SOURCE: An interview in This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, eds., University of New Mexico Press, 1990, pp. 95-107.

[Eysturoy specializes in American Studies. In the following interview which took place in March, 1987, after a poetry reading held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Allen discusses the impact of the American Southwest on her work, her literary beginnings and aims, her cultural identity, the writing process, and feminist issues.]

[Eysturoy]: You were born and raised here [in Albuquerque.] How has that influenced you and your work?

[Allen]: My work is all tangled up with landscape around here. But landscape for me does not mean "the landscape"; it does not mean something that great dramas are enacted upon. Maybe that's because so much of the drama in the Southwest is the land, not the people. We are, to me, the background against which the land enacts her drama, and by landscape I don't mean only the mountains and those vast plains, but the weather, the climatic conditions and rainstorms, the overpowering thunderstorms.

So it is the power of the landscape, more than anythig else, that has left an impression on you?

Right. It has given me an entirely different notion of how women are supposed to be. Other people in America keep thinking that women are supposed to be sort of helpless, cute, and that's femininity. But to me femininity means these great craggy mountains and these deep arroyos and tremendous storms, because mother nature after all is feminine, right? This is all mother nature happening, so I cannot think of her as something that is so terrifying that I have to control her, because storms are exciting, terribly exciting.

You see, you have to live with her, in her, and there is no escape from it. Maybe in England—I have never been there—everything is gentler, more controlled, so that creates the belief that people should be either weak and helpless or power mad, one or the other; maybe that's what creates all those truly bizarre images descending from the English literary tradition. Certainly all the rhetorical forms and especially the artistic forms, those that are about nature, tend to be about a tidy little gentle place.

So this very powerful natural setting of the Southwest does not invite images of a conquering and controlling of nature?

Right, and those images we do have are going to have an effect. Certainly my own writing comes out of the consciousness of my own landscape, where I come from, the trees and mesas I climbed, my physical interaction with where I was. To me that is the real world. American writers tend to think of the real world as ugly, social stuff. They focus on reality as being the yucky things that people do. To me reality is the natural world, and the yucky social stuff, like ugly cities or dreadful political conditions, is the artificiality.

You see this as a balance in nature?

That's right. She gives us our life, so she has a right to take it. What I notice the most when I look at my work is that the land is always there.

The landscape, then, has been important in shaping your perception of the world?

Right. I look at the natural world to see what something in the human world means, because I have no other way of knowing. The natural world might mean inside my body, but even then I will check with the world out there, the planet, the climate, the seasons, how plants function, how the earthy people function. Then I know how I am functioning, because I am an earthy person.

What about the people of the Southwest, your family and the people you grew up with?

My dad mentioned this morning that most of the poems I read last night were either about my family or they were somehow connected to it, and we talked about that. I think that Indian writers, Chicano writers and black and Asian American writers do a lot of family stuff, because we don't distinguish ourselves from the family base. We exist within the matrix of the people who are our relatives or family friends, or our tribe. I'm raised that way, and I can't write any other way. It may seem this is too peculiar, too local, too personal and not universal. But that's not true, because everybody has a human part that is about their connections, their blood-ties. To me, my work has to speak back to the people from whom it comes, if it comes through my voice, my mind, and my art.

Does your spiritual view of life also originate in your family?

It was just something you knew, I guess we all knew. There were always the dances, those things going on at the pueblo. There was Mass, there was church, but this is something more than that. I knew about magic. My mother used to read me European fairytales, Greek mythology, Indian stories, and the Bible, and she did not make any distinction among them. They were all literature. So I grew up thinking that these were all analogues of one another, because she said they were. It must be where I got the whole thing about spirituality, the metaphysics.

I also think that nature herself is metaphysical. I think that if you are really connecting with the land then you are going to have to connect with the spirits. So probably as a consequence of being with the land, I developed a spiritual dimension, because there is no way not to. I think you have to get away from the land and think of it as something you take pictures of before you can lose your spiritual connections. But if you talk to the tree periodically, which I do, you cannot lose your spiritual connection, because the tree talks back and so you know that there is a person in there.

