Playwrights From The United States

"This is what I know from science: that a grain of dust dwells at the center of every flake of snow, that ice can have its way with land, that wolves live inside a circle of their own beginning. This is what I know from blood: the first language is not our own."

"Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)"

"writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America."

"Waking today just before winter when I try to name the color of grasses, how I feel their beauty, there is no word."

"A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. ("The Feathers" p15)"

"Writing begins for me with survival, with life and with freeing life, saving life, speaking life. It is work that speaks what can't be easily said. It originates from a compelling desire to live and be alive. For me, it is sometimes the need to speak for other forms of life, to take the side of human life, even our sometimes frivolous living, and our grief-filled living, our joyous living, our violent living, busy living, our peaceful living. It is about possibility. It is based in the world of matter. I am interested in how something small turns into an image that is large and strong with resonance, where the ordinary becomes beautiful. I believe the divine, the magic, is here in the weeds at our feet, unacknowledged. What a world this is. Where else could water rise up to the sky, turn into snow crystals, magnificently brought together, fall from the sky all around us, pile up billions deep, and catch the small sparks of sunlight as they return again to water?"

"It’s a good feeling to be empty-handed, to feel naked as if a whole life was blown off my back by a storm. (Chapter 5, p105)"

"Lies couldn't call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. (p45)"

"She slept on the ground of the cave that night, feeling the land, feeling it move up through her. She saw her own self lying there, a white-haired woman, a strong woman, part of earth's terrain. In the cave she remembered how there was hope in the land, hope and tomorrow living in the veins and stones of earth. She remembered that the river was going to the sea, had been rain clouds and lakes. It had been snow. Now it was on its journey back to the great first waters of life."

"It was a beautiful night, and she thought how wonderful it was to look out without fear (p373)"

"As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us...It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective. Our very lives might depend on this listening. In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed by the people. It gave away the truth. It carried the story of danger to other countries. It was a poet, a prophet, a scientist. Sometimes, like the wind, poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. It is the language of life speaking through us about the sacredness of life."

"They stared ahead, into another future. (p342)"

"From the hills, the doings of town seemed distant and hazy to Belle. She fell into a new rhythm, more like the rhythm of earth, the cycles of night and day. (p 322)"

"How we have been pulled from the land! And how poetry has worked hard to set us free, uncage us, keep us from split tongues that mimic the voices of our captors. It returns us to our land. Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit. It is a lockbox of words to put an ear to as we try to crack the safe of language, listening for the right combination, the treasure inside. It is life resonating. It is sometimes called Prayer, Soothsaying, Complaint, Invocation, Proclamation, Testimony, Witness. Writing is and does all these things. And like that parade, it is illegitimately insistent on going its own way, on being part of the miracle of life, telling the story about what happened when we were cosmic dust, what it means to be stars listening to our human atoms."

""Right or wrong. For us, it is such a simple thing, only a matter of whether a wrong has been done, or someone harmed. But they have books filled with words, with rules about how the story can and cannot be spoken. There is not room enough, nor time, to search for the real story that lies beneath the rest." (p341)"

"A friend's father, watching the United States stage another revolution in another Third World country, said, "Why doesn't the government just feed people and then let the political chips fall where they may?" He was right. It was easy, obvious, even financially more reasonable to do that, to let democracy be chosen because it feeds hunger."

"of course property is an abstract economic concept on a hidden dollar that has been the cause of the death of people...I mean this country and most others that work out of our economic system are founded on the idea of property, and most of the transgressions that take place here have to do with property. There were massive slaughters of some of the California tribes during the gold rush, and the same thing happened to the Cherokee in Georgia. So, you know, property is no insignificant thing for us to think about if we ever want to change the world."

"I loved poetry. I still do. I love the process of writing it, the very sort of quiet way of being in the world. I think it's more about being than it is about thinking, and I like that...I think the poetry is a basic language for writing, the most condensed, every word cared about. It's preparation for all the other shapes and kinds of writing."

"I never wanted to be a writer, either, but I suppose we each find a calling and fall into it."

