Ellison, Kate - interviewed by Rose Norman
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Transcript
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- | This is Rose Norman. | 0:01 |
And I'm with Kate Ellison in her home in Melrose, Florida. | 0:03 | |
This is November 10th, 2012. | 0:09 | |
Okay. | 0:14 | |
- | Okay, great. | 0:15 |
So this thing is working, huh? | 0:17 | |
- | It's on. | 0:20 |
- | It's on, it's working. | 0:21 |
- | And you're gonna talk about feminism, | 0:22 |
language and how those were connected in your life. | 0:23 | |
- | Okay. | 0:27 |
So I was in college when I heard about feminism. | 0:28 | |
And I was in Knoxville, Tennessee | 0:33 | |
at the University of Tennessee, | 0:37 | |
and I was in sociology. | 0:40 | |
I was really trying to figure out | 0:44 | |
how people live together and what makes them sin. | 0:47 | |
And it was just what interested me. | 0:52 | |
I was inspired by some of my teachers, men and women. | 0:55 | |
And then, so I started getting involved in feminist stuff | 0:57 | |
and this was, so when was this? | 1:02 | |
I was in college in, I was done with college by '72, 1972. | 1:08 | |
And I graduated from high school in 1967. | 1:16 | |
I did part of a Master's Degree, actually, in sociology. | 1:19 | |
So they were, feminism was beginning to get organized | 1:24 | |
with the National Organization for Women in various. | 1:32 | |
And the national media said something, seems to me, | 1:35 | |
they said as a way of discounting our movement, | 1:41 | |
they said, you know, if you scratch a feminist, | 1:47 | |
you'll find a lesbian underneath. | 1:51 | |
And I thought, huh, I'm a feminist. | 1:53 | |
(laughing) | 1:56 | |
So I realized in a pretty short time that I really was | 1:59 | |
attracted to women and although it was a, | 2:08 | |
you know, it was a process, and I had been married | 2:11 | |
and I got out of the marriage. | 2:14 | |
And then I had another boyfriend. | 2:17 | |
And then I had a girlfriend, but it was, | 2:18 | |
it took some time. | 2:23 | |
But by the time I was 24, I was pretty damn sure | 2:24 | |
that I was a lesbian. | 2:30 | |
And I was, you know... | 2:32 | |
I also identified as a leftist, a socialist. | 2:40 | |
I just found that I had no patience | 2:46 | |
for so many of the organizations that were dominated by men. | 2:50 | |
The people who were getting things done politically | 2:56 | |
on the left were not welcoming women as equal partners. | 3:01 | |
They were men, and women were helping them. | 3:07 | |
And it just pissed me off. | 3:11 | |
And so I just gradually over time quit doing anything | 3:13 | |
with men, politically like that. | 3:17 | |
I moved from Knoxville to Atlanta and I worked | 3:25 | |
for the Great Speckled Bird for two years in Atlanta, | 3:30 | |
where I met a women that I fell in love with | 3:33 | |
and I moved back with her to DC. | 3:37 | |
And she was very focused on spirituality. | 3:42 | |
Sort of New Age spiritual stuff that she had her own | 3:50 | |
version of it and she considered herself a writer | 3:55 | |
and a mover in the mental, spiritual arena. | 4:00 | |
Her name is Sharon Evans. | 4:07 | |
And she and I, and another women, bought land | 4:09 | |
in Northern Virginia outside of DC, Rapahanet County. | 4:14 | |
And we were imagining starting something there | 4:22 | |
that was more about spirituality and her focus was | 4:29 | |
like reaching children, protecting girl children, | 4:35 | |
getting some kind of database together. | 4:40 | |
Nobody said database back then. | 4:43 | |
That was you know, 1978, '79, around in there. | 4:45 | |
But she had that thought. | 4:53 | |
And anyway, | 4:55 | |
life happened and she and I broke up, | 4:59 | |
and she went off, left with another women. | 5:03 | |
And I kept making payments on the land. | 5:06 | |
Yeah, I was freelancing. | 5:17 | |
Through Sharon I got involved in doing graphic artist stuff. | 5:19 | |
And also when I worked for the Blade. | 5:25 | |
I mean, the Great Speckled Bird, | 5:29 | |
I did the pay step of the newspaper | 5:32 | |
and I really enjoyed that. | 5:37 | |
You could really see the product of your work take shape. | 5:38 | |
Anyway, so I did graphic artist stuff | 5:46 | |
even though I wasn't trained in it at all, | 5:48 | |
but there was work to be had. | 5:50 | |
And you know, I just figured out how much money | 5:52 | |
I needed month to month and managed to pull that in somehow, | 5:56 | |
some magical way. | 6:00 | |
And gradually worked into, where I worked on the, | 6:04 | |
I got hired to work on the newspaper, | 6:08 | |
the Washington Blade in the graphics department. | 6:12 | |
And I worked there until 1988, when I moved. | 6:15 | |
But before that, | 6:21 | |
so I was living, I had moved from down in DC | 6:27 | |
to across the river in Arlington, Virginia. | 6:31 | |
And... | 6:37 | |
It's hard to sort of compress the stories | 6:43 | |
and remember all the names and to, | 6:46 | |
but eventually a new group was formed | 6:48 | |
and we called it Turtleland. | 6:50 | |
And the same land that I had been paying on these few years, | 6:53 | |
you know, a women whose real name I'm having trouble | 6:59 | |
remembering, but her nickname was Easy. | 7:02 | |
So Easy and Phoenix came to me and said they wondered | 7:08 | |
if they could camp out on my land. | 7:14 | |
And I said, sure, maybe it's time | 7:16 | |
to form the land group again, you know, | 7:17 | |
and they did start living on the land in a tent, at least. | 7:20 | |
- | You weren't living out there? | 7:29 |
- | No, and this land was 20 acres of woods. | 7:30 |
It had a creek along one side of it. | 7:34 | |
And other than that it was-- | 7:37 | |
- | It was all, all woods? | 7:42 |
- | It was just wooded. | 7:44 |
Yeah, it was just a small piece of woods | 7:45 | |
because really we couldn't, | 7:47 | |
we didn't have the money for much, but it was, | 7:48 | |
it was secluded, yet not too far off the road. | 7:52 | |
And it did have that water source | 7:56 | |
and so we just went with it. | 7:59 | |
Anyway, so there was that land and there were five of us | 8:03 | |
who came together and had a land collective. | 8:06 | |
- | Did you have a collective before with Sharon? | 8:14 |
- | We wouldn't have called it that. | 8:17 |
There were three of us who worked together | 8:19 | |
on a project that she, | 8:21 | |
she called it the Uranian Foundation. | 8:23 | |
She already had that concept when I met her. | 8:27 | |
She was very much into astrology. | 8:30 | |
So Uranian, like New Age. | 8:32 | |
- | Or like Uranus. | 8:37 |
- | Like Uranus, yeah. | 8:39 |
- | The Uranian, say it again. | 8:40 |
- | The Uranian Foundation. | 8:42 |
And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a lesbian feminist thing. | 8:46 | |
It was a spiritual thing that came out of | 8:51 | |
a lesbian feminist heart, I guess you could say. | 8:54 | |
But the focus of it wasn't activism or lesbian feminism. | 8:57 | |
But the land, we got the land and the land ended up | 9:02 | |
being the focus of a small collective of five women. | 9:05 | |
Me and Jesrin, and Abby Lyons, and Tony White, | 9:11 | |
and Phoenix, I can't remember her given name. | 9:16 | |
But we really tried to make something there of Turtleland. | 9:25 | |
And I do have this, I'm not supposed to do this, walk away. | 9:34 | |
When it all fell apart, my friend Mandy who lived | 9:40 | |
in the house where we lived made that beautiful | 9:45 | |
pen and ink drawing of a turtle with a lot | 9:50 | |
of symbolism in it. | 9:55 | |
- | Great. | 9:58 |
Let me pause this. | 9:59 | |
