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AI: So you were writing those things in the mid to late '60s.

MY: In prose, yeah.

AI: But at that same time, was that about the time that The Feminine Mystique came out?

MY: Yes.

AI: And then some of those early feminist poets, Marge Piercy and Adrienne Rich?

MY: Carolyn Kiser. Adrienne Rich was still sort of an academic poet, she's the same -- let's see, Adrienne and I were somewhat the same age, I think. Carolyn is a little bit younger. Muriel Ruykeyser is a little bit older, she's already, she already died. Tillie --

AI: So had you -- oh, Tillie Olson?

MY: Yeah, Tillie Olson. I just saw her last week, a couple weeks ago, she's in her nineties and we were having lunch. I always knew that she was about ten years older than I, so she's in her nineties already. And I could see, you know, she was this highly intellectual, wonderful human being. She read my first, the first manuscript on Shameless Hussy, the Camp Notes, and we've been -- she claims that I wrote her the first fan mail she ever had, in 1963 or 1964, when she published Tell Me a Riddle. I wrote to her while the kids were little and I just went to the library and I read that story and I just, oh God, this is really incredible, and I wrote to her through the publishers. And she didn't respond so I had no idea she got it, but... so she's become a great friend and supporter. I met Audre Lorde who was ten years younger than I. She is now, she died of cancer, a really great loss, actually. But she, when she said, in the 1970s I think she was speaking somewhere and she, I was sitting in the front row and she said, "My silences have not protected me. Your silence is not going to protect you." And I thought, oh gosh, that is so great -- it was just a great line. I used it in one of my poems. I looked her up, and she said that I had sent her my po-, when she was an editor of the Amazon Quarterly at University of Chicago, I think. I don't know if I have my chronology properly, but that I had written to her and she wrote back and I was really quite flattered, but I got to know her quite well right before she, about ten years before she died. But many, the women who were in the vanguard of the women's movement are just aging now, but they really -- I think they just turned the world around. I think we have a great debt that we owe to the black liberation movement in the (1940s), going way back to the Supreme Court decision on desegregation and the progress that we made. And the women suddenly became aware that hey, I have a voice, too, and that came after the black liberation movement, I think, and all the other liberation movements that has come, the gay liberation. Most of the gay people that I knew in the 1960s and '70s were men. I didn't know the women, I didn't know there were any lesbians at that time. But, so it's been a wonderful exhilarating experience for me.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.