(upbeat classical music) - I write a certain way because I am me, and no matter how you would describe that style or define it, style is the personality impressed on the piece of writing.

(typewriter typing) My grandmothers were strong.

They followed plows and bent to toil.

They moved through fields sowing seed.

They touched earth and grain grew.

They were full of sturdiness and singing.

My grandmothers were strong.

My grandmothers are full of memories Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay With veins rolling roughly over quick hands They have many clean words to say.

My grandmothers were strong.

Why am I not as they?

I'm Margaret Walker Alexander.

I write under the name of Margaret Walker.

My first book, from which I've just read, "For My People," a book of poetry, was published by Yale University Press in 1942.

The second book, in 1966, was published by Houghton Mifflin and it's a Civil War novel, "Jubilee."

The third book appeared in 1970, published by Broadside Press, and these are Civil Rights Movement poems, poems of the Civil Rights Movement called "Prophets for a New Day."

The fourth book, also published by Broadside Press, is a book of poetry called "October Journey," and it appeared in 1973.

In 1972 we published a small pamphlet on how I wrote Jubilee.

And in 1974, "A Poetic Equation: "Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker," published by Howard University Press, 1974.

Howard University Press is also the publisher for a recently completed biography of Richard Wright, scheduled some time in 1983.

- [Interviewer] Doctor Alexander, when did you first begin to write?

- Well, as nearly as I can figure, I was writing prose before I wrote poetry.

I was composing little pieces when I was 10 years old, that's the earliest prose.

But I began writing poetry at age, oh, I'm not sure whether it was 11 or 12, but I have poetry that dates back to age 13.

I know I was writing before then, so.

My father said it was at puberty urge.

I began writing just about the time I entered puberty.

I went to school when I was five, I could read when I was four, I don't remember when I learned to read, I finished grade school at age 11, I guess 11 and a half, and I finished high school at age 14, so I had a problem of social adjustment, yes.

The older girls and boys in my class were always using me to help them get their work, and I thought that it was because they wanted to be friendly with me, they were really using me.

And I had no, I really had no peers my age.

Even in college that was true.

I understand college is the age when young people are courting and looking toward marriage or careers, and I was too young for anything.

I knew that if I went to The Normal in New Orleans I would be too young when I graduated to get a teaching job and courting was out of the question.

I didn't know what it was all about until I was out of college.

- [Interviewer] You must have been a little lonely then.

- I don't think so.

I always had a world within and that world was a very satisfactory world.

I look back now in journals that I kept, I kept diaries and journals, and when I had nobody to talk to, I wrote to myself.

I was not aware of extreme loneliness.

I realize now that I did not talk to people around me and associates, I was always in conflict with those around me.

- When you were young, did you have imaginary playmates?

- Yes, I did.

- [Interviewer] Did that influence your writing-- - As a very young child, my mother said I would come in from school and, even in the winter time, put on a hat and go out in the backyard, my coat and hat, and talk to all my imaginary playmates.

My sister didn't wanna play, she wanted to play the piano all the time.

So yes, I invented playmates.

Miss Choomby is one of ours-- - [Interviewer] I was about to ask you that.

- One of our invented playmates.

We played Miss Anne and Miss Choomby.

Miss Anne was the white lady and Miss Choomby was the black lady and we took turns being Miss Anne and Miss Choomby.

(Interviewer laughs) - That's marvelous.

What has influenced your writing most?

Family, commitment to the Southern sense of place, race?

- I think it's all of those.

I think it begins with my family.

My father's books and his occupation as a minister, sermons and the Bible, and my mother's music, the Southern landscape, the woods and world around me, and the problems of race in America, I think all of those have been grist to my mill.

It's more than family, it's more than the Southern environment, but that Southern climate, that Southern landscape, both social and physical, that environment has been of tremendous influence.

If you look at the poetry you will see that the images have come out of the Southern landscape.

You will find the rhythms of black music in much of my work.

And of course my background, my family, my mother and my grandmother and my father, who made indelible impressions upon me as a child.

The whole sense of morality, which I think is fundamental for me.

I read somewhere in Newsweek where "Margaret Walker is one of those moral writers", and that was supposed to be a kind of form of derision but, to me, I could not have a greater compliment.

Since my morality is, obviously, in conflict with what we consider the new morality.

