- Okay, I'm gonna say, this is Rose Norman and I'm interviewing Naj, do you wanna use a last name or not? 

- Oh sure, I don't care. 

- What's the last name? 

- McFadden. 

- Naj McFadden, by phone and we're talking about the year and a half that she spent looking for the ideal place to live and it was 19, she started in December of '83 and-- 

- Yes. 

- And ended in January of '87. 

- No, July of '86. 

- July of '86. 

- In about October of '86 is when I went back to Fayetteville to Judy's land and was there and my father died, I think it was January 7th or very early in January. 

- Well, when I first asked you to respond to what Kate had written about how traveling dykes were idealistic nomads who bridged the communication gap during a time before the internet and cellphones, they brought news about what was going on and often controversy or idealistic expectation. You didn't identify with that. Tell how you identified as a traveling dyke. 

- Well, I mean, I guess I carried news about what women I had met, what they were doing and stuff but in terms of actual land and land dykes, I think, the feeling I got anyway was they were pretty much identified, knew of each other, so it wasn't like I was saying, oh, hey, there's this land group, that I'd be at one Women's Land telling them about another Women's Land, they already knew about it. Now, I'm not sure how that, there's a lot of Women's Land in Oregon and I don't really recall like if they all were aware of the Pagoda, for instance, but I spent time at the Pagoda and attended LeAP and I don't know that I was, I mean, I am someone who is always telling people about what I found and what other people are doing, what's going on other places if I'm aware of that but I think the Women's Land was pretty much connected. That's the impression I have at this point, anyway, from back then, even though there weren't cellphones and stuff. And maybe that's incorrect, I don't know, that's just a feeling that I had. 

- Yeah, that's interesting and what gave you that sense because I mean, you went to, what, a dozen different, tell about the advertisement you published. 

- I'd been planning this trip for about 10 years and saving up for it and so, I had some skills that I knew were needed and valuable in the lesbian community and I was a Contact Dyke and Lesbian Connection and had been for, oh, practically since Lesbian Connection started but I wrote this letter about myself, about the skills I had and that I was traveling, looking for the ideal place to live or planning to travel looking for the ideal place to live and that I wanted to work in exchange for room and board and/or money and if anybody was interested in having me come visit them, I included a self-addressed stamped envelope that they could reply to me and also said, if you know other lesbians that might need work, please share this letter with them. 

- Where did you work? 

- I stayed with about 125 different women. 

- Wow. 

- During this trip, I never stayed in a motel, I just went from one lesbian household to another and a couple of women that I stayed with moved, like moved West and I stayed with them again as I went West and a couple of women, after I stayed with them, said, oh, you know, I have a friend in Oregon and called them up and made arrangements that then when I was there I could stay with them. But that was all after the fact, after I'd met, stayed with various women. So from the responses I got, I sort of, I planned out my route and I let people know what my route was and I said that I would send them a letter when I was a couple of, it wasn't like I'm gonna stay five days here and three days there and a week there, it was all up in the air but I tried to stay in touch with people to let them know where I was with letters and postcards so that they would have some sense of when I would be at their and obviously as that got, as I got closer to a particular destination, I would communicate more with someone but yes, I didn't have a phone or anything. 

- Yeah, well, there were cellphones then but not many people had them. 

- Yeah. You know and I could send them a letter and say and a friend of mine was handling, in Indiana, was handling all my bills and correspondence and stuff, so people could call her and I would always call her when I got ready to leave a place and give her my next destination and then I would call her when I got to that destination so that she always knew where I was in the route and how to reach me because I was staying with people, she always had an address or a phone number. 

- That's really well thought out. 

- Except for when I was driving and that became, I hadn't owned a car for many years until I did this trip and when I started out driving, oh, I was terrified. I probably stopped the car five times, of course, I had bought a $500 car too. (Rose laughs) But I probably stopped the car five times before I went 100 miles, pulled off the road, just sure that the car was falling apart and stuff and so when I started out, the driving was just very nerve (audio cuts out) for me but it got so the driving was very valuable time because that was my only time when I had total privacy, when I was alone, otherwise I was in somebody else's home and, you know. I mean, not that I wasn't alone, I mean, sometimes I was in somebody's house and they would go to work or whatever but, yes, I'd be alone in their house but being in the car was like really, like being able to go to my own room and close the door (chuckles). Again, has nothing to do with what you're kind of looking for but. 

- That's an interesting observation though. 

- Yeah. 

- We're hoping to be able to do a longer book. This special issue is limited by what they can publish as the magazine but we may be able to get some funding to go from the magazine to a book and so I'm collecting a lot more than we're gonna publish right away. 

- Uh-huh, now I do remember, like Martine and Miriam, Martine and Miriam were the two women from Canada and like I said, we kept running into each other all over Florida and that was really neat, I enjoyed that and I do remember us sharing information about, oh yeah, go visit this land or go, you know, go look up this (audio cuts out) outside Gainesville, Florida or whatever and when I was at Sand Hill, they came to Sand Hill, when I came back to Sand Hill before my father died, they came to Sand Hill and visited and I guess the information that I felt like I was really sharing was with other traveling dykes that I'd run into. 

- Let me ask, what made you decide to go on the road looking for an ideal place to live, you said you planned it for 10 years, what took you there, did you know about, how did you know about Women's Lands and all? 

- Gosh, how'd I know? I guess probably from Lesbian Connections and also I had, I had worked with Women's Music Festival Collective the second or third festival, I think it was the second one, it was probably in '77, so I'm not sure when. 

- Next year's the 40th. 

- '15 is gonna be the 40th, so it would have been, '75 would have been the first one, or '76, I don't know, anyway, second or third one, it was outside Hesperia, Michigan. I went and worked there and I had always been, I'd lived communally, was interested in living communally, had been involved in radical lesbian feminist movement and that's where my heart lay plus I considered myself kind of a country person. I mean, all my relatives are farmers and I come from a long line of farmers and liked living in the country. My first house I bought for $8,250 and I spent three years totally remodeling it and really wanted to do stuff, I mean, I really wanted to build my own house from the ground up and I wanted to do it and to do things like hand carve the windowsills and stuff like that. You'd spend the rest of your life building the house, not that you wouldn't have a frame-up and stuff that you could live in but just making it yours. So, I hate moving, I wanted to find the ideal place to live and live there for the rest of my life. So, that was my motivation, that's what I was looking for and I knew it wasn't in Indiana. Although I may end up dying here (chuckles). 

- Oh, wow. So, it's been Indiana for the last too many years? 

- I told someone the other day that if I die in Indiana, while I'm still living in Indiana, I'll consider the single biggest failure of my life (chuckles). 

- Oh, so that's the last 25 years of your life you've lived there, more than? 

- Pardon? 

- You've lived there, in Indiana, for the last 25 years? 

- Yes. 

- 14 months, 27 years. 

- And believe me, those 25 years went really fast (chuckles). 

- Okay, okay, so that's how your idealism, all right. This project we're doing, the Southern Lesbian-Feminist Activist Herstory Project is about documenting all the stuff that was going on in the South that's not gotten recognized by the historians of the Women's Movement who tend to focus on urban Northeast and Western places and we see the Land Dyke Movement as a form of lesbian feminist activism, partly because they're just creating this alternative world where you could live out the feminist values. So you said earlier, you saw yourself as a lesbian feminist activist, I know you said you were looking for the ideal place to live but did you see it as a form of activism too? I'm talking about your activism. 

- What is activism? 

- When you said you were already a feminist? 

- Well, I didn't see the traveling as radical but yes, I mean, Women's Land and women living on it, yes, I saw that as a radical act to drop out of, I mean, as much as one could, dropping out of the mainstream and creating our own environment and stuff. Now, at the end of my traveling, I was kind of disillusioned about that but yes, my vision originally was, yes, I saw it as a very radical political activity. 

- And what was your radical politics before you started doing that? 