Where is the-- | 10:04 | |
Okay, Turtleland collective from? | 10:05 | |
- | Perhaps 1980. | 10:08 |
- | Okay. | 10:14 |
'til '83. | 10:15 | |
- | 'Til '83. | |
And we, there was a a lot of consciousness raising | 10:19 | |
around class at the time. | 10:29 | |
And because I, well I mean, Abby and I both had | 10:34 | |
college education, so we were considered middle class. | 10:41 | |
And our backgrounds were sort of more easy | 10:47 | |
than the other three women | 10:50 | |
who were not considered middle class. | 10:53 | |
And it was a very, very difficult | 10:56 | |
struggle around class, even with you know, | 11:04 | |
complete commitment to the process. | 11:11 | |
But one of the things that we didn't know | 11:13 | |
is how much style enters into it. | 11:16 | |
Like what I would consider just a terrible, | 11:18 | |
destructive fight, some of the other women | 11:25 | |
from a more working class background considered talking. | 11:29 | |
And when I agreed to be an ally of a working class women, | 11:33 | |
that in her mind, apparently that meant I agreed | 11:39 | |
to be yelled at. | 11:43 | |
And I didn't know that's what I was agreeing to | 11:45 | |
and I wasn't okay with it. | 11:47 | |
So it was hard, it was just really hard. | 11:49 | |
But we tried, you know, we tried and we had some good times | 11:52 | |
and some parties and lots of ceremonies. | 11:56 | |
Jes and I, also had started Circle of ISIS, | 12:00 | |
dyanic wicken group. | 12:07 | |
And we observed the eight times a year | 12:11 | |
when you would have ceremonies. | 12:17 | |
It was a beautiful thing. | 12:19 | |
And there was a lot of opening and awareness | 12:23 | |
that came from that. | 12:27 | |
And also, it's a nature religion, right? | 12:30 | |
And that fit really well with wanting to feel | 12:33 | |
more connected to the land, wanting to live on the land. | 12:40 | |
Figure out how to be a part of the seasons | 12:46 | |
and the cycles and not so separate. | 12:50 | |
Not so civilized and separate from the life of the planet. | 12:53 | |
And then in '82, | 12:58 | |
sometime in '82 or early '83 | 13:10 | |
Jes's father died and she had been taking care of him. | 13:13 | |
And it was a huge deal for her. | 13:18 | |
And she inherited some money, which you know, | 13:25 | |
it's a little bit of a stereotype, but with her | 13:32 | |
working class background she wanted to go out | 13:36 | |
and spend the whole thing. | 13:37 | |
And I wanted to make her save it. | 13:39 | |
And so she, we saved some of it. | 13:42 | |
She bought musical instruments and we went on a trip. | 13:46 | |
And I had some savings also that I contributed to the trip. | 13:52 | |
And that was in the, | 13:57 | |
that was in September of 1983, | 14:02 | |
right at the end of Turtleland. | 14:05 | |
You know, the split was happening. | 14:08 | |
Jes gave some money, | 14:12 | |
put some money in a bank account to have the land conti--, | 14:15 | |
the land payments continued to be made while we left | 14:21 | |
and while they continued on with the land. | 14:24 | |
We wanted the land to be there and be a wonderful thing | 14:28 | |
for women and wanted them to, you know, | 14:33 | |
wished them well even if we were fighting. | 14:36 | |
And they bought a truck with it | 14:39 | |
and didn't make the payments. | 14:41 | |
And they really had no, almost no other money. | 14:44 | |
It was really, their survival was difficult. | 14:49 | |
So whatever, anyway, that's what happened. | 14:54 | |
- | So they lost the land? | 14:56 |
- | No. | 14:58 |
The interesting thing was that | 15:01 | |
the land became, we were behind in the payments. | 15:06 | |
We were paying the bank in Rapahanet County. | 15:13 | |
But there's this guy, this paternalistic landowner, | 15:19 | |
redneck, older man who must have been my father | 15:27 | |
in another life. | 15:31 | |
I mean it just was this strange thing | 15:33 | |
where he sold us the land and then when it all fell apart, | 15:37 | |
I had to come up with the money. | 15:42 | |
I borrowed money from my father, my real father | 15:43 | |
and paid it to him and got us back current. | 15:47 | |
And then he bought the land back. | 15:53 | |
It had been his originally. | 15:57 | |
He arranged the bank deal so that we owed | 15:59 | |
the money to the bank. | 16:02 | |
But then when it all fell apart-- | 16:03 | |
And I'm like, you know, sitting on the floor | 16:05 | |
in his living room just working this thing out | 16:09 | |
as if there's never been a problem in the world. | 16:12 | |
And I don't know this man from anyone. | 16:14 | |
I mean, it was just wild how easy it was in the world. | 16:17 | |
Those things don't usually happen. | 16:24 | |
Anyway, so we didn't, the land didn't become a complete | 16:26 | |
failure and disaster. | 16:35 | |
And in fact, when he bought it back, | 16:36 | |
Jes and I got like $8,000 out of the deal. | 16:38 | |
And we, so that happened right after that trip | 16:41 | |
that Jes and I took. | 16:49 | |
The not quite coast to coast trip | 16:50 | |
on mostly her money, but some my money. | 16:52 | |
And we traveled around and looked at different things | 16:56 | |
that women were doing. | 16:59 | |
We visited that place in Grand Rapids. | 17:01 | |
Many of the women there ended up in Missouri | 17:06 | |
or North Arkansas. | 17:10 | |
We visited the Women's Peace Camp in Seneca Falls. | 17:13 | |
Right after their big summer. | 17:17 | |
Their big summer had been the summer of '83 | 17:20 | |
and we got there in September of '83. | 17:23 | |
We visited Adobe Land in the Southwest. | 17:26 | |
And we dug crystals in Arkansas | 17:35 | |
and we visited my old boyfriend in Atlanta. | 17:39 | |
And we ended up at Spiral. | 17:44 | |
You know, just these were the things we found | 17:47 | |
through lesbian connection or whatever, | 17:49 | |
however we could find them. | 17:52 | |
There was no internet. | 17:54 | |
And Jes will tell the story that we'd been | 17:57 | |
to Michigan, Lake Michigan, | 18:02 | |
we've been to the Rocky Mountains. | 18:06 | |
We've been to the desert, which Jes loved. | 18:08 | |
We've been to digging crystals in Arkansas. | 18:11 | |
We were heading up I-75 from Tennessee to Kentucky | 18:16 | |
and I'm going, these are my mountains. | 18:21 | |
And you know, it just seemed to be that we met | 18:25 | |
these women who were living beside Spiral in a farmhouse, | 18:32 | |
next door to Spiral is what I mean, in a farmhouse. | 18:36 | |
And trying to keep Spiral going after the original | 18:39 | |
collective of 25 that had come together to buy the land | 18:46 | |
in 1981 had fallen apart. | 18:51 | |
So that was Mary Hoelterhoff, Lucina Arachney. | 18:55 | |
- | Can you spell those names? | 19:02 |
- | H-O-E-L-T-E-R-H-O-F-F. | 19:05 |
- | Oh gosh. | 19:09 |
- | I know. | 19:10 |
- | H-O-E-L-T-E-R-H-O-F-F. | 19:12 |
She's from outside of Chicago. | 19:17 | |
And Lucina, L-U-C-I-N-A. | 19:20 | |
Arachney, like spider. | 19:23 | |
And she is from Kentucky, I'm pretty sure. | 19:29 | |
She and another women were the main ones | 19:38 | |
responsible for buying the land, Spiral | 19:42 | |
because they had jobs, the were nurses. | 19:46 | |
They had jobs, they could get a loan from the bank. | 19:49 | |
And there were, you know, I never met all these women, | 19:54 | |
but there were apparently about 25 women | 20:00 | |
who came together with the idea of buying land | 20:03 | |
and in the process of actually bringing the dream | 20:07 | |
into reality, they split apart. | 20:12 | |
And some of them, seem still mad about it. | 20:15 | |
- | So that group, this is still 1983, | 20:24 |
