Linda Hogan (writer)

"It is a life of constant observation and learning. Sometimes, other than love and tenderness for our own, what else is there to learn in this world for us?"

"It is more about murder and theft, the true stories of what happened during the Oklahoma oil boom."

"Don’t you think that civilization is a confusing word? It seems that it always implies Western civilization and certain kinds of behavior and ways of being in the world that are in conflict with the environment...That particular one needs to be rethought, especially if you look over the history of the European knowledge system and mind. One of the things I’m most interested in is talking about indigenous traditions and looking at the differences between the two. If you take a system of agriculture that was in place on this continent at the time of first contact and how well it was working, and then you compare it with the agriculture of Europe at that time, there’s simply no comparison. Something happened in Europe, in Western civilization, that created a breakdown of a healthy knowledge system and a healthy relationship with the rest of the world. I spend all of my time reading, writing, thinking about what it is that created people who thought they were civilized but really were the harshest and cruelest people in any time and any place from the beginning."

"I puzzle over humans. They can talk, but they can lie. They do not always know their own motivations."

"Linda Hogan's gentle and clear poetry in Rounding the Human Corners reminds me that, too often, I long and ask for more than I need."

"While groups of non-humans have different cultures, even different dialects in the same species, they accept one another. Humans find their differences too often as fracture lines. I have loved working with non-human animals, but find that I also have love for humans once I learn them."

"(The childishness of that attitude - that insistence on "mine" and "my way only" - is rather frightening.) Right. Torture and genocide are based on such small words as those."

"I see so many disappointing environmental writers who are not writing about the environment at all. They’re writing about themselves in the environment, and they often don’t understand the world they’re writing about. There are clearly writers who are more concerned with traveling around and checking everything out than they are with long-term survival of the habitats that they’re working in. In some ways, the writing I do is politically centered because it is about a world view that can’t be separated from the political"

"Stories have the capacity to make change in ways that other forms of activism don’t...Sometimes I think of them as a form of activism, sometimes as an expression of love, or the meaningful humanity of our daily lives."

"Whatever it is that people believe about the lives of writers only applies to writers who have great incomes, I believe."

"I truly feel there is a new language coming about-look at the work of Meridel LeSueur, Sharon Doubiago, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker - it's coming from the women. Something has to be turned around. (1990)"

"In recent years I read much more Native American women's work than anything else; for example, Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan. I feel an affinity within to these women's work. Their writings run closer to the Chicano experience, given the fact that we both have native roots here in the United States."

"Drenched in grief and loss though it is, Mean Spirit is a haunting and beautiful story. Hogan's compassion for her characters is what makes the book captivating, bearable. She brings us a long overdue story, one that celebrates the resilience and survival of our own Indian population."

"I love the art of learning. It doesn’t always stay with me but reading about snail teeth and thinking about how many crows roost together, watching them fledge their young with the help of magpies, it is all exciting and leaves me, and hopefully the reader, in a state of wonder about our world and the cooperation of one bird with another. I think this also answers many of the questions about why it is important that we read and write such works. Readers fall in love with the planet, their own environment. They want to find their path toward making change, to learn how it may be done."

"Language is really connected to place. In native languages, indigenous languages, for example. One of the things people don't think about very often is that English is a very small language. It has only a tenth, sometimes less, of the vocabulary of some of the native languages and for indigenous people who come from a place, an ecosystem- the relationship to that place is actually embedded in the language itself."

"I sometimes think that when we imagine we know something, that it's mostly conjecture, and that it actually diminishes the world and the animals around us when we imagine that we know what they're about. A more open mind is called for. We're very limited. We have very limited minds. Our equipment for understanding the world is not very evolved."

"I suppose it takes a life-time of reflection and thought to move a writer in a certain direction."

"I’m very concerned with human, animal, and plant survival, traditions that are ecologically sound, and indigenous knowledge systems, and how to convey these understandings of the world to a wide readership."

"I find that my process usually isn’t that I’m full of intention. It’s usually that I’m just open, and something comes to visit and tells me the story and creates it."

"I write to put words together in ways that express what can’t be said in the ordinary use of language, particularly the way a poem feels, goes not only through the mind, but through the heart and body, as well. With poetry, I’d like it to first bypass the mind and give off a particular feeling, then if someone wishes, they can return to it with their mind. I want it to be accessible, also, to every person and not just to other poets or people who have studied poetry."

"We can’t control the earth’s response to our actions, only our own behaviors."

"I always think of Lewis and Clark, their story. It is not really their story at all. It is the story of Sacajawea who knew the way, took them along, saved them from mishaps, kept them fed, negotiated their entry into different tribal territories. The story, really, is hers. And she was still just a girl. Yet, women have been omitted from Native histories and so little is found that it is an effort to find information, even for scholars. So I like to center stories that are also history, with women as integral forces within the story."

