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
I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.
All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.
There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
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.
I was not influenced by Joyce although he's a great writer, and I love his work. I was influenced by Saint Augustine.
Like Kay Boyle, whose work I'm wild about, I could have married, written a book with every baby, a baby with every book.
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.
The asexual angel, neither male nor female... unable to live without her mask of illusions... showed herself to be the denuded character every person would be if confronted with the loss of their illusions as she was.
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.