"Working at a university I've made the observation that many student writers write for the sake of writing. They are really writing for other writers, not to tell a necessary story, not out of urgency and need. I have keenly felt that writing must be more than that, that it must have a power to enter the world, to begin to change the stories people live by, to open that story into something larger, into something that helps us know how to live. This means that we have to expand not only our work but our ideas about audience. It wouldn't bother me to have academics reject my work if somebody read it and it changed their attitude about deforestation, for example. I think I began to write out of a desire to make change in the world, searching for language that would help me speak my innermost hopes and ways. Writing was something of a foreign language I learned to be fluent in so that I could communicate emotions and what I knew was important-an ethical way of thinking about the world-communicate what racism is and what it does to people."

"Home was always, in my heart, Oklahoma. I can feel even now the stillness of the land, the smell of it. But I've lived a long time in Colorado, so I believe it is home too. Especially since I know the stories there, the land, the animals, and the people in our community. But I am thinking that home is larger than this. As the earth has grown smaller and we know its fragility, it is important for us now to expand our view of home to a larger space, a global community, and to think of land, ocean, mountains, desert, as home. And we need to extend our sense of community to include animals and other forms of life."

"The real place of writing is to make change in the world, and it's a very powerful medium."

"The planet is so much smaller than we ever thought in the past I think of the whole planet as home, a whole ecosystem that seems important to our growth as people and our survival."

"The exciting thing about writing is how it happens, how a story takes on life, begins to move in its own direction, surprises the writer with its growing. When it's working, time passes quickly, the characters speak inside your inner ear, the scenes are there just needing words. When it's working, the story shows you a new way to live, it offers a writer wisdom one would never have without it."

"I see my everyday life in a historical context. We are living in the midst of history; it's important that somebody keeps records."

"We're all affected by place whether we realize it or not. For one thing, all our stories-creation stories, myths, oral traditions-are, in part, about storied land. Stories live in the land. They "take place" in context with all the rest. Our daily lives are linked to place. One of the problems with the dominant culture is that it wants to escape this connection. As Rachel Rosenthal said in a recent performance, people use intellect and science as a tool so they won't have to dirty their hands with matter. For indigenous people, the link between the person and the land is a connecting point, not only with ordinary, daily life, but with the cosmos. It is about relationship. And relationship is the most central part of our lives, our being, not only relationship with other people, but with all things. I believe a lot of neuroses have to do with a lack of healthy relationship with the land, with self, with creation and the creative spirit."

"The humor was always there also, because even in desperate situations people are human. They still do funny things, and they still have their obsessions and habits. It bothers me when I read a book where everything is clear-cut and there isn't anything human about or in it. One of the things that often happens between cultures is the denial of common humanity."

"People who write about wilderness and the environment are going away from themselves to do it. They don't look at the inner wilderness and what motivates people to be destructive. I think everything is connected, that I'm a part of the destruction; we all are. Investigating why we're sometimes apathetic is probably the best work we could do."

"When the stories of your people center around the name of one stone, one place, the whole land around you becomes a part of everything that you know: your religion, your mythology, your family history."

"I think protest and legal actions lack the emotions, the feelings of the people, and story is a way to touch the heart. It often carries a weight that the grey language of law lacks."

"the more I observe the world, the more I learn about it, the more I think that there's a vast terrestrial intelligence all around us."

"Once a people are victims, they have to struggle hard to politicize themselves and to be able to break the cycle, to be able to somehow, as they say today, to empower themselves once again, to get back their health and their wholeness."

"Spirituality necessitates certain kinds of political action. If you believe that the earth, and all living things, and all the stones are sacred, your responsibility really is to protect those things. I do believe that's our duty, to be custodians of the planet. What has amazed me is that after the first bomb, you would have thought all war would stop forever, and that they could find a way to resolve all conflict."

"I think it's easier for a non-Indian to write a book about Indian people and get it published than it is for us. Our own experiences and our own lives don't fit the stereotypes."

"The next day as he rode on toward the bluffs, Stace Red Hawk felt a renewal of faith, the kind of feeling that comes to a man in silence, when he takes notice that a tree is older than himself, and that it will remain when he is gone. (p 230)"

"when all of them joined in to sing about lovers and fights and broken-down cars, it was a shared world, between all tribes, all nations. (p 296)"

"Spring was rich and heavy in the air. All the plants were turning over, beginning another journey upward toward the sun. (p 244)"

"I think that in some ways maybe we've come to think of fiction as a lie. It's like the word “myth,” which means “lie” for many people; yet, myth is the highest form of truth. It is about the inner journey, about others before us who have gone that way and civilizations. It is about our life's task of becoming. In some ways I think fiction is like myth, but also fiction takes a fact or an event, even an imagined one, and it makes truth out of it. Prose is a process of uncovering, of getting to the bare, unstated facts of living. Maybe they are inner facts, maybe they are not historical, but they tell the highest truths."

