Rayjon Young '26: MFA Creative Writing Spotlight

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Rayjon Young, Fiction Class of 2026, a Question and Answer session. In celebration of the MFA in Creative Writing's 30th Anniversary at Saint Mary's College.

1. What does your writing routine look like? Do you have any rituals around writing?

My writing routine begins with journaling every day, usually as a way to recap my day and record my thoughts and feelings. Although I wish I did, I don’t write fiction every day; however, I manage to get a significant amount of writing done two days a week. Three if I'm lucky. My only ritual when writing is listening to jazz. Or electronic music. But I can’t do lyrics. “Dreamflower” by Torika Blue just gets me in the writing mood. Whenever that song pops up in my favorites playlist, I end up writing something. 

2. Which books or writers have most deeply influenced your writing?

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor made me view writing as something that doesn't have to be an expansive endeavor to convey a story. And yet the contents of the book itself are vast, and the main character embarks on a great endeavor. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick lives rent-free in my head. I think I read it in high school, and it made me think about science fiction in a different way. There’s a moral dilemma in the book where the characters struggle to distinguish between an android and a person. I feel like these dilemmas come up frequently in my writing. My main characters are often faced with predicaments that challenge their sense of self, leading to a dynamic shift in which they either forgo their humanity or become more in tune with the emotions they had been hiding deep within themselves. What makes us human is probably something I’m always going to be writing about. 

3. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self just starting in writing, what would it be?

Probably to save more of my notebooks from childhood. I discarded many poems and stories because I thought they wouldn't serve me later in life. Also, to believe that there's a career in writing. It may not look like what I imagined, but it’s there. 

4. Is there a "failed draft" that still influences you in some way?

All my failed drafts have influenced my current writing in some way. One thing that grounds my stories is my failed drafts. Before I even write a story, it comes to me in the form of a title or flashes of scenes like a movie trailer. The downside to that is that writing is not a visual medium. So I have to turn this movie inside my head into words. Half the time, I epicly fail. However, I am failing forward, which helps improve my drafts of other stories. Although some of my failed drafts might work if I were a better writer or read more widely, I am not there yet. 

5. Which character (from your own work or someone else's) would you most like to get coffee or a drink with?

I want to get a drink with Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski. Geralt is such a complex character that I feel like the conversation would be so interesting that it would never end. Plus, I want him to show me magic. 

6. If your writing had a soundtrack, what three songs would definitely be on it?

“New Person, Same Old Mistakes” by Tame Impala, “Timmy’s Prayer” by Sampha, “Nan Chun” by SE SO NEON.  I won’t give any reason for picking these songs, but if you’ve read some of my work and listened to them, you may find a fragile connective thread. Depending on the day, this answer would change. 

7. What emoji best captures your writing style?

🤹🏾‍♂️

8. If you could only bring three books to a desert island, what would they be?

Two of these are trilogies, which might be cheating, but Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. I picked all of these because I’d like to enjoy my time on that island by reading, but these books would light a fire within me to not want to be stuck in my situation, and hopefully get off that island. 

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