Marguerite Young
Marguerite Young
Marguerite Vivian Youngwas an American writer and academic. She is best known for her novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. In her later years, she was known for teaching creative writing and as a mentor to young authors. "She was a respected literary figure as well as a cherished Greenwich Village eccentric." Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Young was educated at Butler University and the Universities of Chicago and Iowa. She briefly taught at Shortridge High School before embarking on...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 August 1908
CountryUnited States of America
Just as I do not want my students to imitate my style, I admire authors who write differently from me. Lewis and Dreiser didn't try to write in a poetic style.
I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.
I had read the histories of mountain climbers, of suffragette captains, of travelers to the Middle East... all the ladies who went to the Middle East. I'd like to go myself. I didn't invent anything in my book. I didn't need to.
My first attempt to write about Robert Owen was in the form of poetry. Then I turned it into a blank verse poem, but I discovered that I couldn't fit in all the facts, which are fabulous. I decided to rewrite it a third time, still retaining every image I had already written in the first two versions.
I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don't really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition.
One day I bumped into a group of coal miners from the Ozarks, wandering coal miners living a gypsy life... I started to speak with these coal miners, and became very interested in them.
I was not influenced by Joyce although he's a great writer, and I love his work. I was influenced by Saint Augustine.
I like Gertrude Stein, and spent two weeks with her at the University of Chicago.
I had a book, which was stolen, the art of the life of the character, in which you present a whole life in three of four pages. I used that method.
I try to teach my students style, but always as a part of life, not as ornament. Style has to come out of communicating coherent thought, not in sticking little flowers on speeches. Style and substance and a sense of life are the things literature is composed of. One must use one's own personality in relationship to life and language, of course, and everyone has such a relationship. Some people find it, some don't find it, but it's there.
Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.
I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.
If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.
All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.