"(Do you see being mixed blood as a burden, or is it an advantage?) It depends on the day you ask me! It's a very difficult position to be in, but, on the other hand, it allows for a great amount of freedom. If you live on the boundaries between cultures, you are both of those cultures and neither of those cultures, and you can move with great mobility in any direction you want."

"the evidence of healing is all around us. A scar, for instance, is evidence that a wound has healed. But the poems are also about wilderness; they're about animals that live in the wilderness and humans who go into the human wilderness, and who also fear the wilderness outside them. In some ways the poems are an investigation of the depths of people, the history of land."

"...as you grow and develop, you betray your readers and you betray your own self. At each step, you're a different person with the new work, and that old person, while still there like the foundation I mentioned, is pushed further into the background. You can't remain true to your past and true to your readers and keep growing. Hopefully they will grow along with you."

"All cruelty is needless. All fighting. Now do we need to build real estate in the Everglades or on migration lands or drill the earth? We have everything available to us for full, good lives, for peace. We must just simply step into it. Anyway, I just started thinking that being silent was in some way not being honest and that I did not want to be silent about the things that were very important and that our survival is very important. We've gone on-this progression is a very straight line progression into total destruction (Meridel Le Sueur says this also), and we're just on the border now. Like the earth is square again and we stand on her edge. I guess I feel, if I'm going to be killed and if my family is going to be killed, at least I don't want to go quietly. I want to feel as if I have done something and not just passively accepted it."

"Uncle Sam was a cold uncle with a mean soul and a cruel spirit. (p219)"

""Are you afraid?" [she] curled up to [him]. "Yes." He held her hand. Such comfort in the flesh. Then he turned toward her, grateful for her presence, and held her, and because the desire for life goes on under all circumstances, they made love. (p230)"

""I think the Bible is full of mistakes. I thought I would correct them. For instance, where does it say that all living things are equal?" The priest shook his head. 'It doesn't say that. It says man has dominion over the creatures of the earth.' "'Well, that's where it needs to be fixed. That's part of the trouble, don't you see?'" (270)"

"I'd like to pass along some of what I've learned about what preserves and protects life. My intention is to create an energy, a life protection energy. That's everybody's job. Everybody that's living now has to work to protect life. What other options do we have? We protect life, or we're indifferent and allow it to be destroyed. We're in a position now to stop life altogether. Our energy and our living have to move towards protecting life."

"(about humor) It's a survival technique, too. People who are in poverty, people who are in very difficult situations and in pain, have to develop humor or die of despair."

"I teach in American Indian studies at the university and I find that many of the non-Indian students are desperately searching for spirits, for their own souls, that something in the contemporary world has left many Euro-Americans and Europeans without a source, has left them with a longing for something they believe existed in earlier times or in tribal people. What they want is their own life, their own love for the earth, but when they speak their own words about it, they don't believe them, so they look to Indians, forgetting that enlightenment can't be found in a weekend workshop, forgetting that most Indian people are living the crisis of American life, the toxins of chemical waste, the pain of what is repressed in white Americans. There is not such a thing as becoming an instant shaman, an instant healer, an instantly spiritualized person."

"Simon Ortiz says, "It's fiction and you'd better believe it." I always loved that line. Another way to say it is that fiction is a vertical descent; it's a drop into an event or into history or into the depths of some kind of meaning in order to understand humans, and to somehow decipher what history speaks, the story beneath the story."

"I write because the poems speak what I can't say in my normal language. There's a kind of magic, an intuitive thing I feel when a poem or a story really works for me. It works on the deepest levels, all the levels of myself. Certainly, it works physically, and it also works psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, and then the last priority for me is how it works intellectually…(you're saying that writing poetry or just creative writing is a heuristic device that brings about a different kind of understanding?) LH: It makes me change; it makes other people change. When you read something that is really put together well, something unresolved in the heart or psyche moves toward resolution and wholeness. It's magic."