- One special person who influenced your writing most.

- My mother and my father were my first influences.

Then, as early as 11 and 12, I was reading the black poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and when I was 16 I saw Langston for the first time.

Langston Hughes, W.E.B.

Du Bois, and Richard Wright have had tremendous influence on me.

I knew all three of them personally and all three of them I have read.

And in my estimation, they are giants, all three.

- How does a writer like you approach writing?

How do you begin?

What do you do first?

- Well, the first thing you do in any creative task is think about it.

The idea comes first.

The concept and the thought and the idea are there before you have the word and the sentence and the paragraph, or before you have a figuration of ideas or a configuration.

Writing grows out of creative thinking, which is nothing more than perceptive and apperceptive ark of conceptualization.

So that's the first thing.

The first step is conceptualization.

Sometimes you are conscious of that conceptualization, sometimes you're not.

You perceive a thing outside yourself, and the idea or the concept and the thought and the idea grow from that.

Whenever society is in ferment, wherever the troubles, wherever the trouble spots are, you can look for extraordinarily fine writing.

There's an explosion of the imagination out of of social ferment.

- [Interviewer] Is it best, do you think, to follow a daily schedule in writing or to write when you have a flash of inspiration?

- It depends on what you're writing.

When I was an adolescent, from the time I began writing until I was early 20s, I wrote every day.

I wrote diaries and journals, I wrote poetry almost every day, I wrote papers, little vignettes, little character sketches, I wrote.

Because that was my only outlet, so I wrote all the time, but.

After adolescence, after I'd graduated from college, after I'd begun writing and after I'd had several very bitter experiences with other writers, that pace of every day slacked.

I became more conscious and self-conscious, and when you are extremely self-conscious, you do not write as much.

But if you are writing a novel, I've written three novels.

I started a novel when I was 12 and I never finished that novel but I wrote hundreds of pages, I'd just sit at the typewriter and write it.

It was a very sentimental, religious, non-racial thing.

I guess more white than black.

I didn't know what I was doing but, I was learning to type.

So I was using that to write this novel.

When I was an adult and looked at it I said, "Oh, my goodness, "what drivel, what trash."

(Interviewer laughs) Then I wrote a novel when I was working on the Writers' Project in Chicago called "Goose Island."

I completed it but it has never been published.

It was not a very good novel, either.

I had excellent characters and some of the dialogue was very good, the plot was alright, but, basically, it's the reverse of the "Native Son" plot.

The third novel, of course, was a novel I began when I was a senior at Northwestern.

It was my family's story, the Civil War novel "Jubilee."

I spent 30 years learning how to write that book.

10 years in research and all kinds of research.

But then I had the job of transforming fact into fiction and I didn't learn how to do that until after 20 or 25 years.

Went out to Iowa the second time and I learned how to do it.

The main thing I didn't know how to do was to create scene, how to dramatize the material.

And anyone who doesn't know how to draft a scene, doesn't know how to write fiction.

Fiction is never pure reality, fiction is a blend of fantasy and reality.

To write reality is not to write fiction.

And to deal with all the evils of the world without any mitigating influences is not my idea of good fiction.

- Could you talk about style?

- Style, in my estimation, is nothing more than the impression of the personality on the piece of writing.

Style is a very individual matter.

It is absolutely personal, no matter whether you call it a simple style or a sublime style.

Style is absolutely individual.

My style is me, it's my voice, it's the way I express myself.

I write a certain way because I am me.

And no matter how you would describe that style or define it, style is the personality impressed on the piece of writing.

You see, the form in which a thing is written, frequently evidences the style.

Content has almost nothing to do with style, form and content need to be wedded, yes, but when you talk about style and the stylistic elements in a writer you are talking about the way and the method that he does it.

- Are any of your characters based on real people?

- I think I do some other things with character other than just base them on real people.

I have a rule of thumb for character that was taught to me when I was out in Iowa and living in a house with Miss Harvey.

She taught me there are only five things you can do with any character, and giving those five things every time they appear, the character appears, there must be consistency.

When you describe the character and tell how he looks, and you have the character talking, you hear him talking, you go behind the mind of the character and experience him thinking, then you see him in action and you see him reacting to others.

That's all you can do with a character.

Those five things.

But you can have different kinds of characters.

