Louise Young | Red Room Writer Profile

My mother published a novel when I was six. Before that, we had been your typical suburban family: father working, mother staying home and taking care of the eight children (did I mention that we were Catholic?) but once the media got a hold of the story ("Mother of Eight Writes Novel&q ...
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My first influence was John Gardner, whose fiction inspired me early in my reading career. My most major influence was Gabriel Garcia Marquez: I learned Spanish by reading his books word by laborious word and in doing that, I ended up kind of absorbing a lot about his writing. Most recently, I've been astonished by Roberto Bolano's shorter works and his major novels.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, The Spell of the Sensual by David Abrams, Anil's Ghosts (or is it maybe In the Skin of a Lion?) by Michael Ondaatji, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda, Paradise in Ashes by Beatriz Manz, Latitud de la flor y el granizo by Mario Payeras, A Century of Change in Guatemalan Textiles by Ann Pollard Rowe

Connections

purgatory
November 19, 2009
- As kids in Catholic school, we were taught about purgatory: a place created to accommodate the gray area between heaven and hell in the afterlife. The way it was explained to us by the nuns, purgatory is a kind of holding tank constructed to house all of the souls not evil enough to be damned but also not good enough to be allowed yet into heaven. Souls were sentenced to purgatory for finite ...
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seducing the spirits
November 5, 2009
- About an hour before dawn, howler monkeys woke with grumbles and grunts that eventually gathered enough volume and resonance to become full-blown roars. From my narrow bed in the second-story dormitory room, I heard the entire chorus but since this was my first night in the rain forest, I had no idea what I was listening to. I thought that someone downstairs was suffering from a really bad ...
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of bats and snakes and dead things
October 29, 2009
- For the past three days, a bat has been swooping and fluttering and looping above the pond outside my window with that distinctive short-bodied, herky-jerky flight that one normally only sees at dusk or on spooky, moon-filled Halloweens. At first, I found this bat to be spooky: daylight flight is contrary to the nature of bats and hinted of perhaps a deeper problem. Bats are notorious ...
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