so that group only lasted a couple years. | 20:27 | |
- | Well I mean, they probably worked on finding | 20:29 |
the land for a couple years before they bought it in '81. | 20:34 | |
And there is a story of doing fundraising by having | 20:38 | |
a booth in Michigan, the Michigan Festival | 20:44 | |
and selling mama corn. | 20:48 | |
Instead of popcorn, it was mama corn they were selling | 20:49 | |
in this booth in Michigan to raise money for Spiral. | 20:53 | |
And I think that was before I knew them, but maybe not. | 20:57 | |
Maybe it was before I moved there, | 21:06 | |
but after Jes and I had connected. | 21:08 | |
And we started spending all our vacation time at Spiral, | 21:11 | |
even if nobody was there. | 21:16 | |
Mary and Lucina broke up and Lucina moved back | 21:18 | |
to the city, being Lexington. | 21:22 | |
And Mary went to school, went to college | 21:24 | |
and was there part-time and away part-time. | 21:29 | |
She also, I'm sorry, she didn't go to college then, | 21:33 | |
that was later. | 21:36 | |
She worked for her father during the growing season. | 21:37 | |
He owned a landscaping business in Bartlett, Illinois | 21:40 | |
outside of Chicago. | 21:50 | |
Jes's father also had owned a landscaping business, | 21:51 | |
which was kind of an interesting coincidence, but anyway-- | 21:55 | |
- | Was this, where was this? | 21:59 |
I mean, she went to Chicago to do that? | 22:00 | |
- | Yeah, so when Jes and I would visit on our vacation time, | 22:02 |
a lot of times, no one would be there. | 22:07 | |
But Mary was in the process of building her house, | 22:10 | |
so there was something like a roof we could park beside. | 22:15 | |
A road and a roof we could park beside and we could go | 22:20 | |
for long walks and just be there. | 22:23 | |
You know, it was, there wasn't much going on. | 22:28 | |
But there were meetings from time to time | 22:31 | |
where say 10, roughly 10 women would meet | 22:33 | |
once or twice a year. | 22:45 | |
At the time, and Spiral was 250 acres more or less. | 22:46 | |
And the purchase price was $50,000. | 22:53 | |
I know. | 22:59 | |
It was the backend of a holler. | 23:00 | |
There was more farmland in front of it | 23:03 | |
that was open pastureland and you drove through that | 23:05 | |
to get to sort of the steeper, more wooded, | 23:10 | |
but it still had some bottom land and a spring. | 23:14 | |
And some smaller amount of cleared area, | 23:17 | |
maybe two to three acres of cleared area, but mostly woods. | 23:20 | |
But we didn't care, it was beautiful, | 23:25 | |
truly beautiful land. | 23:27 | |
And you could just, you could walk for three hours, | 23:32 | |
not really leaving the land and get to this rock out crop | 23:35 | |
called Pine Knobs and you could just look out | 23:41 | |
on a panorama of Kentucky and Tennessee | 23:44 | |
because it's right on the border with Tennessee. | 23:49 | |
And see nothing but woods. | 23:52 | |
It was just, you know, that was a little bit of a lesion. | 23:55 | |
There were roads and farmhouses and such, | 23:59 | |
but overall it was very beautiful, somewhat pristine land. | 24:03 | |
- | How did it log? | 24:11 |
- | They did not do clear cutting. | 24:12 |
They logged, but the farmers logged it. | 24:16 | |
And it was considered a cash crop. | 24:21 | |
They wanted to do it once every 10 years, roughly. | 24:23 | |
So they didn't clear cut. | 24:26 | |
They just took the big trees and tried to drop them | 24:29 | |
on trees that would not, | 24:32 | |
they wouldn't be selling anyway like dogwoods or something. | 24:35 | |
They did it carefully and it didn't, | 24:39 | |
like leave a bare, barren place to erode into nothingness. | 24:43 | |
The woods grew back really fast. | 24:50 | |
And it just grew back on its own. | 24:53 | |
They didn't replant or anything. | 24:55 | |
It was a reasonable, somewhat sustainable way to do that. | 24:57 | |
Anyway, so we really loved the land and being there. | 25:08 | |
And gradually, the reason that Jes and I didn't move there | 25:18 | |
'til 1988 was because although her daughter wasn't living | 25:24 | |
with her, she had kind of promised her daughter to wait, | 25:30 | |
to sort of like drop off the cliff of civilized | 25:34 | |
normal society until she graduated from high school. | 25:39 | |
So once Star was out of high school, | 25:45 | |
we moved like immediately. | 25:49 | |
She graduated in June, we moved in July of '88. | 25:51 | |
And... | 25:55 | |
You know... | 26:00 | |
Star was like, you know, my mom is a lesbian | 26:04 | |
witch who eats flowers. | 26:08 | |
But she sort of joked about it. | 26:11 | |
- | Who was she living with if she wasn't living with-- | 26:14 |
- | Her father and his wife and their four children, | 26:16 |
instead of being an only child with Jes. | 26:21 | |
And Jes's sort of unsettled lifestyle, | 26:25 | |
that until she met me and Lorette | 26:30 | |
and the other women from Turtleland, | 26:34 | |
until then she was kind of a bar dyke. | 26:39 | |
Kind of a, it was kind of rough and tumble existence. | 26:42 | |
But she was interested in spirituality | 26:51 | |
and she got into the whole wicken thing, and healing. | 26:57 | |
She was really interested in healing. | 27:03 | |
She was a nurse, LPN. | 27:05 | |
And so she got into this thing called brain balancing. | 27:08 | |
A brain gym. | 27:16 | |
Anyway, it's thing that kind of helps you | 27:18 | |
unite the two sides of your brain. | 27:21 | |
And when that happened, she could suddenly read. | 27:23 | |
Suddenly, she was an avid reader. | 27:27 | |
Just you know, she went from reading three books in her life | 27:30 | |
to reading everything she could find. | 27:34 | |
And one day I came home from work and she was, | 27:37 | |
she had set up the typewriter with a little, | 27:40 | |
on the little typewriter table and a chair. | 27:43 | |
And she's like, okay tell me how this works. | 27:46 | |
And she started writing. | 27:51 | |
And she wrote and she wrote and she wrote. | 27:53 | |
And you know, the rest is herstory. | 27:55 | |
- | What is brain balancing, I don't understand it. | 27:58 |
- | Because she didn't, first she had to find out | 28:02 |
that she was dyslectic, | 28:04 | |
that that was what was wrong with her. | 28:05 | |
And then she found this cure that really does work. | 28:07 | |
It's a, I mean, maybe it doesn't work for everybody, | 28:12 | |
but it works way better than sort of the Western | 28:15 | |
retraining sort of very tedious method that they have. | 28:19 | |
And brain gym is probably something you could look up. | 28:23 | |
- | G-Y-M? | 28:28 |
- | Yeah, I don't remember names. | 28:29 |
And she has all the books, so. | 28:32 | |
Anyway. | 28:36 | |
We... | 28:40 | |
- | So you discovered it in 1983, for the first time. | 28:45 |
Five years before you actually moved there. | 28:50 | |
How long were you there? | 28:52 | |
- | And I left in about 2003. | 28:55 |
I had one period of a year or something | 29:03 | |
that I lived in St. Pete, that I was away from the land. | 29:08 | |
But other than that I was there the rest of the time. | 29:12 | |
I really thought I was gonna live there the rest of my life. | 29:18 | |
And I had been to visit it a couple times a year | 29:21 | |
every year since we made that connection. | 29:29 | |
And Mary and Lucina and Joy and Jackie, | 29:32 | |
sometimes would come to Arlington and visit us | 29:36 | |
and have meetings. | 29:40 | |
Joy Lohrer, Jackie Gruer. | 29:43 | |
- | How do you spell those names. | 29:48 |
- | Joy L-O-H-R-E-R. | 29:50 |
Jackie G-R-U-E-R, I think. | 29:53 | |
