Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Maggie Yang. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Maggie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

One of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on is my book Graftings, a collection of my poetry and visual art. I grew up primarily painting and only began writing poetry later, so much of my poetic language is inspired and shaped by the way I think visually, especially in terms of imagery, color, and composition. Graftings gave me the chance to explore how these two media can inspire and infuse into each other, especially on themes I’ve always been interested in exploring, such as memory, ethnicity, relationships, and how time can affect them. Graftings became an entwinement and landscape of how these themes have informed my perspective, youth, and growth. I wrote almost all of the pieces in Graftings back to back in a short span of time, and the art pieces were ones I had worked on recently, so everything came together relatively quickly.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m currently a student at Columbia University, planning on studying History and Psychology. I didn’t begin pursuing poetry until later in high school, when I started submitting to publications and contests, reading at events, and writing my book Graftings. Since Graftings, I’ve slowed down a bit and become a bit dormant when it comes to creative writing, but I’m getting back to it by experimenting with different styles and forms, such as prose poetry, creative non-fiction, and journalism.
But I’d say that my interest in writing started when I was younger, as I loved writing and imagining stories and metaphors. I grew up going to art museums and traveling, and I was always quiet, so writing became a way that I could capture these imaginations and sketches of a moment. And that progressed to high school, where I was learning many more interesting ideas, philosophies, and concepts, that poetry became the way I assemble all my whirring thoughts, curious dialogues, observations, and reflections on my experiences like a jigsaw puzzle.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

One of the first poems that I read was by Ocean Vuong, which is a common entry point, as many other people have fallen in love with poetry through his work, but his use of language really allowed me to admire poetry specifically. Before reading Vuong, I had this weird preconception that poetry was extremely abstract and inaccessible, that it must be some ununderstandable foreign masterpiece. But Vuong’s poetry changed my perception, as with the poems I read, it wasn’t like I was reading in a foreign language or something I couldn’t understand on a word level. He used words that I used in everyday life, but it was the way he used them—how they bear so much weight, symbolism, and meaning in the context that got me into poetry. With a simple word in a sentence, I could be treading across a tight rope above a dark scaffolding of uncertainty or wading through a thick water of possibilities, and it was all through just everyday words. The way he took this currency of language we use merely to just communicate and transcended it into an art form to carry histories, concepts, and stories, changed my outlook on the weight of words and importance of the lack of rules within poetry, how simple words can be charged based on which context and how we use them. Poetry became the vessel for that because of its experimental, ambiguous, and surrealist qualities.
Some other poets I love reading are Richard Blanco, Sally Wen Mao, and Richard Siken. Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook also made me fall in love with reading theory and prose about poetry, learning more about the craft of it to better engage with the process.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Writing has always been important to me because of its self-reflective nature. Poetry, especially, engages me in an often time-defiant process, almost like developing film where I can slowly reflect by immersing or shedding myself of old skins and inks. I strip away my stubborn and unnecessary protective faces, apprehensions, and preconceptions, and emerge with a stronger understanding of myself and what I am interrogating. The emotions and experiences that resonate eventually bubble to the surface, and I grow by recognizing my vulnerabilities, fears, and nostalgia through poetry. Poetry becomes not only a finished product and art form, but also an inquisitive and inner process.
It’s rewarding to go through this process of writing poetry, and the way poetry operates is also quite magical—I can hold a simple feeling, curious observation, or memory up to this prism nature of poetry, and it refracts into something richer with more colors, angles, and meanings. Poetry becomes a process that can reveal this spectrum and broader texture that I couldn’t access otherwise—its fluidity in being an inner excavation or refraction becomes the most meaningful part for me.

Contact Info:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggiieyang/