I first started writing and impressed my teachers in third or fourth grade but I really did not start reading for enjoyment outside of school until after fourth grade. At that time I read a Wind in the Willows and started reading a lot of science fiction like Asimov, Heinlein, and then fantasy like Tolkein and McCaffery. I loved that stuff and did not read anything "literary" until high school when I started reading Vonnegut obsessively, Doestevsky, and Salinger. I then read Hesse, and started my English literature career at Penn with Melville, Hawthorne, and Wallace Stevens.In high school I read part of a book called A Journal Workshop by Ira Progoff and I started to keep a daily journal. This continued in college until I started writing poetry, then went to London in 1987 and became friends with some poets, writers, and artists who encouraged me. I started writing my first novel in 1988 inspired by my readings of Aeschylus and his Oresteia; my final version of that novel, Blue, does resemble the madness of Orestes in some ways.I also read Joyce and Beckett who influenced me and much theory and philosophy which, for better or worse, effected me as well.In 1989 I also started painting and this would help me in times of writers' block or when I needed a break from words or writing over the years. I'm inspired by film and my work has been described as cinematic. Films like Blue, Red, White, Apocaplypse Now, and the Matrix have inspired me. It has also been described as poetic, and I have written a lot of poetry over the years. I focus on novels now because of the challenge and the freedom of the novel in the 21st century, which is really a wide open field of possibility. Anyone who tells you otherwise knows little about the novel as a form. Other writers I love are Kafka, Broch, Kundera, Sarraute, Sartre, Camus, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Bowles. William Burroughs and Neil Stephenson have had an impact.I have received various reactions to my writing, both negative and positive. I like the comparisons to beautiful prose poetry, a dreamlike quality, and Kerouac. My new novel, In the Flat Field, is about a world that is ending, or being completely changed, because of the environment and the way people have changed the earth. The approach that the characters take is extreme, but it is one possible future. This book was inspired by the death by overdose of my friend Ann Carter who was a very talented artist and wonderful person. In some ways, or mainly this novel was my way of working through that grief.My website is www.charleskeatts.com for more info.Read more about this authorRead less about this author