Not real sure. | 29:59 | |
They're both from Cincinnati. | 30:01 | |
Joy was the second, Mary was the first one | 30:03 | |
to get her house on the land, build her house on the land. | 30:06 | |
Joy had the next house. | 30:09 | |
And then Jes and I were building ours | 30:13 | |
for a good long time because it was a big house | 30:18 | |
and we didn't have, anyway, | 30:20 | |
but also a small house was built that Bolynn built | 30:22 | |
with help that became the REM. | 30:28 | |
REM being the initials R-E-M, | 30:32 | |
for resident exploring membership. | 30:36 | |
It was Boe's house, she was gonna leave | 30:42 | |
and we bought the house from her. | 30:46 | |
The Spiral bought the house from her. | 30:48 | |
I was gonna say something about the, | 30:55 | |
how hard it was to keep the land. | 31:01 | |
I started talking about that we bought it for 50,000, | 31:03 | |
but it was back in the day when interest rates varied | 31:07 | |
and it was, they had something called the balloon payment. | 31:11 | |
And we were up to like 14% interest. | 31:16 | |
And we would go to a meeting of four or five women. | 31:21 | |
We would have to just sit around in somebody's living room | 31:26 | |
and commit to making payments until the payment, | 31:29 | |
'til we could cobble together the four or five hundred | 31:32 | |
dollars that it took to keep it going month by month. | 31:36 | |
And it was, and Jes and I had, | 31:40 | |
were able to bring the $8,000 from Turtleland in | 31:43 | |
and help get the price down to something we could imagine | 31:48 | |
continuing to pay because it was just excruciating | 31:52 | |
to come up with even between five or six women, | 31:57 | |
to come up with enough money month by month | 32:02 | |
to keep the payments up. | 32:05 | |
You know, we just didn't have access | 32:09 | |
to a whole lot of money. | 32:13 | |
And it was hard the entire time, access to money. | 32:14 | |
The entire time. | 32:18 | |
And you know, I may have a really middle class background, | 32:20 | |
but when you move to remote Kentucky, there are no jobs. | 32:25 | |
I temporarily had kind of a social work job, | 32:31 | |
but I didn't really have a social work degree | 32:35 | |
and that job, I wasn't well suited for it. | 32:38 | |
I was too radicalized and too just unaware | 32:42 | |
of how to be a social worker, and it didn't work. | 32:48 | |
And it was awful. | 32:52 | |
But I did end up having some worker's comp | 32:53 | |
or unemployment, not worker's comp, unemployment | 32:57 | |
for a while, several, quite a few months from that | 33:03 | |
which really helped. | 33:07 | |
And Jes worked as an LPN, home health nurse. | 33:07 | |
She could do that. | 33:12 | |
And Mary worked for her father every summer. | 33:17 | |
And she got a number of things, like big trucks, | 33:21 | |
out of the deal and various tools. | 33:23 | |
We built our houses ourselves. | 33:29 | |
We didn't have any help from men. | 33:32 | |
Men could bring supplies on big trucks | 33:38 | |
and dump them off, but we, | 33:43 | |
and we also, the wells were dug by men. | 33:45 | |
They were regular board, six inch hole wells. | 33:50 | |
Two of the, one at Mary's house, one at our house. | 33:55 | |
But other than that, really, we did all the carpentry, | 34:01 | |
all the wiring and plumbing inside | 34:06 | |
and roofing, you know, just whatever it took, we did it. | 34:13 | |
Foundations. | 34:18 | |
So it was slow, but we loved it. | 34:20 | |
You know, there is nothing, no job I've enjoyed | 34:23 | |
in my life more than building my house. | 34:27 | |
Not that I ever earned any money doing it, | 34:30 | |
but it was just wonderful. | 34:33 | |
Although, you know, and Jes will tell you, | 34:36 | |
the first time I, when we were, | 34:40 | |
we moved into the farmhouse next to Spiral | 34:43 | |
when Mary had moved to her house on the land. | 34:48 | |
And we were trying to like put up some insulation | 34:51 | |
and some paneling over that so that it wouldn't | 34:55 | |
be so freaking cold. | 34:57 | |
And so I was essentially learning to nail | 35:00 | |
using four inch finish nails, which is really stupid. | 35:04 | |
And I bent every one of them. | 35:08 | |
But I managed to learn to hammer a nail into a wall | 35:11 | |
and I learned to use a chainsaw and a circular saw. | 35:16 | |
And I did not have these skills before at all. | 35:21 | |
I was a graphic artist and city girl. | 35:26 | |
But I loved it, I just loved it. | 35:32 | |
It was so invigorating and freeing. | 35:35 | |
And you know, outside of the limitations of what it was, | 35:38 | |
what it had always meant to be a woman was that | 35:46 | |
you can't do anything in the world. | 35:49 | |
You know, you can just push a pencil or something. | 35:51 | |
And it wasn't that I, well... | 35:56 | |
I mean, Tony Wyatt and I, Tony from Turtleland, | 36:03 | |
Tony and I were pretty femy, you know. | 36:07 | |
But we didn't think that meant passive or submissive. | 36:12 | |
It was just a way we were in the world, | 36:19 | |
that we liked beautiful clothes | 36:25 | |
or to be able to giggle and blush. | 36:27 | |
But we could still be in charge of our lives | 36:31 | |
and take control of the situation if we needed to. | 36:39 | |
And much later, when the whole, | 36:46 | |
when the SM community helped us redefine power, | 36:55 | |
we came to understand that there's sort of like, | 37:00 | |
in a relationship there's a, | 37:03 | |
there can be one who tends to dominate | 37:06 | |
and one who tends to submit. | 37:10 | |
And those can change. | 37:13 | |
Like you can, | 37:14 | |
you can be sexually assertive and sexually passive | 37:17 | |
in the bedroom. | 37:22 | |
You can also be, those two roles can be the opposite | 37:23 | |
out in the world. | 37:27 | |
You know, but anyway so power sharing | 37:30 | |
is something that we came to understand a lot better | 37:33 | |
during the whole evolution of lesbian feminism. | 37:36 | |
And being fem doesn't have to mean being passive | 37:39 | |
or being weak. | 37:45 | |
We ended up calling it Super 10 Fem. | 37:50 | |
Because we could just do anything. | 37:53 | |
- | Super what fem? | 37:55 |
- | Super 10, Super 10 Fem. | 37:56 |
We could build a house and we could, you know, | 38:00 | |
wear glitter if we wanted. | 38:05 | |
And cry, I cried a lot also while I was trying | 38:09 | |
to build the house. | 38:13 | |
But like when you, when you enter a circle in wicka, | 38:15 | |
you say I enter this circle in perfect love | 38:24 | |
and perfect trust. | 38:27 | |
Or perhaps, perfect love and growing trust. | 38:29 | |
And whenever I went to work in the house | 38:33 | |
that I was building, often all by myself, | 38:36 | |
I said, I enter this love in perfect, | 38:39 | |
I enter this house in perfect love and perfect trust. | 38:43 | |
And it helped me put really good energy into it | 38:47 | |
and just you know, just do it board by board. | 38:50 | |
And it took a very long time. | 38:59 | |
But you know, we really believed in women | 39:05 | |
being self-sufficient. | 39:11 | |
Like the analysis was that women relied on men | 39:13 | |
and women couldn't live without men, | 39:22 | |
that in the end, in the last analysis, | 39:26 | |
the buck stopped with them. | 39:30 | |
They were the providers, the protectors, the controllers. | 39:33 | |
And as lesbians, we thought that just wasn't | 39:38 | |
necessarily true, that we could provide everything | 39:41 | |
we needed for each other. | 39:45 | |
And that meant really learning self reliance, | 39:47 | |
inner self reliance, reliance on each other, | 39:50 | |
