listen to certain tracks, they can "feel" what's happening in the movie even though the movie itself is nowhere to be found.  It also happens that, since I'm a pretty melancholy, pensive fellow by nature, a lot of the symphonic music I like is that way also, and so a lot of my stories end up that way.  Sort of calm, introspective and bittersweet.  That's what I strive for; also I strive to make my prose have an emotional depth, since that's what I respond to.  I can't write funny prose...it's just not in me.  When I do I kind of scare myself because it's so out of the ordinary. 

My two favorite songs of late are October by Eric Whitacre and Persis by James L. Hosay.  October is a gorgeously melancholy piece with powerful full-ensemble swells that really get at the heart of October and the Fall season...it captures (for me) the sights of autumn in sound, and on a deeper level that sort of bittersweet fading feeling of things passing away and time moving on.  Persis is one of those totally epic songs that's really long and sweeps through a huge variety of emotions, from fear/adrenaline, excitement, deep contentedness and extreme emotional distress.  It has an exciting beginning, and a sweet, melancholy oboe solo in the middle followed by a slow crescendo of building emotional intensity, more instruments adding their voice, and the middle section climaxes in this hugely epic emotional peak that never gets old.  The song ends with a fast-paced interweaving of all the musical themes that came before: you have the relentless drums, the frantic woodwinds, and the desperate brass all vying for attention and the whole ending is just phenomenal.  I want my stories someday to be able to evoke those emotions from readers.

I also get a fair amount of inspiration from people-watching.  Like yesterday, I went to the coffee shop alone to read and think, and I saw out of the corner of my eye a frantic college girl rushing out of the shop talking on the phone, and she dropped one of her red gloves and left it behind, totally forgotten.  I couldn't stop looking at and thinking about that lovely red glove, and how she seemed so intent on it before she got whatever desperate call she got and then totally forgot about the red glove, leaving it on the dirty floor.  So I made a note of it to see if I could do something with it later, and sure enough I wrote a poem about it. 

But anyway, I've talked enough.  What do you, anonymous readers, think are your sources of inspiration?