How did you realize that you wanted to become a writer?

I think it was an accident! When I was younger I wanted to become an actress. My first two years in college I majored in drama, and I was pretty good at it; I liked it. I wrote some poems that looked like prose poems, but it wasn't what I focused on. Then I got married, and I wrote some essays just because I needed to say some things. I was reading Ayn Rand and wrote two or three essays in response to what she was saying.

Then I got divorced, moved to Albuquerque, and decided to sign up for something called "The Famous Writers School." At that point I thought I would be a fiction writer. At the time, I had two babies and a job making seventy-five cents an hour. I don't know how I lived through those years, I really don't. But I did…. Then I decided to go back to the university.

I had met a young man from Kenya, and as I was sitting in his house one day there was a book of poems by Robert Creeley on the table. Poetry was not going to be my thing, but I really liked that poetry, so I took the book home, read it from cover to cover, and took it back to my friend who said, "Well, you know, Creeley is teaching on campus. Why don't you see if you can get into his class?" So I went. It was sort of intentional and sort of not.

Meanwhile I had decided that I could not become an actress. For one thing I had two babies; I couldn't get on a bus and go to New York City and live on the streets. So to some extent I became a writer because I had these babies and couldn't just go and do anything I wanted.

In Creeley's class I got an A. He really liked my work, but every time he looked at me he could not believe I had done it, because I looked like a housewife from Grants. This was the early sixties when a person was supposed to look cool, you know. And in fiction I got A's, so it was sort of easy. So, to some extent it was a forced choice. I couldn't do what I wanted to do and there didn't seem to be any way out, so that must be fate….

I don't like to write. I do once I get going, but it is difficult. I'll clean house, I'll do anything other than sit down and write; it is very difficult. In Oregon, once, I had to write a little thing about writing, and I remember writing that as far as I could see writing was a series of small suicides, some of which are fatal. And I still believe that; it is amazing how many delusions and illusions you have to blow to smithereens just to write a paragraph, a good paragraph.

In a way writing is more painful than birthing, and birthing hurts. That was also something I said I was never going to do again after the first time. I did it again, but very, very unhappily, because I knew what it was going to cost. I wanted the kids, but I did not want the anguish. It is the same thing with writing: I want the book, but, oh, I don't want the agony.

How long did it take you to write The Woman Who Owned the Shadows?

Thirteen years! I wrote parts in Albuquerque, then I moved to California and wrote parts in San Francisco. I moved back to Albuquerque, wrote a little more, moved back to San Francisco and finished it there. Later I revised it in L.A. and added a number of new passages in El Cerrito.

Is writing like a vision quest for you?

I like that question, because that's exactly right. That's what I am searching for, to pull the vision out of me, because it is here, I know it is. It is a path, a road, and it is how I am that molecule that does that dance that makes up her being. Our job is to be conscious of our dance, because that's the way we play for our mother. And that is what I do and, I think, that's what writers must do. That's why writers are important, as long as they are working toward consciousness.

I don't mean evolution. I mean noticing what we already know; we were born knowing it; maybe it is in our genes, or maybe it is in our soul. I don't know where it is, but I know that it is. So the trick is to get back to our origin, to know what it knows or what she knows.

That's what a vision quest is for, you know. You go out in the wilderness—or men do—and you find out who you are. Well, a writer goes into the wilderness and finds out who she is. And it is awful! But I love it once I get past the garbage, the fear, all the walls and resistance, and I finally am working; when the voice begins to come and the work starts doing me—because I am not doing it by then—then it is great rejoicing and I won't leave the word processor.

But it might take me four days of work to get to that point; in that sense it is sacred.

Do you think the vision quest of women is different from that of men?

As far as I understand, it was different for women. A person with the female anatomy might go on a mountaintop vision quest; but by and large she stayed very near the village. There are reasons for that. For one thing, how far do you have to go when you have so much happening in your own body?