trust for each other and to stop thinking about | 39:54 | |
you know, who can I get to do this thing? | 39:59 | |
Just can I do this? | 40:03 | |
How can I figure out how to do this, | 40:05 | |
how to build this house? | 40:08 | |
My house is a four bedroom, 1700 square foot house | 40:09 | |
that never got completely finished, | 40:16 | |
but a good number of women lived there over some years | 40:18 | |
and it was functional, you know. | 40:22 | |
- | What about electricity? | 40:26 |
Did you have-- | 40:27 | |
- | We had electricity. | 40:28 |
We wanted to do solar, but it costs like $10,000 | 40:30 | |
just to set up. | 40:33 | |
And you know, that was just not the kind of money we had. | 40:34 | |
It as just impossible to imagine, you know, | 40:39 | |
we bought a load of two by fours when we had | 40:43 | |
the money for a load of two by fours. | 40:48 | |
We did not have $10,000 in one big chunk | 40:49 | |
to spend on anything. | 40:52 | |
So we hooked up to the grid and that was somewhat, | 40:55 | |
that involved some difficult meetings | 41:01 | |
because the wires had to go across the big picture windows | 41:04 | |
in front of Mary, you know, had to go across | 41:08 | |
in front of Mary's house and sort of in her view. | 41:11 | |
And she had to be okay with that, and she was. | 41:15 | |
It was a process, but she was really okay | 41:21 | |
with the wires going across like that. | 41:25 | |
And so we had running water and electricity. | 41:29 | |
We did not have indoor toilets. | 41:33 | |
And none of us did. | 41:37 | |
Jes and I bought a composting toilet, | 41:43 | |
so it was indoor, but it wasn't water based. | 41:45 | |
You know, you learn that even if you're trying | 41:56 | |
to live your dream, live close to the land | 42:00 | |
and be in touch with the cycles and the seasons, | 42:04 | |
you still have to make a lot of compromise. | 42:07 | |
Especially, you know, I mean Mary built her first house, | 42:09 | |
which wasn't on Spiral, but she built it with a chainsaw | 42:15 | |
and no electricity and it was a pretty rough house. | 42:19 | |
And it didn't really, and she built it with almost no money, | 42:24 | |
using scrap wood, didn't really survive. | 42:27 | |
And so you know, life involves a lot of compromise. | 42:30 | |
And you just try to live as close to your principles | 42:35 | |
as possible, but knowing that you have to compromise, | 42:39 | |
you know, in order to move forward and not be completely | 42:43 | |
stymied by you know, what's not possible. | 42:48 | |
- | I'm gonna stop a minute. | 43:00 |
- | Sure. | 43:01 |
- | Go ahead. | 43:03 |
- | So we, well I had the idea that we were cultural workers. | 43:05 |
And that's terminology that I think Holly Near | 43:12 | |
might have come up with, I don't know. | 43:16 | |
But the idea is that we were, | 43:19 | |
as much as we could, creating a world for ourselves | 43:26 | |
outside of patriarchy. | 43:33 | |
What would women be like if they weren't | 43:34 | |
surrounded with male culture? | 43:41 | |
If everywhere you turned you didn't have | 43:45 | |
to answer to a man. | 43:49 | |
You didn't have to work for a man. | 43:50 | |
You didn't live with a man. | 43:52 | |
You weren't really involved in politics | 43:56 | |
that were so male dominated. | 43:58 | |
What would women be like? | 44:02 | |
How would we treat each other? | 44:04 | |
How would we form ourselves together | 44:07 | |
in family units or tribal units or whatever? | 44:09 | |
We made decisions as a group through consensus. | 44:16 | |
And we were very idealistic. | 44:21 | |
And it was not true that you could get away | 44:24 | |
from patriarchy, you couldn't. | 44:30 | |
Because we were raised with patriarchy inside us. | 44:32 | |
And so the ways that we had been belittled | 44:37 | |
or not fully appreciated as whole human beings, | 44:42 | |
the ways that we were mistreated to one degree or another | 44:49 | |
as we grew up. | 44:52 | |
We brought that with us to the land | 44:55 | |
and we consequently had the same kind | 44:57 | |
of power struggles and ego trips and misunderstandings | 45:02 | |
that everyone else had. | 45:08 | |
We tried to work through it and we tried to explore | 45:12 | |
methodologies that would help through, | 45:16 | |
through consensus decision making, | 45:22 | |
but that's based on listening to each other. | 45:27 | |
Like not talking over each other. | 45:31 | |
Letting one woman talk at a time. | 45:34 | |
Going around the circle until everyone had had her say. | 45:37 | |
And then trying to come to an understanding. | 45:43 | |
And it worked to one degree or another. | 45:48 | |
It wasn't perfect and we weren't that great at it, | 45:53 | |
but it did work for a good, for a number of years. | 45:56 | |
We brought in a mediator a couple times. | 46:02 | |
And later we learned non-violent communication, | 46:06 | |
which is a thing, but that's outside the timeframe. | 46:13 | |
So we didn't believe that we could own each other | 46:20 | |
in couple relationships and so we believed | 46:26 | |
that women could love each other | 46:34 | |
in many ways, including physical. | 46:36 | |
I did not end up as negative on that tack | 46:42 | |
as many women did. | 46:49 | |
I still think it's reasonable and possible. | 46:50 | |
But-- | 46:54 | |
- | You used the word non-monogamy. | 46:57 |
You've used, we don't own each other. | 46:58 | |
- | We don't own each other. | 47:00 |
Yeah, we called it non-monogamy. | 47:01 | |
Based on the idea that we don't own each other. | 47:05 | |
That was why we, how we got into it. | 47:07 | |
And the thing that's essential | 47:12 | |
about non-monogamy is honesty. | 47:15 | |
Like it's not the same as sneaking around | 47:19 | |
and having an affair. | 47:24 | |
It's completely the opposite of that | 47:25 | |
because there's never any deception or deceit or betrayal. | 47:26 | |
But it's difficult and most people ended up | 47:34 | |
hating the whole idea of it. | 47:39 | |
I don't hate it, but at this point in my life, | 47:41 | |
one lover would be lovely. | 47:45 | |
- | Right. | 47:48 |
Sounds amazing. | 47:52 | |
I'm gonna pause it. | 47:53 | |
- | Okay. | 47:54 |
- | Okay. | 47:59 |
- | I ended up leaving Spiral eventually | 48:01 |
and now I live alone. | 48:04 | |
I am disappointed that my relationships didn't work out. | 48:08 | |
I really, really believe in doing things together | 48:13 | |
in a group of women who are committed to each other | 48:17 | |
on pretty deep levels and who talk to each other | 48:22 | |
and work things out and develop communication skills. | 48:24 | |
Whatever it takes to, you know, to move the culture forward | 48:28 | |
out of patriarchal families and into consensus based living. | 48:32 | |
But it takes a lot of willingness to sit and talk. | 48:41 | |
Talk things out and trust each other. | 48:45 | |
And I don't have that anymore. | 48:50 | |
I miss it, but I don't have it anymore | 48:53 | |
and very few women do. | 48:56 | |
Even if we supposedly live in a community. | 48:58 | |
- | Okay, so what didn't we get to talk about yet | 49:06 |
about Spiral because you had, | 49:08 | |
forgotten where we were taking it to | 49:12 | |
in terms of the development of it. | 49:14 | |
You were on the land, you're building houses. | 49:16 | |
- | Yeah, trying to build community. | 49:18 |
Trying to find a way to make a living. | 49:21 | |
You know, we'd spent a good long time basically doing that. | 49:26 | |
- | And that's community building in itself. | 49:31 |
- | Yeah, that's community building, yeah. | 49:33 |
We were a part of the development of the, | 49:37 | |
