(Guest post by Beth Alvarado)

To write something about influence for the Marvelous Paragraph Project seems serendipitous, since Jillian in the Borderlands began as an exercise in imitation, to see if could I imitate all four writers whose work I was teaching in one story. Because this experiment gave me the constraints of the book—that each story in it had to be told from various characters’ perspectives—it also gave me something invisible and liberating: the permission to follow the voices and to let go of other intentions in order to do so. I think of this as a kind of “fast writing,” where you tap into a voice, listen, and then the story unspools. Of course, in the end, it’s harder than that but, when you’re writing, it feels a little metaphysical or magical, a little addicting.