Certainly, the cultures that do vision quests also do menstrual huts, and that's a vision quest all by itself and very frightening.

It is not as though we are not allowed to do vision quests, but rather that the male impulse requires one set of circumstances and the female impulse requires another. Our anatomies are different and so we have to have different methods suited to our anatomies, to our hormonal system that will work for that entity.

The forms are different and their way of sharing is different, but the fact of sharing is always the same; you don't get to keep it. You have to put it to use in the community or you didn't do anything.

Is your writing, then, an act of sharing with others what you are envisioning on your quest?

That's right. It's like cooking; you'll try to make something that will feed and nourish your guests.

Is putting the past together, remembering, or as you say, remembering the past a form of providing nourishment for others?

Right—re-membering the past, putting it back together, recovering; knowing who we are and who we have been. How are we going to know who we are going to be, if we don't know where we have been?

The Indian potters, the women, take old pottery and grind it up and put it into the clay-mix with the new pot. The reason why they do it that way is that the clay will bond more securely all around so it will not fall apart easily. If you don't do it right, the pot will blow up when you are cooking it; it doesn't have the right consistency. But if you don't do it at all, the pot will crumble; it won't hold up over time and you won't be able to put water in it.

So you see yourself as creating a fabric that will strengthen and nurture others, and give them a sense of who they are and where they came from?

That's right.

In The Sacred Hoop you talk about alienation as a predominant theme in American Indian fiction…. Most of those writers are male. Do you think that that in itself could have been a reason for the predominance of the alienation theme?

You know, I don't know yet; it very well might be. For one thing, there are not that many women writing novels yet, so it is hard to tell. But thinking of Anna Lee Walters's stories, for example, then she is certainly telling a different story entirely.

I wrote that essay, "Stranger in My Own Land," in 1977. At that time there were a lot of urban, marginal Indians writing, who really did not have any connections back to a homeland. But on the other hand, those same men writing in the eighties do write differently. There are a lot more people from the reservations or from intact communities who are in print now, you know, and we don't find the alienation theme, the degree of it, with nearly the kind of intensity that you did in the seventies.

I am thinking about James Welch. There is a real progression in his three novels to where his new novel, Fools Crow, explains the alienation. He goes back to the conquest of that particular band, the Blackfeet, to which tribe he belongs. In a way it is a healing process, because I am sure it has healed something, not only his consciousness, but also in the consciousness of his people. And I think that is true for Indians across the country. So the alienation of the seventies has moved to the spiritual, powerful voice of the eighties.

Do you see it as a process of exorcising the alienation and then coming back to the original center?

Right. Now where are we? That's where The Sacred Hoop comes in, and that's right where The Woman Who Owned the Shadows ends. It stops where the healing process begins, and The Sacred Hoop is about recovery, recovery of our selves.

A lot of people will probably say, after having read The Sacred Hoop, that the theories presented there of a gynocratic Indian past are mostly conjecture. If we can generalize, how gynocratic were the tribes in the past?

Well, we can generalize, in fact, I can make better generalizations as each year goes by. The Sacred Hoop was published in 1985, was at the press in '83, so almost everything in it was written by '82-'83, except for the introduction, so we are dealing with a time-lag here.

By '77 social anthropologists could say that if you drew a line from Maine through San Diego, everything south of that line would be gynocratic, and the way you could tell was that they were corn-based cultures. Where you found corn, squash, and beans, you found predominantly female deities and powerful female beings, and you would always have a matrilocality, matrifocality, and matrilineality. What is that if not a gynarchy? Some are still arguing about this, but if you descend from a woman, and if the culture is centered on female deities, I am willing to call that a gynarchy or a gynocentric civilization.

I have never found a patriarchal culture in Native America, North or South. Never. I have found cultures where women appeared to be under the dominance of clan head men, but I have never found a culture where that meant that the men told the women what to do. In a lot of these cultures the older women told the younger women what to do, and the older men told the younger men what to do. But if the young woman or the young man did not want to do it, there were not a lot of mechanisms of enforcement. So in the sense of a nonauthoritarianism, in the sense of equal distribution of goods—or equal distribution of starvation—and in the sense of sharing of tasks and responsibilities between genders, I don't think you are going to find a Native American culture where that is not going on.

