All cruelty is needless. All fighting. Now do we need to build real estate in the Everglades or on migration lands or drill the earth? We have everyt… - Linda Hogan

Working at a university I've made the observation that many student writers write for the sake of writing. They are really writing for other writers, not to tell a necessary story, not out of urgency and need. I have keenly felt that writing must be more than that, that it must have a power to enter the world, to begin to change the stories people live by, to open that story into something larger, into something that helps us know how to live. This means that we have to expand not only our work but our ideas about audience. It wouldn't bother me to have academics reject my work if somebody read it and it changed their attitude about deforestation, for example. I think I began to write out of a desire to make change in the world, searching for language that would help me speak my innermost hopes and ways. Writing was something of a foreign language I learned to be fluent in so that I could communicate emotions and what I knew was important-an ethical way of thinking about the world-communicate what racism is and what it does to people.

"Why don't you go out more?" her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had hap¬ pened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean. (p65)

The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. (p64)