the larger Landyke community. | 49:45 | |
The one that, is it called a LIC? | 49:47 | |
- | Yeah. | 49:54 |
- | Association of lesbian intentional communities. | 49:56 |
And that became, like we would have a gathering | 50:01 | |
once a year and it was at Spiral twice. | 50:08 | |
- | And I was at one of those. | 50:12 |
- | Yeah, that was outside of the timeframe though. | 50:13 |
- | Oh yeah, it was. | 50:16 |
A LIC is after '94, right? | 50:21 | |
- | It probably is. | 50:24 |
I don't remember when exactly it started. | 50:27 | |
It probably is. | 50:30 | |
But you know, one thing that is kind of important | 50:31 | |
about lesbian community on the land | 50:38 | |
is the traveling dykes. | 50:42 | |
The lesbians, generally young lesbians who would | 50:45 | |
move from place to place. | 50:51 | |
They were gypsy like. | 50:53 | |
And they brought news from different communities. | 50:55 | |
And they brought new ideas, | 50:59 | |
and usually it was kind of disruptive and often difficult, | 51:02 | |
but they were opportunities for very | 51:07 | |
intellectually stimulating connections | 51:13 | |
that I believe moved the culture forward. | 51:16 | |
Through the kind of sharing that they did | 51:20 | |
and the bringing new ideas to women | 51:24 | |
who were kind of isolated and... | 51:28 | |
You know, I think that was an important part. | 51:34 | |
And those women did get a view | 51:37 | |
of the different ways that women lived | 51:41 | |
on the different lands. | 51:43 | |
And often they were serious separatists, | 51:48 | |
more so than those of us who had made | 51:52 | |
enough compromise to actually build something. | 51:54 | |
I don't know, maybe that's a judgment, but. | 52:00 | |
- | How much was separatism apart of what you were going for | 52:05 |
as opposed to self-sufficiency | 52:11 | |
and learning what life could be like | 52:15 | |
if you depended on yourself? | 52:17 | |
- | See, I never considered myself a separatist, | 52:20 |
but people who knew me did. | 52:22 | |
Like, I didn't need the sort of hard edged, | 52:25 | |
political statement of separatism. | 52:32 | |
But I did want to learn to live in a world without men. | 52:35 | |
Not because I hated men, but because I loved women, | 52:43 | |
because I wanted to see who and what we could be | 52:47 | |
if we had that kind of freedom. | 52:52 | |
And most people would call that separatism, I think. | 52:55 | |
But I didn't try to claim the label. | 53:01 | |
And usually, I found that the women I knew | 53:04 | |
who called themselves separatists | 53:08 | |
had kind of a lot of anger. | 53:11 | |
You know, maybe they wouldn't characterize | 53:16 | |
themselves that way, but I did. | 53:18 | |
- | So where they have anger, you have idealism or? | 53:27 |
- | I think that I had maybe more years | 53:36 |
of spiritual experience like meditation and covens, | 53:39 | |
and perhaps genuine struggle with each other. | 53:46 | |
Where you have to, | 53:54 | |
you really have to listen and understand | 53:58 | |
the other's point of view. | 54:01 | |
And you just can't be doctrine air | 54:03 | |
once you've been through that a few times. | 54:06 | |
I think. | 54:10 | |
The women I knew who called themselves separatists | 54:13 | |
sort of had one way of looking at things | 54:17 | |
and if you didn't buy that, you weren't on their level | 54:20 | |
of evolved womanhood or something. | 54:27 | |
I don't know. | 54:32 | |
That was my experience of it. | 54:33 | |
And I knew some separatists in the DC area | 54:36 | |
and women certainly came to visit us | 54:41 | |
who had the point of view. | 54:43 | |
They also, another reason why I say anger | 54:47 | |
is because they sort of needed to make a statement | 54:50 | |
of their separate lives. | 54:54 | |
And so they would not sort of cattle tell to politeness | 54:58 | |
around the farmers that we had to live with over the years. | 55:04 | |
You know, not live with in our face, | 55:13 | |
but they were our neighbors. | 55:14 | |
We needed neighborly good relations | 55:17 | |
or we would be screwed. | 55:21 | |
And so we didn't wanna do things like, | 55:23 | |
for example, let drumming into the night on the hillside | 55:28 | |
because the dog had wandered off | 55:34 | |
and the drumming might bring the dog back | 55:37 | |
because the drumming could be heard | 55:40 | |
through the entire valley. | 55:42 | |
It just was so foreign to the farmers there | 55:45 | |
who had maybe never left the county | 55:49 | |
in their entire lives. | 55:51 | |
You know, it just, so we thought it was not polite. | 55:54 | |
And they thought it was being themselves | 56:01 | |
and just doing their lives. | 56:04 | |
But it made us nervous. | 56:07 | |
Anyway, I mean but it was enriching, I thought, | 56:11 | |
to have the women travel through. | 56:15 | |
And they were always gonna come back | 56:18 | |
and they were always gonna settle down and they never did. | 56:20 | |
You know, there was never a traveling woman | 56:24 | |
who ended up coming back and settling. | 56:26 | |
And eventually, you know, there wasn't anyone, | 56:31 | |
younger women that, we always imagined | 56:36 | |
we would live there forever | 56:39 | |
and the younger women would come behind | 56:40 | |
and they were take up the harder parts | 56:42 | |
of living that we couldn't do anymore, | 56:46 | |
but that never happened. | 56:49 | |
Living on the land like that is very physically demanding. | 56:53 | |
You know, just walking up all those steep hills | 56:58 | |
was physically demanding you couldn't, | 57:00 | |
it was not accessible, Spiral was not accessible. | 57:03 | |
We built ramps where we could, | 57:06 | |
but you had to drive to the house | 57:09 | |
and then get out and go up the ramp. | 57:11 | |
But just very, very rugged existence, | 57:15 | |
even if there was electricity. | 57:21 | |
Hauling wood, building houses, hauling wood, | 57:24 | |
doing farming, you know, walking. | 57:27 | |
Walking, walking, walking, walking, walking. | 57:30 | |
Mowing, you know, I mean it was just all, | 57:34 | |
every bit of it was hard. | 57:38 | |
And I loved it and I was strong. | 57:40 | |
And I don't know. | 57:45 | |
- | And were others less, I mean there was-- | 57:48 |
- | Mary was a lot of physically adept than I was. | 57:51 |
She grew up working in a landscaping business | 57:54 | |
and she knew how to do everything. | 57:57 | |
And I learned a lot from her. | 58:00 | |
And I knew a few things too about drawing, for example, | 58:03 | |
that was good. | 58:07 | |
And I had much better communication skills | 58:10 | |
and just willingness to process. | 58:12 | |
Jes lost patience with building | 58:21 | |
and went and got herself a job, | 58:25 | |
and that was a wonderful thing | 58:26 | |
because then we had a little money to buy boards with. | 58:29 | |
Bolynn had an army background. | 58:36 | |
She could survive almost anywhere. | 58:39 | |
And she was not afraid. | 58:42 | |
She had some skills and she was just good at physical stuff. | 58:44 | |
She's also an artist. | 58:48 | |
Joy was a big, tall, strong woman who had a black belt. | 58:52 | |
And she built her house, I don't think she knew | 59:02 | |
how to build a house before she built it, | 59:05 | |
but she learned and she did it. | 59:07 | |
- | And Lorette? | 59:13 |
- | Lorette had been a carpenter's apprentice in the city | 59:15 |
and had learned carpentry from men, the official way, | 59:21 | |
the hard way and so she knew all about | 59:25 | |
all sorts of stuff. | 59:29 | |
- | So it sounds to me like it was physically | 59:32 |