Now, in order to have a character in the round, you gotta do all five of those things and develop them extremely well.

- How important are revisions to a writer?

- I think writing is 9/10 re-writing, even with my poetry.

Sometimes the poem comes out whole because you've thought about it a long time and it's been in the unconscious, in that secondary imagination, a long time and you have put it down as it should be, comes out whole and there's been a long period of gestation.

But if you get a flash and you think you got a sudden idea and you sit down and you attempt to do it right away, frequently that is not gonna come out right the first time.

You have to think about it and rework it and work it over.

I have one poem in "For My People" that I reworked at least 12 times and worked on it about five years.

That's a poem called "Delta."

On the other hand, "For My People" was written in 15 minutes on a typewriter with the last stanza not there.

I had to think about that a long time before I could write that final stanza.

- [Interviewer] What makes the difference whether something rolls off your pen or whether you have to take this time of gestation?

- I think it is, again, a question of conceptualization.

How complete is that at the very beginning?

You cannot organize and realize the work, compose it, when the concept is half-baked.

When you conceive the thing, if you have the complete idea or configuration in the first conceptualization then it doesn't take a long time.

But if you do not have that altogether in that earliest, intuitive moment, then you have to rework it and rewrite it.

When you type very fast, if you use the touch system, and I think rapidly and I write rapidly, I write as I talk, too much, too easily, too much, too soon, too fast.

It comes out and you got a lot.

But everything you think is not what you want on paper.

- What are your views on modern life today?

The permissive attitude, etc.

- I think it's like the last the last days of Pompeii, the last days of the Roman Empire, I think that we have lived through a century of war and revolution and that we have not been able to implement the positive elements of the Einsteinian revolution, so that we are in high ttechnology in terms of the sciences and math and we are completely adrift in terms of the humanities and the social sciences.

I think something that people were talking about at the end of the 19th and early 20th century has had a terribly demoralizing effect on people today.

Since I believe that I'm, I consider myself more of a Christian humanist, I am not inclined to believe that God is dead.

But people like the Marxist and the atheistic existentialist say that the reason we are so morally adrift is that we have lost God, that for modern man, God no longer exists.

And when God does not exist, then the people have no vision.

They perish because they are without substance, without ballast.

Without anything to believe or hold on to.

So in our secular society, we have lost all our gods.

We have no, no ideals left.

Our world is a world of chaos, crime, corruption, and that's it.

- Do you think too much of that crops up in today's writing?

- Yes, I think one of our brilliant, young black women writers, in fact I could name three or four of these black women writers who are selling like hot stuff everywhere, they are on the border of, if not including, softcore pornography.

- Then how should a love scene be handled?

- I think that subtlety is more effective than blatancy.

I think that when women or men decide that everything has to be sexually explicit, that there's something kind of twisted with their sexual natures.

That's what I really believe.

That when sex has ceased to be anything sacred, when it ceases to have anything sacrosanct or private about it, then it has lost its true basic meaning.

Sexuality is a part of humanity but then humanity strives toward divinity, you see?

If sex is not tempered with genuine, spiritual love, then something pretty ugly comes out of it.

- Some years ago you wrote a poem, "For My People," it still has application today.

- I wrote that poem when I was 22 and I hope it has significance today.

I've been told many things about the poem but during the 60s, when we were at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, friends came to see me from California and they said when the young men and women were thrown into the jails in California, one of the Civil Rights leaders would go in there and read poetry to them, and they always read "For My People."

That was one of the crowing glories for me.

They were saying that this poetry helped to spawn a kind of revolution.

That's precisely what it was intended to do.

That was a compliment.

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power.

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood.

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the Adams and Eves and their countless generations.

Let a new earth rise.

Let another world be born.

Let a bloody peace be written in the sky.

Let a second generation full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth.

Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood.

Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear.

Let a race of men now rise and take control.

I'm not a native Mississippian but I've lived here a great part of my life and my family has been here, members of my family, for 100 years.

And I think Mississippi is one of the most interesting places and certainly a climate for genius.

I think it's a great place for writing.

The social ferment has been so horrible that out of it you were bound to get great writers like Faulkner and Wright.

You were bound to get very great writers like Tennessee Williams.

Those are great, great writers.

And their genius, their genius really came out of Mississippi.