Women Authors From The United States

"I have seen this sky every day of my life and I am still in awed by it. That is what the wild is — this intense medicinal beauty. To look at it makes you feel whole."

"I feel that men are as much of a mystery as women. Once we get past a certain amount of self-consciousness and protection of certain sacred cows by each gender, we could have a real conversation, maybe, for the first time ever in the universe, in this century."

"The mother, if she commits herself to life and builds a vast storehouse of knowing inside of her, is her children’s bastion. She has a relationship with her children forever as mother. And she has the wisdom, hopefully, to know when to let go and let them lead their lives on their own. But she also is there when they come back and need something. There has to be a prototype for the mother who remains mother forever."

"I understand mythology. I understand stories. I understand poetry. I understand that they cut close to the bone. I am a poet who became a psychoanalyst. That is my background. I am a cantadora. I am a storyteller. It comes from my feet, upward, not from my brain, downward."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"I have to say that a man can never know who he is, or a woman cannot know who she is, until she has poured herself through the sieve that is her mother and poured herself through the sieve that is her father and come to understand through both."

"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."

"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."

"We need to see and understand that whatever stands behind nature is what is god. Nature itself, it is the manifestation."

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

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

"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)"

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"one of our best writers."

"My theory, which is a blasphemous and heinous theory, is that as long as men elevate the maiden and the sexual woman, they will trash the mother and the daughter."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"(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 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."

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

"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."

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

""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."

"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."

"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."

"Cynicism is the opposite of soulful. Cynicism means the conduit to the soul has a great kink in it, like a garden hose in which nothing flows in either direction. That’s what makes cynicism. If those conduits are open, you cannot be cynical."

"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."

"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 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."