You are never going to find a patriarchy, is what I am saying. Absolutely never. There isn't any.

Do they then fulfill the Jungian androgynous ideal of balance?

They might…. Certainly, that's why I used the term gynocratic or gynocentric, because I am not talking about matriarchy, and I won't use that word. It tends to mean that women dominate, because patriarchy means that the men dominate. So to avoid triggering that idea in people's minds, I use the term gynarchy or gynocentrism, meaning that femaleness or femininity is the central cultural value.

This is reflected in the female deities. The status of individual women ranges from abject dependency to complete and absolute autonomy, just as it does with men, and you can find anything in between, but you find significant female deities and you find significant female rituals that are necessary to the ongoing life of the tribe. You find women significantly present in one way or another in every ceremony, whether it be male or female. Now, that's saying something about all of Native America, and that is not really all that conjectural.

You mention in The Sacred Hoop that deities who were perceived as only feminine in the past have recently emerged as male after having gone through an androgynous process. Is it your contention, then, that that process in itself says something about the social structures they must have reflected in the past?

Right, that's my point. The female deities reflected the social system and the understandings of the people within that system. Metaphysically I would argue that the people were reflecting the gods. But in a sociological, scholarly framework I am perfectly willing to argue in the other direction, that the gods reflected the people.

It works both ways …

Yes, they go both ways; you cannot have one without the other.

So when you are talking about the centrality of the role of women, you are talking about a value rather than a position of power or control?

Absolutely. That was never going on—not as far as I can tell—in any Native American system.

It seems to me that in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, Ephanie, the central character, is on a vision quest. On that quest she moves further and further into a female universe, while the male characters are basically negative characters. How do you achieve the balance there that—as we have talked about—is so important in American Indian philosophy, the balance of male and female? How does Ephanie reach that balance?

She reaches it because in a woman's life femininity is central; in a man's life masculinity is central. You don't get egalitarianism by women relating to men and you don't get it by men relating to women. What I am saying is that gender norms are for the gender to which they apply; they are not for the other gender. For Ephanie to locate who she is, she has to move from thinking of her reference group as male to thinking of her reference group as female. That says nothing about the men. Ephanie herself is pretty crazy—out of touch with herself—until she understands that she is female.

So she has to move into a female universe in order to explore herself?

A truly female universe.

… from which she can emerge and be her true self, and then unite with her male counterpart?

Or not. Uniting is one of the things white people do. There is a male and there is a female. There is not a "unite" in there anywhere, and there never is in the tribes. And why should they unite? They are different.

So they should operate in their separate spheres with balance between those spheres?

That's right. Yes, and with mutual respect. You know, if you look at the plain we are on, you see the Sandias, which I have always thought of as male, and across, way across, is Mt. Taylor, whom I always have thought of as female. She stays there, and he stays here and they converse. They don't get mixed up in thinking that one has to be the other one, and they don't think they have to merge. If they ever do think that, we are in trouble, all of us who live in between. And that's why the mountains are that way, and that's how I see the appropriate balance of genders. I think that we live in separate spheres. We have different consciousnesses, because we have different bodies. We need each other; but only if we recognize the validity of our own way, and therefore the validity of the other person's way, are we ever going to be able to actually function together.

We should accept the differences?

Absolutely, and use them; it is essential. You know, patriarchy is about monogamy, it is about monotony, it is about monotheism, it is about unity, and it is about uniformity. No Indian system is like that, in any sense. They never wanted other people to be like them. That's why they don't recruit members. They don't only respect difference and acknowledge it; they expect it, and they always have. That's why they got conquered, as a matter of fact. They did not understand that there were people who thought that there was only one way of doing things and that was their way, and if you did not do it their way they would kill you.

