"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."