"Writers who work in more than one genre find that their work is different in each way they write, yet the topic may be the same. It is just another form and way of thinking. Some things can’t be said in a poem or a novel but might become an essay. Other pieces of work begin as a poem then make a turn into an essay. The work is shape-shifting even if the inner person, the psyche of the writer, remains the same. The approach may be the same, but the final product is quite different than the writer first thought it would be. Creativity goes its own direction. It has its own life energy. Writing is the teacher and we follow it."

"Linda Hogan's work is rooted in truth and mystery."

"A novel that instructs the heart as it binds its curative spell. With her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic, Linda Hogan reinforces my faith in reading, writing, living."

"one of our best writers."

"She is a compassionate witness who reminds us: 'When a person says, "I remember," all things are possible.'"

"Linda Hogan is one of the most important environmental writers of our time. In this troubled and dark world, I am grateful for the wisdom, light, and love found in these poems."

"There is no one like Linda Hogan. I read her poetry to both calm and ignite my heart."

"Her verses teach us how to live with dignity in a world bent on destruction."

"First books, for many people, seem to be sort of autobiographical incursions into who they are, and what it means to be who they are."

"I love all animals and nature. I just find that the more I learn about the world the more exciting and fascinating it all is."

"It's been in the western history of science that the abstract has been idealized over matter. Until recently. As spirit has been preferred over body in the religious systems."

"I think place has been a mentor for me, and nature. I have always mostly been interested in this world around us, and that's not always the human world. I believe these things have been directions for me more than individual people have been. They have been maps to my growing mind, religions to my heart."

"When I discovered writing, it was...like being dropped into water and finding that you're an excellent swimmer - that you love the water and you love to swim. I think when I discovered poetry it allowed me to step into my real life, my real self- the body, heart and soul of being alive."

""Story" is significant here, the stories we tell ourselves, those we learn. So I think stories contribute to what we will continue to allow to happen in and out of our world. I've observed that when people do political work, they might go and talk to people about You need to speak out about this, or You need do that, and everyone gets excited and they're ready to do it. Then a day or two later they go back to their lives and business goes on as usual. But when there's an emotional element, a story, with characters you grow to care about, then I think it actually makes a difference in the world, and that's why I write. Because story has a power. Because I've seen it make a difference, seen it change people."

"If someone is going to be a writer, they’ll be a writer no matter what they do. I don’t think I have any advice. I used to think I did, but if somebody loves to write they will be a writer."

"It took men quite a while to have the courage to look at things differently."

"I feel that, as an Indian woman, it’s important to hold to our integrity about our relationships with all the other species, including plants, and that they not be endangered. They are part of our cultural heritage and part of our spiritual life and our well-being, in terms of keeping our tribal lands and ecosystems intact."

"My characters actually create me instead of the other way around."

"I feel like I owe the future to my children and grandchildren, that the work I do, I hope, will help sustain them in the future...My family’s important to me. I think you feel that even more when you’re an American Indian. You see your children, and you want them to know the tradition, to know the language to follow in some way, and yet, you still have to live in America. I think that’s my priority in my life. My work is all dedicated to those babies and children."

"We live in a world of many intelligences. Human language isn't all that is spoken in the world around our lives. Other documented and studied languages exist in the animal world. They surround us, also, in the plant world, where trees have the ability to call helpful underground bacteria toward them from distances, to communicate with one another through hormonal and chemical means. Cedars and junipers even store moisture to release for hardwoods during times of drought. We are surrounded by voices intelligent and in need of respect."

"How absolutely amazing all the life forms and their origins."

"Everything that happens in one country is carried away to others, through air, through ocean. Radioactivity shows up long distances away. Our plastics travel in the ocean to other continents. Now there is plastic sand, the ground-down drinking bottles of America, which have become the dead beaches on islands in the Pacific. These were once places the indigenous people depended on for food sources and which are now completely dead. We forget how small the planet has always been and it becomes smaller with each catastrophe. We also now have ways to communicate across and beneath oceans, to know what is happening not only to our embodied planet, but to people in other locations, attacks on innocent protesters, wars we might not have known existed, and that has allowed us to become more conscious humans on this earth, to know we have kin everywhere and the earth, as a living body, is one."

"All of the animals I have known enter into my writing, become it. They are inspiration, research, and also my love."

"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)"

""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)"

"May all the walls be like those of the jungle, filled with animals singing into the ears of night Let them be made of the mysteries further in in the heart, joined with the lives of all, all bridges of flesh all singing, all covering the wounded land showing again, again that boundaries are all lies."

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

"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)"