- Well, I'd lived in New York City and I'd been a part of New York Radical Feminists and Women's Music Network that put out the record Lavender Jane Loves Women and we were doing dances and concerts with women, you know, with lesbian performers and it was all, at that time, all women and all women played the music and I thought we were doing something very different. I didn't think we were just trying to create a lesbian Mick Jagger but again, I think what's happened with women's music is it's just become mainstream. It's not what I thought it was to begin with but I mean, I was involved in things like, well, I was involved in things beyond just lesbian politics, I was also involved with this group in New York City that organized rent strikes and helped, was much more of a, kind of a Marxist group but the Radical Lesbian Feminists was what was really personal for me and my attitude was, the personal was politically, how we would get things changed, how we would create change was by changing things in our own lives and that being, not an example isn't exactly the right word but that being, as things in our lives changed, for instance, Women's Land, women living on Women's Land, the more women that were living on Women's Land, the more other women could see, well, that's a possibility. Yeah, I could do that too. So, in the sense, an example, and that's how change was created more so than voting or boycotting or whatever. That was my personal political philosophy back then. The staff seemed to have a lot of Women's Land, a fair amount of Women's Land. I kind of felt like, when I left New York City, just about anything or everything you could (chuckles) wanna find, you could find in New York City and I left there in '75 but what I discovered and thought was that but incredible, radical things are happening all over, like Lesbian Connection and the Michigan Women's Music Festival, which was different than it is now. For one thing, it was a collective back then and like the Pagoda. I thought the Pagoda was just really fantastic and really exciting but the Pagoda was a rare place because everybody was an owner, whereas most Women's Land, what was defined as Women's Land, except for one or two places in Oregon, really was privately owned land and the owner, whoever the actual owner was really had the right at any point to kick people off and that's exactly what they did at certain points and when I was traveling I found that very depressing and scary. I would have been very hesitant to build my own house on somebody else's land, on land that I didn't really have any ownership in, that somebody could just kick me off if I pissed them off (chuckles) or whatever. 

- Yeah, did you know Blue Lunden, did you go down there, to Sugarloaf? 

- Yes, but I knew Blue from New York City. 

- Oh, right, of course, yeah. 

- Yeah but I did visit her in Sugarloaf. 

- She was dying and they were trying to talk her into putting her land in a land trust and she told more than one person that she was resisting it because she's afraid that then they might kick her off if she didn't own it (laughs). 

- Well, she did go back to New York City to die, didn't she? 

- No, she died at Sugarloaf. 

- Did she? 

- At Sugarloaf, in that house. 

- Was she in New York some of the time because a friend of mine, a good friend of mine helped care for her and I'm pretty sure she did it in New York. 

- Well, she might have had some caregiving in New York but a whole bunch of people went down to Sugarloaf to care for her in her last days. 

- Well, I need to call Callie 'cause I need a recipe from her for a cranberry salad but I'll ask her about that because this particular person I knew from when I lived in Des Moines and so it was neat that someone I knew from New York City and then someone I knew from Des Moines, Iowa, connected up and knew each other well (chuckles). 

- Yeah, that's interesting crossings. 

- Yeah, I had this whole list of what would make the place a perfect place to live, for me, and on the top of the list was, well, high up on the list was that it not snow and that's why it was so ironic that every place I went, I got snowed in. 

- (laughs) And that was in the South? 

- (voice drowned out by Rose) the first place, I wasn't snowed in there but my car wouldn't start, it was so cold. 

- Where was that? 

- I mean, it even snowed in Phoenix, when I was in Phoenix. Again, I didn't get snowed in Phoenix but it snowed in Phoenix, which just doesn't happen very, so the joke was that I was bringing, me, who was trying to get away from snow was bringing it with me everywhere I went but at Sugarloaf, I was working on a ceiling in the guesthouse and it was July, I think, anyway, it was the middle of the summer and I came down off the ladder and it was noticeably cooler and that's when I realized during my trip that yeah, I don't like snow and it's a pain in the ass to drive in and everything but the heat will kill you a lot faster than the cold will (chuckles). So that was, many things on my list changed as I traveled and experienced other realities. 

- Can you think of other traveling dykes you met, other than Miriam and Martine? 

- Oh, gee. It's not Mary Ellen, Miriam. 

- Yeah, she pronounces it Miriam. 

- Oh, Miriam, oh, okay. 

- Yeah, it's a French pronunciation (laughs). 

- Okay, huh... You know, not really, although I should drag out my journals and go through that. 

- Well, after I type this up, you may be moved to do that because you may wanna play with it and do something with it and I'm thinking, this whole interview, it might inspire you to write something else or more. It can go, probably, in the book. We're only gonna be able to use a small part, maybe we'll, you know, some quotations from several traveling dykes or something. I'm not sure, I'm gonna send this to Kate when I send it to you and see whether she can think of, I mean, I'm thinking about Blue Jay, do you know Blue Jay? 

