My characters actually create me instead of the other way around. - 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.

American people need to revise their ideas about spirituality. Spirituality ends up being very much like capitalism. It ends up being a force to control other people or to make yourself look good-to give yourself a position of power and integrity.

I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)