Ephanie, in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, is not supposed to unite with the men. She keeps expecting men to do her life for her, because she got feminized in the western way instead of the tribal way. She made a terrible mistake and she paid for it until she understood that she had power in her own right.

And the healing process is the recovering of her past?

Her past and her place in the world, yes; her past, her place, and therefore her identity.

How has all this helped you resolve your own sense of who you are, your own sense of identity?

I had a lot of questions about that when I was quite a bit younger. It was really important in my twenties. By the time I was in my early thirties, I had pretty much resolved it for myself. I am Lebanese-American, I am Indian, I am a breed, and I am New Mexican and they have a lot to do with how I act and what I think and how I interpret things. I was raised in a family and in a world that was multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious, and multilinguistic, with a number of social classes involved. All of those people were my relatives, and all of those people were part of me, because they had an impact on me.

You mention in The Sacred Hoop that there is an unconscious assumption that these identities must be in conflict, and a choice therefore has to be made, but that you don't see that this necessarily has to be.

No, it does not have to be. Though, certainly, there are times where the Lebanese Paula and the Indian Paula come into awful conflict, because they are different. So certainly, there is intra-psychic conflict and stress that arises. And then I have a kind of overlaying or underlaying American or Anglo culture that I mostly picked up in school. It is all me. It sometimes comes into conflict with itself, but it is all me.

Does incorporating all parts of your origins, rather than making a choice, become a means of survival?

You have to incorporate them all. I think that's where you get into alienation, thinking that you cannot have the whole bulk, that you have to choose.

Do you think the philosophy or ideology that you have to be either one or the other is part of the colonization process?

Yes, I do, absolutely. It is very clear in the case of the Native Americans. They have been propagandized for anywhere from one hundred to four hundred years—depending on the region of the country—that they have to choose. Then all the stories that were written about the Indian between two chairs—all of La Farge and Frank Waters—and of course the Indian between two chairs has to choose, cannot choose, and therefore dies. This tells all the youngsters growing up that they are going to die. It is a genocidal myth. I know all kinds of people, Indian people, full bloods, traditionals, half-bloods, whatever, who can manage to do both quite nicely. But they are not the ones that show up in literature, and there is a reason for that. If it is white writers, it is because they really want all the Indians dead. They are not going to admit that; they really think they pity the Indian. But why are they killing them all in their books, if they really want them to live? How come they are always dying? Good question!

You see these writers creating a myth they would like to see realized?

That's right. What is it? The self-fulfilling tendency of expectation? And it works very insidiously, but it works. So I have been teaching for a long, long time that you must accept all your identities; they are yours, and nobody has the right to take them away from you. You have to be a lot smarter to manage two cultures or five cultures than you do to manage one. Americans—white Americans, I mean, because nobody else in America has this luxury but white Americans—think they are smarter because they have only one culture, and they don't understand that the more cultures you have, the greater your range; your personal range, your intellectual range, and your emotional range is much greater. It is like assuming that if you only eat potatoes, that somehow you are better than the people who eat rice, corn, wheat, potatoes, and pasta.

And I think that of the western nations the United States is very peculiar in that way. It tends to think that there is only the Anglo-Protestant capitalist way of doing things.

You know how white folks like to go out to the reservation to see Indians? Well, I love to watch TV and watch white folks; it's great fun. But I didn't know why I liked it so much. I used to get mad, because they said the dumbest things, until it finally dawned on me that they are talking to each other, and to them American means this very narrow group of middle- to upper-class Anglo-European people who go to Protestant church—not fundamentalist Protestant, but respectable Protestant—and they have homes and cars, and they all look the same way, eat the same food, and do the same things. They are only these people on TV, and that leaves out at least 40 percent of the people in the United States, a lot of whom are white, a lot of whom are European, but they don't happen to live in that little tiny culture box, so they don't show up on TV as being Americans.