and perhaps even financially, you had what it took. | 59:37 | |
- | Well, maybe so. | 59:41 |
It always seemed like we didn't quite have enough. | 59:44 | |
But we did survive there for a number of years | 59:46 | |
and we pulled together from our different skills. | 59:49 | |
- | From 1988 to 19, 2003, that's 15 years. | 59:58 |
- | I always say I lived there 15 years. | 1:00:05 |
And Mary lived there from the beginning | 1:00:08 | |
and left after me. | 1:00:12 | |
Mary and I are no longer speaking to each other, | 1:00:15 | |
but we do email. | 1:00:18 | |
I left because I just had a terrible screaming fight | 1:00:25 | |
with Mary and her lover. | 1:00:31 | |
And she also had the same screaming fight with Jenna. | 1:00:34 | |
And this was in 2003 so it's off the timeframe. | 1:00:41 | |
But in the end it fell apart. | 1:00:45 | |
And I fell apart when we were working together | 1:00:48 | |
to earn money in the hammock business. | 1:00:52 | |
You know, we had gotten that hammock business | 1:00:56 | |
from Twin Oaks. | 1:00:59 | |
- | Did Twin Oaks stop that, or? | 1:01:01 |
- | Twin Oaks was tired of making hammocks | 1:01:04 |
and so they were farming it out. | 1:01:08 | |
And then eventually, I mean they had a long term, | 1:01:10 | |
years and years contract to provide hammocks to Pier One. | 1:01:14 | |
And then Pier One started buying them from, | 1:01:19 | |
you know, the Philippines or something, yeah. | 1:01:21 | |
And so that went away. | 1:01:24 | |
I don't know what Twin Oaks is doing now, | 1:01:27 | |
but they were really tired of making hammocks | 1:01:29 | |
and they had branched out into tofu and indexing, | 1:01:31 | |
making indexes for books and probably a bit | 1:01:35 | |
of training, you know, | 1:01:38 | |
survival skills, country living skills. | 1:01:42 | |
I don't know, I don't know what they're doing now. | 1:01:46 | |
- | Well tell me, I think it's worth, even though | 1:01:48 |
it's well beyond our cut off, it's worth talking about | 1:01:50 | |
what made it not last in the way that you | 1:01:54 | |
had envisioned that it would last. | 1:01:59 | |
What the reasons that you wanted it to last. | 1:02:01 | |
And you had everything, it seems to me that it had | 1:02:03 | |
nothing to do with what it takes to live on the land. | 1:02:05 | |
It had something to do with what it takes | 1:02:08 | |
to make money while living in an isolated community? | 1:02:10 | |
- | It was when the issue of making money together, | 1:02:18 |
when we had to work that out, that's when it fell apart. | 1:02:24 | |
And we always said, over the years that issues of money | 1:02:28 | |
were the hardest thing. | 1:02:34 | |
We all have different relationships with money | 1:02:36 | |
and different beliefs about money, | 1:02:39 | |
and different ways of appreciating work. | 1:02:41 | |
And we were all very strong in our opinions about that. | 1:02:44 | |
And so when we were share, | 1:02:50 | |
when our fate was shared financially, | 1:02:55 | |
the fights were worse, the struggles were worse. | 1:03:00 | |
Trying to think of how to be more specific. | 1:03:06 | |
Mary never felt like her skills and contributions | 1:03:13 | |
were adequately compensated. | 1:03:17 | |
And I think that to some extent, that was true. | 1:03:20 | |
I think that I, and I opposed her on that. | 1:03:26 | |
I thought that her, that she should have been a lot more | 1:03:30 | |
willing to share in a more equal way. | 1:03:34 | |
In the way that I brought in a tractor | 1:03:39 | |
because my father gave me a tractor, | 1:03:43 | |
her father gave her a truck, for example. | 1:03:46 | |
And so the tractor was Spiral's. | 1:03:50 | |
The truck was Mary's. | 1:03:53 | |
That's sort of a difference in the way we did things. | 1:03:55 | |
Mary's a lot more working class. | 1:03:58 | |
I'm a lot more middle class, or "privileged," | 1:04:01 | |
and therefore more willing to share | 1:04:05 | |
because everything wasn't so scarce in my life. | 1:04:09 | |
I don't know, perhaps. | 1:04:12 | |
Or my parents were less harsh. | 1:04:14 | |
And so she grew up in a harsh life | 1:04:18 | |
and was less trusting. | 1:04:22 | |
I don't know, I don't know. | 1:04:26 | |
I had much more a communitarian and more like | 1:04:29 | |
true socialist, communist point of view. | 1:04:33 | |
And she just wanted to have women's land | 1:04:38 | |
and work with women and have a good time, | 1:04:42 | |
and do all these things that she knew how to do | 1:04:44 | |
like build houses and grow plants. | 1:04:48 | |
And you know, it was a different point of view. | 1:04:50 | |
And Jes tried to be a peace maker | 1:04:54 | |
and Joy got run out of there earlier than others. | 1:04:59 | |
- | Why? | 1:05:06 |
- | Joy, well you know, she couldn't stand the struggles | 1:05:08 |
and she needed to make money. | 1:05:13 | |
She was just not, things weren't working out for her | 1:05:16 | |
emotionally and with the struggles. | 1:05:20 | |
And she just went back to the city and I don't know, | 1:05:23 | |
got another degree or something. | 1:05:28 | |
- | So she got run out, not she just took herself away. | 1:05:32 |
- | She took herself away. | 1:05:35 |
There was a couple of meetings where | 1:05:36 | |
she had tried to, she tried to say that, | 1:05:43 | |
that Bo and Susan, | 1:05:46 | |
that Bo and Susan were not contributing and it was wrong, | 1:05:54 | |
and they needed to step up and pay their fair share. | 1:05:58 | |
And when that happened, me and Jes and Lorette and Mary | 1:06:03 | |
kind of all ganged up against Joy. | 1:06:12 | |
Lorette kind of, I can't remember if Lorette was there then | 1:06:18 | |
and she played a mediating role | 1:06:23 | |
or somebody else played a mediating role | 1:06:25 | |
and didn't take a stand. | 1:06:27 | |
But me and Jes and Mary definitely just | 1:06:28 | |
brought up all the, not all, but several important things | 1:06:35 | |
that we had never said to Joy about | 1:06:40 | |
that we didn't like about the way she did things. | 1:06:43 | |
And as a result of that, she was shocked. | 1:06:46 | |
And pretty much left after that. | 1:06:52 | |
So it was, it was rough, it was rough. | 1:06:55 | |
It was not fine feminists theory in action. | 1:06:58 | |
It was, there were some harsh things that happened | 1:07:05 | |
and I was way far from perfect. | 1:07:09 | |
I thought I was doing the right thing at the time. | 1:07:11 | |
But looking back on it, I wish I had handled | 1:07:15 | |
some things differently. | 1:07:20 | |
But I wish Mary had handled a lot of things differently. | 1:07:22 | |
I believe that Mary wanted the attention | 1:07:30 | |
that she got by causing trouble in a meeting. | 1:07:34 | |
You know, like she needed more attention | 1:07:38 | |
than she was getting, and so she just blocked decisions | 1:07:41 | |
chronically, like month after month, year after year. | 1:07:46 | |
Didn't let us come to a final decision | 1:07:52 | |
because she would rather stir the pot | 1:07:55 | |
and get the attention. | 1:07:59 | |
And if that wasn't happening, she would like | 1:08:00 | |
go cut down a tree or something without permission | 1:08:03 | |
in shared space. | 1:08:06 | |
Just so that we would come together and focus on her. | 1:08:10 | |
And I just, so. | 1:08:14 | |
It was, you know, and I blocked her in ways | 1:08:20 | |
that I wish I hadn't, you know? | 1:08:24 | |
Somewhere I've written something about all that. | 1:08:30 | |
It was out of the timeframe, but it might be useful | 1:08:33 | |
to have eventually if I can find it and share it, | 1:08:39 | |
about the split that happened. | 1:08:43 | |
