Bowie, My Muse

David. Not David Bowie. Not Mr. Bowie. Not even Bowie. David. That’s what my parents call him. For instance, Dad: “I saw David on the Regis Philbin show the other morning.” Mom: “They’re doing an interview with David on the radio right now. Just thought you might want to know.” That’s how close they feel to him. And to me.

For years as a besotted and music-crazed teen-ager, I plastered my bedroom walls with Bowie posters and song lyrics typed on individual sheets of spiral notebook paper (along with others from the Clash, Pretenders, Beatles, Boomtown Rats, and Elvis Costello). My friend Melissa and I dressed up in cheap tuxedos and sat in the first row with scalped tickets for his concerts in the ‘80s, throwing a dozen roses on the stage at one point and holding up an old bed sheet spraypainted with a Turkish greeting from one of his albums. (I am proud, not even embarrassed, to note that he put one of the roses between his teeth and stopped mid-performance to read the sheet message aloud. Sigh.) I even wrote my senior high school dissertation on Bowie. It got an “A,” and I sent it to a vanity publishing house. It was never printed, but Mom began referring to it as my first book. To this day, years after living in London not far from his old Brixton stomping ground, I keep Ziggy Stardust a constant on my iPod playlist. And I try not to get too jealous when my significant other tells the story of how he met Bowie at a Manhattan party years ago. Maybe a little jealous.

Writers are often asked about the writers who influenced them, and my co-authors and I are starting to get that question as we prepare for interviews and fill out questionnaires for our publishers and book-related Web sites. I sometimes have a hard time with it. Don’t get me wrong. I love books. Love to read. Admire many authors — from Annie Proulx and Michael Chabon to Tolstoy, Alice Munro (heartbreaking first short story in her new book, by the way), and Jeannette Walls. And experience great joy in my daughter’s love of what passes for literature at age 2: Curious George is the livre du jour. (BTW, Steve Miller Band the music of the week.)

But for me, visual artists and musicians like Bowie can just as well be the ones who give me inspiration and energy. They elevate my mood when it’s low. They make me excited to write when I don’t want to. They can be famous strangers or close friends (or famous friends) — Adam Rothberg, a Boston-based musician whose songwriting has been compared to Paul McCartney, or Ann Tracy, a New York artist who creates glorious paintings, or Janet Echelman, whose ethereal nets will be showcased at the Vancouver Winter Games. I am stunned by their ability to visualize and create art or music that looks like it has always had a place in the world, or should have, when in fact it was spun from imagination and culled from thin air. By doing so, they give me the courage to think that maybe I can, too. Or at least it’s worth trying. I find the pain of not creating is worse than creating, even if winds up on the cutting room floor. As it often does.

And so, I turned to Lucy Kaplansky, the wonderful folksinger who kvells at every live performance over her daughter (adopted from China not so very long ago), to carry me through much of the writing of my story in Three Wishes. So did Dar Williams and Richard Shindell, her former partners in Cry Cry Cry, along with Bruce Springsteen and Antje Duvekot for some tough rewrites. Alexi Murdoch, whose music was featured in the film “Away We Go,” kept me going through final edits and plays even now in the background as I write this. My co-authors Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and I used the Bowie songwriting technique to brainstorm a subtitle, moving around dozens of words on individual pieces of paper on a countertop until we found a string of words that seemed just right.

In high school and college, I could study for tests and write school papers to the drumbeat and heavy guitar of Led Zeppelin and Boston. Now, though, it’s more gentle strumming and lyrical storytelling that transports me. I’m as picky about what’s playing as some writers are about starting their work with a #2 pencil and a yellow legal pad, or at a desk facing southeast. Once it starts playing, I begin to see my story almost as a film reel set to a soundtrack, and eventually the music fades until I lift my pen or stop typing and hear it once again.