I finally realized that that's because we are not Americans. Americans are a very specifically defined cultural entity to which a lot of citizens of the United States do not belong. We are citizens of the United States, but we are not Americans. And that's definitely very weird! It doesn't make me mad anymore; it strikes me as hilarious and stupid and short sighted, and possibly dangerous. But it is pretty funny. How can you live in Washington, DC, surrounded by black people and think that way?

You say that you have incorporated your different ethnic backgrounds. How does Ephanie, in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, incorporate the white world? She seems to go further and further into her Indianness.

And then she goes back to teach white people. So her resolution is that this is not about race; this is about vision. The people who live on this continent are Indians, that is to say, they live on the Indian continent, and what we must do is teach them how to live here. We tried and they kept killing us. That was then; but now maybe there are people here, lots of them, who are ready…. Ephanie goes back to the world as a teacher and she knows who she is.

Is that why she says "I mix my metaphors with care"?

That's right. You have to do it, and she learns very carefully. She has to have that whole period of isolation and relearning herself before she is in any position to be able to do that. Then she is going as herself back into the white world; it is different from the way she originally did it. First she went into the white world to find herself, and that did not work; it made her crazy, literally crazy and suicidal. You can't do that, you can't borrow an identity, you have to go out from your own identity.

Ephanie goes into the mythical past and recovers the myth. As a writer, do you see yourself as a recoverer of myths or as a creator of myths?

As a writer I am not a creator of myths. As a channel I am.

How do you distinguish between being a writer and being a channel?

Well, writers invent and I do it, too. But there are passages where, frankly, somebody else takes over. It is not me, and the reason I know it is not me is because they say stuff I wouldn't have said, and in fact, some of it I disagree with.

There is a passage in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows about the Grandmothers, "And then for long eons they slept." I love that passage, and I wrote it in the physical sense of writing down the words, but, frankly, somebody took hold of my pencil and they wrote it. I was just the typewriter, so to speak. And it wasn't as though I was in a trance or unconscious; I don't mean that. It was conscious, but I would not have thought of writing that. So I am talking about another order. I think you touch into the mythstream that is always there; it is part of the world; it is part of the universe.

Is that what you are getting at when you mention that rather than say "I wrote it," you say "I listened"?

Yes, and a writer's job is to be as accurate a receiver as you can be. It is hard work. For one thing you have to read a lot, talk a lot, and think a lot, and take a lot of time for yourself. You have to know a lot of people, and you have to have a good ear. Otherwise, when the stuff comes through, you are going to try to change it, because you are not going to recognize it. So you have to be a very knowledgeable, experimental instrument; you have to have a range of knowledge and adaptability and physical experience, because only then can you become a good instrument.

And you have to learn how to listen.

That's it; you have to learn how, especially if you were raised in America. I don't mean rural America, though, because I was raised on those mesas, with a great deal of freedom to listen to myself. My mother was very verbal about it. She would complain about people who would not let their children just daydream. I spent weeks up on the mesa. I didn't talk a lot to people; I did not learn to talk to people until I was well into my twenties. I was an introverted person and I needed to be, so I would have the ability to listen.

What new directions are you taking in your new novel, Raven's Road?

That's such a hard book, another thirteen-year book, and I really would like to get it done soon instead of thirteen years from now. But I have a cast of characters that is huge, and an outline that is seventeen pages long and I can't make head or tails of it. I started out to write a very simple lesbian novel just for fun. But I got involved. So I have a story about Indian people in Albuquerque, an urban group; some folks out in Isleta; a lesbian community in Albuquerque; the national lesbian community; alcoholism and battering; the bomb; and the antipornography movement, and I am trying to work this out over a time frame of about forty years, from '45 to '85. Meanwhile I want to write a thousand-page novel, and I don't want to write a trilogy; so I am stuck.

The excerpt that was published in The New Native American Novel, where Allie and Raven watch a nuclear explosion at Yucca Flats, Nevada, seems to suggest that you are dealing with the geopolitical aspect of the nuclear bomb, and also that you see a deeper meaning behind nuclear power.

That excerpt is the sacred heart of the novel.