- | I don't know that we need to, it's good to have it. | 1:08:51 |
I have it on the record maybe, but-- | 1:08:54 | |
- | Not for this. | 1:08:57 |
- | Not for this. | 1:08:58 |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 1:08:59 |
- | I mean, I think it's enough to say that | 1:09:00 |
once it was over money issues that began to have | 1:09:04 | |
interpersonal difficulties, that eventually led to a split. | 1:09:07 | |
- | One thing that I haven't talked about | 1:09:13 |
that is in the timeframe, I think, | 1:09:15 | |
is that Jes and I together, but especially Jes | 1:09:18 | |
developed a business of healing, using herbs. | 1:09:23 | |
It was called Earth Grown Herbs, and-- | 1:09:29 | |
- | Yeah, I bought some of those. | 1:09:31 |
- | Yeah, yeah, we made tinctures and she studied, | 1:09:32 |
studied, studied, studied, studied. | 1:09:37 | |
We both did, but her more than me. | 1:09:39 | |
And she became an herbalist, self taught herbalist. | 1:09:41 | |
And you know, she's carried it on in other ways, | 1:09:47 | |
sort of as a intuitive healer to this day. | 1:09:53 | |
But it started there at Spiral. | 1:09:56 | |
And it did bring some income that Jes and I had. | 1:09:58 | |
And what else? | 1:10:08 | |
I haven't talked much about our relationship with the land, | 1:10:15 | |
about how we all believed that the land | 1:10:20 | |
was sacred and alive. | 1:10:26 | |
And we wanted to treat the land as respectfully as possible. | 1:10:28 | |
Mary had more of a farming attitude, | 1:10:39 | |
but she still was committed to organic farming | 1:10:41 | |
and being with the seasons and understanding | 1:10:45 | |
how to grow from your center, out. | 1:10:48 | |
We all took that attitude, which is parma culture. | 1:10:59 | |
From your center to the doorway to the steps, | 1:11:02 | |
to the kitchen garden, to the lay of the land | 1:11:07 | |
and the way that you are with the land | 1:11:12 | |
that's sustainable year after year | 1:11:16 | |
because you take from it and you give back. | 1:11:20 | |
And that was hugely important. | 1:11:23 | |
And a place that we might differ on the details, | 1:11:27 | |
but we agreed on the principle. | 1:11:31 | |
And we wanted to do so much more than we ever had time for | 1:11:33 | |
because mostly, we built our houses and that was essential | 1:11:37 | |
to have shelter and it took years. | 1:11:40 | |
But we wanted, we had visions and plans | 1:11:46 | |
for the way that we would you know, help the land | 1:11:48 | |
be more self-sustaining and not just have the forest | 1:11:52 | |
take back over the fields. | 1:11:57 | |
Mary did have a CSA eventually. | 1:12:01 | |
- | Did she... | 1:12:06 |
- | Was she-- | 1:12:07 |
- | She was selling her photos to people in the community. | 1:12:09 |
- | Yeah, and we all worked for her then. | 1:12:11 |
That was hell. | 1:12:13 | |
Yeah. | 1:12:16 | |
And... | 1:12:19 | |
Yeah. | 1:12:25 | |
- | Yeah. | 1:12:27 |
It's coming up on five o'clock. | 1:12:30 | |
- | Yeah it takes a good long time. | 1:12:32 |
- | It does. | 1:12:35 |
- | Now there was a Landyke-- | 1:12:37 |
- | There was a Landyke movement and it was the same | 1:12:38 |
across the United States, and perhaps the world. | 1:12:40 | |
And it was different in each femi-festation, | 1:12:43 | |
manifestation of the group and how the group evolve, | 1:12:47 | |
came together, evolved, bought land | 1:12:52 | |
or came into land and what we did there in each place, | 1:12:56 | |
and how much money we had to create something | 1:13:01 | |
or you know, each individual place was really different. | 1:13:04 | |
But the vision of a sustainable community of women | 1:13:08 | |
living in harmony with the land. | 1:13:17 | |
That was what we all shared. | 1:13:20 | |
And we all tried to create one way or another. | 1:13:24 | |
- | Do you see that as in the tradition or history if Utopian? | 1:13:30 |
- | Yes. | 1:13:36 |
Yes, Utopian communities. | 1:13:37 | |
The back to the land movement of the hippies. | 1:13:40 | |
We were like that. | 1:13:45 | |
We had feminism and lesbian feminism as our base. | 1:13:47 | |
But the appreciation and relationship with nature, I think, | 1:13:54 | |
was shared with other back to the land movements. | 1:14:00 | |
And Utopian communities thought they had a vision | 1:14:04 | |
of how to live in community that was different | 1:14:10 | |
from the nuclear family version that the modern | 1:14:15 | |
United States had to offer. | 1:14:21 | |
We, I think, and even in the past, they were more like | 1:14:23 | |
religious based Utopian communities. | 1:14:28 | |
But they were larger than one family. | 1:14:33 | |
They were ways of organizing human life together | 1:14:36 | |
that weren't based on the father, the mother, | 1:14:41 | |
and the two kids. | 1:14:44 | |
Or the grandparents and you know, | 1:14:46 | |
the three generations living together. | 1:14:49 | |
It was beyond that. | 1:14:51 | |
And so it was sort of tribal. | 1:14:52 | |
You know, I believe that it, that we tried to learn | 1:14:54 | |
tribal living in a way that wasn't patriarchal. | 1:14:59 | |
Not all tribes are patriarchal, but many of them are | 1:15:04 | |
and they are all heterosexual, almost entirely, | 1:15:10 | |
but not exclusively. | 1:15:13 | |
But tribal in the sense of there's unit, | 1:15:15 | |
small units within a whole, | 1:15:21 | |
and the whole works together and their fate is together. | 1:15:23 | |
In patriarchy your fate is in your nuclear family. | 1:15:31 | |
That's where the bank account is. | 1:15:35 | |
That's where the survival is. | 1:15:38 | |
And in a tribe, the tribe lives together | 1:15:41 | |
and survives together as a whole. | 1:15:46 | |
And there may be different power structure, | 1:15:49 | |
levels of sharing or whatever, but the tribe looks out | 1:15:53 | |
for the whole tribe. | 1:15:57 | |
And works things out together among the whole tribe. | 1:15:58 | |
And I think that that's the closest, familiar vision | 1:16:03 | |
to what we were attempting to create and live. | 1:16:07 | |
- | I've read and people have studied groups. | 1:16:12 |
And how groups work well together. | 1:16:16 | |
That they work best when there is age diversity | 1:16:18 | |
and gender diversity. | 1:16:22 | |
And something else, which I can't remember. | 1:16:27 | |
And I'm just thinking, were you mostly the same age | 1:16:30 | |
and what about, you did not have children, right? | 1:16:34 | |
So there was none. | 1:16:38 | |
- | There were no children and we were mostly the same age. | 1:16:39 |
The baby boomer generation. | 1:16:43 | |
A lot of the traveling women were younger | 1:16:47 | |
and there were younger women outside of the timeframe. | 1:16:50 | |
So there's that. | 1:16:59 | |
I don't think, as far as there should be diversity | 1:17:02 | |
of gender, that there can be diversity of, | 1:17:08 | |
you know, gender expression or something | 1:17:14 | |
that's not necessarily based on genes. | 1:17:18 | |
- | And there was some gender expression diversity among you. | 1:17:25 |
- | Yes, yes. | 1:17:28 |
And you know, and I think that was valuable. | 1:17:31 | |
- | And there was class diversity. | 1:17:35 |
- | And there was class diversity. | 1:17:36 |
- | Ultimately what? | 1:17:37 |
- | And that was rough, you know? | 1:17:38 |
There was a lot of misunderstandings | 1:17:41 | |
because of class, I think. | 1:17:44 | |
And I don't know what it would've take | 1:17:51 | |
besides just a lot more wisdom. | 1:17:53 | |
So... | 1:18:04 | |
- | Well, looks like we-- | 1:18:11 |
Item Info
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