- No. 

- She lives out West? 

- Where does she live? 

- ARF, I think. 

- Yes, I've met her, I met her out at We'Moon. 

- Yeah, she travels a lot. She has land but she travels a great deal. She's not Southern but I know she lived in the South and I'm just trying to think of some other traveling dykes we could interview to get some different perspectives on what the experience was like. This is a very good one and the fact that you were so organized (laughs). (Naj laughs) Sending self-addressed, stamped envelopes to people (laughs). How did you get addresses to do that, what did you do? 

- Lesbian Connection. 

- Oh, you sent them to Contact Dykes. 

- There wasn't email, so people had phone numbers and/or addresses. All the Contact Dykes had addresses or a phone number and most of them had addresses because there wasn't email. Now, you know, everybody just has email, maybe a phone number, sometimes an address and it's also interesting that, well, I did the self-addressed, stamped envelopes because I had not had much money, a lot of money in my life and I figured, well, if I want people to respond to me, I should make it easy for them to do that and hopefully if they don't want to respond to me but they could use the stamped envelope for something else. 

- Sure, yeah. Do you feel like you've said what you got on your mind right now? 

- I fell in love with Florida and the women in Florida and LeAP, LeAP was very powerful and I guess what I started to say and didn't finish was that women were doing incredible things all over the country and it was something different, some things were the same all over the country but each area of the country seemed to have their own thing and I found that very exciting and I personally really clicked with the women around Gainesville and then Willith Barben and Barbara, her partner, who's still in the Miami area, really clicked with them and we talked about forming community together but the problem was, none of us had any money. I mean, I probably would have thought, before this trip, I probably would have thought, gee, if somebody bought the land and said, come on and live on it, gee, that's great, what more could you ask for and yet, as I experienced it traveling around, that's when I got a whole 'nother sort of feeling about it and realized that usually when land was privately owned, the person who owned it wasn't willing to, well, like Judy's land, men weren't allowed on that land until Judy got a lover that had a teenage son and then, you know, he was allowed there and anybody who didn't like it, didn't need to come to the land and in fact, they wanted the land to be more private and I'm not sure where Margaret Waters is but I've heard that, I'm not on Facebook but I've heard that Sandra's on Facebook, you know Sandra, do you know Sandra? 

- Sandra who? 

- I'm trying to think of her last name. She was at Carris? 

- Oh, Lambert, yes, yeah, I do. 

- Yes, Lambert, right, Sandra Lambert, so you know Sandra? 

- Yeah, in fact somebody in Gainesville is interviewing her, we're doing a third issue on cultural feminism with bookstores and stuff and somebody's getting an interview with her about Garris. 

- And where is she, I'd really like to get in touch with her? 

- She's in Gainesville. 

- Oh, she lives in Gainesville? 

- Either she's in Gainesville or in one of those towns that's not far from Gainesville, you know, like Hawthorne or Melrose. 

- Right, right, right. 

- People in Gainesville had mentioned your name, when you said who you were, I immediately recognized having heard your name. I was at that women's gathering last fall too, were you there? 

- Yes. = Seemed like your name came up there too maybe. 

- Yeah, well, what do you look like? 

- I don't look like a land dyke. I look like a narc. 

- Like a what? 

- I look like I'm infiltrating, I don't look like a land dyke. (Rose and Naj laugh) I have this problem with not looking like I fit in (laughs). I don't think I'm very memorable looking. 

- Where did you camp? 

- I didn't camp. I was staying in Salem, that's how I got to go was I had a friend who was going to a workshop in Salem and I flew out with her and then I drove over to We'Moon Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so I didn't really get to meet people 'cause I wasn't camping. 

- Okay, so but, where did you sleep? Did you drive over there from Salem during the day? 

- Yeah, yeah. 

- Oh, okay. 

- That's, you know, that's not a good way to meet people (laughs). 

- Yeah, yeah, I was the one who kept losing my clothes. 

- Really (laughs). 

- I was there for a week, I mean, if something isn't attached to me, nowadays and one day it was sunny and I took my clothes off and then lost 'em and people were helping me to find them but-- 

- They have great thrift stores out there. We had some good thrift shopping out there. 