As I see it at this point, the bomb is seen because of the Grandmothers, and because Allie and Raven are both medicine-women, for lack of a better word. They are who they are because of what another Indian woman had said to Raven years before.

The bomb is about cleansing the planet; it is about the voice of another power. There are reasons why I see it that way, some of which are metaphysical. Well, for heaven's sake, all the Buddhists have always been praying for enlightenment, so why are they not thrilled about this bomb? It would be very enlightening. You get more light from those things than you could possibly get in any other way….

Uranium was first mined at Laguna, and the form it comes in is called yellowcake. The color of femaleness is yellow, and at Laguna a woman's face is painted yellow with some red spots when she dies, so that when she comes to Shipap, the Mother will know who she is and that she is respectful and respectable. So that is sitting in my head. Then the bomb is all of this light, and for me light means two things; it means colonization and genocide, and it also means "Turn on the light so I can see in the dark."

Since I think the planet is the Mother and the galaxy is the Grandmother, and since I think that nothing goes on here that She did not think of to begin with, then I am left with the question of why She would think of this. That's the question I am working on in those segments. I don't know what the answer is going to be, and neither do Allie and Raven. All they know is that they are supposed to be watching this thing. But certainly, one of the things I can see right now is that a bunch of complacent colonizers are threatened with the extinction that they have visited upon everyone else. And, I don't know—I have a tacky sense of humor—I enjoy it. I think it is very funny watching them racing around trying to stop their own ultimate extinction.

They haven't cared about ultimate extinction before. They have extinguished race after race after race, and all the species of animals who ever lived—right now 99 percent are extinct—and nobody cared. Now all of a sudden …

But were they not created by the Mother, too?

Yes, they were created, and they have to leave. I mean, I figure that even privilege was created to create exactly this situation, but I am not really sure if we have to blow up. Sometimes I think, great, I can't think of a better way to get to Nirvana. I mean—think of it—instant vaporization; there couldn't be a more pleasant way to die. Fifteen minutes is all you've got; you don't have six months or three years, you know. Not only that, but you're instantly vaporized, turned into spirit. That's really something to think about. So maybe that's what She is doing; that's a neat way to do it …

So you think there is a meaning behind it all, a pattern that we are just enacting?

We might find it very uncomfortable; I am sure that we don't want to go. But people don't like it too much when a mountain blows up and there is a volcano; they will have to get out of the way or perish. The Mother cares for us greatly, but not for us more than for herself. And the thing is, we don't know what time it is.

You have talked a lot about the Mother, the Mother Earth, Grandmother Universe. What has being a mother meant to you?

I always thought that I would go on to the beach, become a beatnik and have a good time. But I had to feed the kids, and more importantly, I lived in a world that to my eyes was a real mess, and here I had brought these innocent people into it—it was my idea, after all, it wasn't their idea—so I was responsible. That meant I had to work, I had to write, and I had to teach, because I had to have some input into the situation that they would grow up in, and I think that their existence impelled me. They are also very bright and interesting people, so they themselves push me in all kinds of directions. And then there is the simple fact of knowing what being a mother means. Sometimes it means not being nice; sometimes it is not smelling sweet and baking cookies, and doing everything baby wants just because that's what baby wants.

It is like that in nature, and you have to think about the larger picture, the whole, and what's going on around you. It has allowed me to notice parts of Mother Earth that I didn't understand before, because I could just have said that mothers are terrible people, which people in America love to say, if-my-mother-hadn't-been-so-rotten-I-would-have-been-wonderful, you know. Some mothers really are dreadful, and that's part of it. Have you even seen birds function with babies? They are not nice. In a patriarchy, of course, we are supposed to think that we are better than the animals, but I don't think so; they seem to be pretty smart. But I had to notice all that, because I had to reconcile conflicts within myself; I wanted to be a good mother, but then I had to bring out what that means, had to think about it.

So being a mother led you back to the earth and its mothering cycle?

Yes. And then, in fact, you become immortal; not because you have kids, but because you reclaim yourself for being. You close the circle.