Richard Wolkomir & Joyce Rogers Wolkomir

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This is Nosmo the corgi's story. 

 

We're in it, too, Joyce and Richard, because that's how Nosmo wanted it--we three together. 

 

It's a story about finding your true home. 

 

It's about finding your true people. 

 

It's about struggling through darkness to come out under the stars. 

 

This story is joyous. 

 

It's a love story.

We recently gave a talk on our work, and a question came up, as it often does: "What influenced you?"

 

For a moment, we both went blank, stumped. Probably the questioners wondered what authors cast a spell on us, but there were so many, and none became a template.

 

Joyce, for instance, home from school, collapsed into her father's easy chair with Moby Dick, utterly enthralled. Yet, she's never felt compelled to write about white whales and harpoons.

 

Richard read a thousand comic books, plus the Great Books in his family's living room shelves, bought by the yard for décor purposes, and yet felt no urge to write about a Batman superhero or to mimic War and Peace.

 

Here are some of our real influences, and you could surely list your own:

 

For Richard, there was the Hudson River, surging by his little factory town, so deep and dangerous, and the shark-finned Plymouths and Chevys he yearned to own, and all those rock-and-roll songs, with guitars and saxophones.

 

For Joyce, there was Canandaigua Lake in summer, diving into soft turquoise waters, and First Grade, when she already could read and nearly died of boredom, listening to her classmates struggle with a's, t's, and f's.

 

Older now—there's a funeral procession far up the Nile and a horn-honking duel on a Roman street too narrow for two cars to pass and bright sunlight at midnight on Baffin Island, while kids ride bikes.  

 

And so many dogs.

 

Here's the point: we're made—all of us—partly of what we've seen and suffered and savored during our lives, and it's good, when you're quiet, to let those moments slip into your busy mind.

 

Could be you'll write a story.