- Yeah, yeah, I know, I spent two months in Portland last winter and I can't do that kind of shopping much 'cause standing now is difficult for me, for long periods of time but I did go thrift shopping once and got two great jackets and a couple of shirts and a pair of shoes and really made some good scores that I've been wearing a lot lately. So, where are you right now? 

- I live in Huntsville, Alabama. 

- Okay. 

- Yeah, we have land in Sewanee, Tennessee, there's a group of six but only one of us lives on the land. It doesn't have any utilities, you know, the five of us live here in Huntsville within blocks of each other. It just got to be where, nobody wanted to sell their house and move out into the country that far away from where all our connections are. 

- Uh-uh. 

- It's that old story. 

- You know, now that we're getting older, I don't feel capable or have the desire to live out, I mean, I'd love to live out in the country but I don't feel capable of heating with wood and stuff. I just couldn't live out there in Oregon like they do and when I lived in Kansas City for a little over a year, let's see, that was back in '75, '76 and the women there were buying and/or renting houses in this one neighborhood. 

- Womantown. 

- So that was really cool. I wish we could organize that kind of thing again. 

- Yeah. 

- Or here in Indianapolis there's a lot of buildings that are just abandoned, really neat buildings that I would love to, if I had a ton of money, it's be great to rehab one of them and have it be apartments with a common area on each floor with a kitchen and a big area that could handle meetings or parties or whatever, on each floor. I mean, 'cause nobody, you know, we don't all need our own washer and dryer and stuff like that, we could certainly share, share things but it'd have to be convenient, you know? The sad thing is, what I saw out in Oregon, the younger women nowadays, women's space is not of value to most of them. The land, they love the land at We'Moon and stuff but things have changed so that they don't feel the need, they're definitely not separatists and they don't feel any need to be a separatist and I suppose that's a sign of how rules have changed and society's changed, so I should take that as a good thing although it's kind of, I feel like we're a dying breed. 

- Well, we've had some young, a few young, like 30s, 40s dykes and one 20-something who lives at We'Moon and there are some who have sort of the same values that we did and they're coming along behind us. Of course, they still don't have any money (laughs), like all of us. 

- Who did you interview that's 20-something at We'Moon? 

- Her name is Eva and she moved out there this summer with her partner. 

- Yeah, okay, they moved from, they were at Twin Oaks for awhile. 

- Yeah they were, yeah. 

- But did you read about, are you on the Grapevine or do you get the notices from that? I think it's neat, I've never met her, I really wanted to because I visited Twin Oaks when I was traveling and I was really impressed. Boy, they have it down, I mean, the living down. So I really wanted to be able to meet her and her partner and just talk with them about Twin Oaks and why they left and what they thought of it now 'cause it's been 30 years since I was there but did you see the thing she was organizing for summer solstice, maybe it wasn't, I don't know if it was summer solstice but she organized a little festival and brought a performer up from California? 

- I didn't see that. 

- Okay, yeah, it was gonna be like, I'm gonna get the figures wrong but she was gonna pay this performer something like $1,500 and so, to come out to We'Moon for the weekend for this, it was gonna be $300 or $400 and I read that and I just thought, wow, I don't know anybody who was at We'Moon who's gonna go to We'Moon, gonna spend three or $400 for a weekend at We'Moon and I thought about several of the women that were involved with the land and said, what do you think and they all said, I'm not going, I can't afford to go. I mean, everything was always, here's the price, more if you can, less if you can't. 

- Yeah, yeah. 

- And I believe in that strongly but I mean, the whole We'Moon, I was at We'Moon for 10 days, I guess, and what was it, $40 or something, for food for the week? 

- Yeah, yeah (laughs). 

- You know (laughs), I gave them more money than that 'cause I could do that but you know, this one was gonna turn around and charge. So she values women-only space? 

- She wrote something that, the focus of the piece was, it's called "The Ache" and it was about why she's now at We'Moon. She started feeling this ache for lesbian-only space, yes. 

- I wondered if maybe that had something to do with why she left, why they left Twin Oaks. The thing that amazed me about Twin Oaks was, 30 years ago, was that the men weren't like typical men and the women weren't like typical, the men weren't like typical straight men and the women weren't like typical straight women, so I was really blown away 'cause I could have never, I could have stayed at Twin Oaks and I could have never envisioned me being able to do that being in a mixed community. So I was really kind of blown away by Twin Oaks but there was only one other lesbian there when I visited. I mean, I was visiting her. 

