Spotlight On Writers – Stark Hunter

I grew up in a small town sixteen miles from Los Angeles. President Richard Nixon had his first law office in my hometown of Whittier. His wife, Pat, taught business courses at Whittier High. My mother took Pat Ryan’s typing class in 1939. The streets of my origination were always busy it seemed, with families on the move, going to the business establishments, churches, and schools that defined our mid-20th Century life in Whittier. My house was located near an old, run-down graveyard, Whittier’s first cemetery, founded in the late 1880’s. Inside were old crumbling tombstones and overgrown weeds. A barbed-wire fence surrounded the confines. It was the spookiest, scariest place in the entire world, or so I thought at the time. I later wrote a book about this haunted locale. It was this unique, small-town setting from which my creative mind emerged.

Music. Preferably Erik Satie music. My imagination invariably experiences a shuddering of crazed atoms whenever I hear Satie’s Nocturnes playing on the piano. It’s as if my mind is going through a mental carwash, then coming out at the other end ready for the road. Other conducive musical works are Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Riopy’s Meditation 432, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel.