Playwrights From The United States

"When I sit down at the desk, there are other women who are hungry, homeless. I don't want to forget that, that the world of matter is still there to be reckoned with. This writing is a form of freedom most other people do not have. So, when I write, I feel a responsibility, a commitment to other humans and to the animal and plant communities as well."

"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."

"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."

"(asked about poetry and fiction) the two genres are very connected in some way, because they're both doing the same thing. It's a descent into something older, deeper and more powerful than our everyday being or reality."

"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."

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

"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?"

"(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 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'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."

"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."

"being "traditional" means you have a great deal of responsibility. Rather than people cutting themselves off from white communities to be traditional, the more I think about it in my life the more I have thought that breaking down those barriers is much more important than building them up. Any kind of racism at this point is not good for any people. And to become anti-white is a mistake. It's self-destructive for those who do. Talk about a balance of things-talk about head and heart or head and soul-somehow I think that merging the two cultures in a really healthy way, not as done in the past, might be an integration in the way that we were talking about earlier. Indians have already begun that process. Years ago. Now I see white people integrating in that way. Mostly women at this point."

"American people need to revise their ideas about spirituality. Spirituality ends up being very much like capitalism. It ends up being a force to control other people or to make yourself look good-to give yourself a position of power and integrity."

"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."

"the land, is the oldest part of me and the wisest. The part that can survive. All of us Indian writers are historically a part of the whole body of our nations' histories and places, wherever we may do our writing, in New York City or at Rosebud."

"That balance between the spiritual and the physical and the mental-a lot of people who become interested in the spiritual tradition become very silly. They go off so far there is no balance or no footing, and our feet are very important in spiritual life touching earth. We're here on earth with our bodies. We're not meant for outer space physically or spiritually. People who go into the mental can go off too far into the mental. I don't know many people who can go off too far into the physical (I don't mean athletically or sexually, I mean awareness of body), but the physical draws down the other two, the spiritual and the mental. I suppose physical labor is real good for that reason-chopping wood and doing whatever work you have to do in the world. It seems to me that is a very important aspect of tradition, to have that balance and keep and maintain it as much as you can. I think when people lose it is when they get caught up into the other things-when they lose that balance."

"We are here to rejoice with our full selves. We didn't come here to deprive ourselves. We aren't made for deprivation. We came here with work to do-balancing the forces-and with great capacities for love and joy to fulfill with/in our full selves."

"...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."

"I search for the words that will speak the feelings inside my body and hope they touch those feelings in others. At the same time it is a celebration and sacred song given back to those of whom I speak, especially the animals who are made stronger by our acknowledgment of them."

"The U.S. is organized socially and politically and economically in ways to keep people without vibrance or energy. To keep them working hard, thinking they will "make it" if they work harder, all at the expense of their real lives."

"People believe they are secure and own their land, their houses. American history shows us that is never true. White people are shocked when their homes are taken away. It's unjust. But Indians have known that in their DNA. This government has broken over 300 treaties. Why believe them?"

"One life does not fit neatly into the other always. Creative work is a way to order it."

"My own particular circumstance guaranteed that I'd never feel normal or manage to fit into mainstream life. Until a person knows that, from the mind, they feel crazy. Now I see there's no need to fit. You know, it's not that Indians are different from the dominant culture. We are the same with the same needs and loves and heartaches. It's just that most Indians know time and space well enough from the heart to know that life is for living. Because we are short in our span here and we are not the most significant of lives on earth. We share the planet with plants and animals equal to ourselves, and we are small in the universe. So the daily strivings fall into place. I feel that poetry is a process of uncovering our real knowledge. To manipulate the language merely via the intellect takes away the strength of the poem."

"Most of the things that I did as a child and even as an older growing person were outdoors and were alone. Outside was my church, my place of vision and dreaming."

"In tribal culture every person has their place and one who speaks more clearly with spirits than others is not a better person or is not in a higher position but simply performs one of many functions for the people. You and I have friends who do this daily and they make nothing of it. The woman who builds the fire is as important as the woman who guides the soul."

"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."

"I consider caretaking the basic work of living on earth. I've often thought about how one of the things that was probably necessary for the woman's movement-the dominant culture woman's movement - was to break free of the duty of being a caretaker. But then, for women to return to being caretakers, because it's important to offer service to the living, and to the planet. I find many women now who are returning to the idea of being a caretaker, of nourishing as one of the primary roles of both men and women. I see a direct relation between how we care for the animal-people and the plants and insects and land and water, and how we care for each other, and for ourselves. Part of our work here is to care for life. (Smith: And what you're saying, I guess, is you can't limit that care to just your family and friends, to just the human creatures you love who come your way - you have to widen that.) LH: Yeah, it has to be widened. If you look at the book Call to Consciousness for instance, a community is not just us-our nuclear family, or the Indian community, or a "University community," as they say here--but the community of all living creatures."

"I love to read poetry, phone books, playing cards, novels, newspapers, bathroom walls - there's a story in all of it. And I love poets who bring together poetry and life in all its motion: Neruda, Forche, Cardenal, Dugan, Bishop...I learn from all of what I read and hear. And as Lame Deer said, we're surrounded by books. The stones are books, and we may read their stories. The trees are books with a story written in them. The water and land and each animal is a book, with a poem and story and song."

"I work best if I allow the process to take place. That doesn't mean I don't think, take measurements of what is just, feel out what is valuable to life, to self, to earth, where to take, where to return, what is the responsibility of my own work-you know, response-ability. I ask myself how best to let my words serve. I know that part of that is to take a global perspective, because I see what's happening in the world, and others see, and our combined voices are a chorus, a movement toward life. They are a protest against human-imposed suffering. They are vital energy going out into the world. We feed each other with that energy when we read each other's work. My other responsibility, I think, is to be honest about my life. That doesn't mean I won't write fiction, or that I'll "tell all"...But it means this: that I, as an Indian woman, from a non middle-class background, on the margin, not a member of the dominant culture I need to speak what my struggle has been, and offer the strength of that survival to keep us all moving together, to offer back my own words. This means to speak about what it's like to be of mixed blood, to have suffered losses, to have not been educated, to have worked primarily at working-class jobs until fairly recently and to have worked as a writer. Not that I think my own life is so significant although sometimes I think it's pretty incredible, I'll tell ya!...it's part of a historical process. It's a woman's experience, and an Indian woman's experience. And I've been given this gift of words, and I need to speak this life, and the political dimensions of it. I need to make the interpretation of my own place and the places of others in the American context. But I don't want to get too serious here. These responsibilities shouldn't be taken so seriously by writers, by women, as to take away passion, and joy, and play. Because we've got to keep energy moving. We must take in and out, like breathing. I've always thought there's nothing less peaceful than a somber peace movement, you know what I mean? You know those T shirts with Emma Goldman, saying, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution?" That's what peace and equality must mean to us all-that we can have joy in living, and no more cold war of the inner self."

"I began writing fiction because our lives are made up of stories and a story can change a life. (2020)"

"For me, and maybe I am wrong, fight has more than one way to exist. Change has to happen. Maybe a book does make a difference, I hope. Maybe words can make change. They have in the past. So I search for the right ones. Maybe it is not of use, but sometimes it is. (2020)"

"in our human development we begin with ourselves and move outward toward relationship, and in writing work, it seems to be the same, that most writers begin with their own identity, with autobiography, and then move out toward family, friends, environment, country, world. I have noticed there's a return for many writers as they age…for others the world expands outward more and more, never returning to self...We need for writers to do both. We need the personal in its global context."

"The poetry writing was very important to me. It was a way of trying to define who I was in an environment that felt foreign. I realize now that writing had everything to do with my life and my survival."

"live so nothing will be left for death at the end"

"I used to tell students that whatever is inside the psyche will come to the fore in poetry and writing and not to think too much about wanting to say something, about wanting a theme. It is already there. Given the chance, words will come with their own will. A poem knows what it wants to do even without the mind of the writer intervening. Writers can’t create it on their own behalf and make it right. It is more like putting together a basket. The shape happens as the maker weaves...That is my key way of knowing; It Comes to Me. (2020)"

"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."

"(Your writing is rich with love and compassion – how do you stay rooted in those qualities when dealing with such tragic themes as the destruction of our environment and the treatment of Native Americans?) What other choice do I have? It doesn’t mean I have no anger about injustice. I do. I throw myself down when it is violent and painful. But it is also a matter of how to work against that injustice. I haven’t seen it succeed by fighting, yelling, rage, or outward anger. Think of those yelling faces you see on the news, mouths wide open. They lose. Their anger, their hatred has the opposite effect of what they are reaching toward. (2020)"

"I discovered Kenneth Rexroth and I was really excited about him. It was the first contemporary poetry I read, and it was alive for me. It became a kind of model for how I wanted to write."

"we don't have to do anything special to have contact with the spirit world. It's just natural if you stop and listen. Just there, always. Like your own heartbeat."

"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."

"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."

"What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. ("Deify the Wolf" p66)"

"To walk on this earth is to walk on a living past, on the open pages of history and geology. ("Creations" p79)"

"You can really change the world with a good story, you can really make a difference with a good story, or you can really touch a heart with a good poem or essay. But you can't do it sometimes just with a sign...the power of story and sharing is the power to make change, the ability to make a difference. And it's not fixed, like a belief system would be a fixed thing. So when we talk, when we share, when we hear a story, read a story, learn a new story, it has the real ability to make a difference and change the world, change a person."

"There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger. ("All My Relations" p41)"