- Who was the other lesbian? 

- You know, I can't tell you her name, I'd have to go back and through my, she was a Contact Dyke in Lesbian Connection. She was from California because she, I was very close with my grandmother and in conversations with her, she was lamenting that she had not gotten more information from her grandmother and her grandmother was down in, oh god, I'll think of it, Sherman Oaks or something like that, A Thousand Oaks, California? When I went up the coast of California, I went and spent a day with her grandmother and tape recorded her and sent this woman the tapes. 

- Wow, that was great. What a great gift to give that person. 

- Yeah, yeah, it was neat, it was fun, I enjoyed meeting her grandmother. My grandmother was an amazing, amazing woman and unfortunately a lot of things, a lot of the information and knowledge that she had, I wasn't interested in when she was really at the top of her game and by the time I really realized, wow, she's got information that's gonna die with her, she was not quite so with it to be able to impart that. So I've always been real aware of how valuable that information is when somebody's got it, you wanna get it (laughs). 

- Yeah, that's what we're doing, that's what our project's all about, all of these old dykes that were doing so much in the '70s and '80s and '90s are dyin' (laughs), so we gotta get their stories. 

- Yeah, that's right. Well, I read the first thing in Sinister Wisdom and I told Barb Ester, I said, the one thing that I didn't like about, a lot of it was just the chronology of dates and this happened, this happened, this happened and I said, gee, what I really wanted to read was what Corky had to say about the North 40 and Pat, the other woman who was living there full time and more personal, what I personally was interested in reading was people's personal stories and there was some of that in Sinister Wisdom and I really enjoyed that a lot and that's what I hope this brings out more, more of that. 

- We do have a lot of personal stories in this one. We have Corky talking about the North 40 and we have something about Womantown, which is that Kansas City, the people who started Womantown, that lesbian neighborhood in Kansas City, are part of our project. 

- Is Paula Marie Dotter one of them? 

- I know who that is but no, that's not. 

- Well, she lives in Missouri or Arkansas or someplace like that now. We'Moon Lighthart knows Paula Marie Dotter but Paula lived in Kansas City when I was there and she was a flight attendant and doing a lot of organizing of stewardesses, to get them to be called flight attendants and get them the respect they deserved and stuff. Yeah, she was definitely a big part of that community there. 

- We'Moon did write a story about (mumbles) for us. 

- Uh-huh? 

- We'Moon wrote something (mumbles). 

- Do you know Kway? 

- No, Kway, okay. 

- She was at We'Moon, the We'Moon Celebration and she's at ARF now but she lives very near We'Moon. Somebody on the listserv, not very long ago, somebody was asking, oh, the woman in Iowa that's got the farm, was asking if anybody had Kway's phone number and We'Moon Lighthart wrote in and said, where is Kway? Anyway, everybody got connected up but Kway's out at, she built a house, Kway's a very skilled builder and she built a house near We'Moon Lighthart, so she's in that same vicinity but she travels a lot. She's been going and spending the winter in Florida working, doing a lot of remodeling work for women around the Gainesville area, Hawthorne and do you know Jenna Worth? 

- Jenna Weston? 

- Yeah, Jenna Weston, I mean. 

- Yeah, she wrote about gathering dirt, uh-huh. 

- Yeah, Kway has spent two winters remodeling Jenna's house down there and outside Hawthorne but Kway might be a good one to write. I don't know what her herstory is, she's younger than I am, how much traveling she did back in the years that you're wanting but she does a lot of traveling and goes around to a lot of different lands and stuff. She might be a good person to contact. Would you like her phone number? 

- Sure, yeah. 

- Let me look it up, just a minute. She's a inground swimming pool with two professors and another place I stayed was a dirt floor house with no electricity and an outhouse, so I really stayed in a wide variety of places with a wide variety of people. 

- Well, I think if you were to find those journals, you might be able to cook up something really, really, even more detailed and interesting out of this, so I'm hoping that sending you these notes will encourage you to go back and (chuckles) think about it and try to take your mind back there and maybe write some of that. 

- I'll see what I can do. 

- Okay, well, I need to let you go now but I will be in touch with these notes and--