You can really change the world with a good story, you can really make a difference with a good story, or you can really touch a heart with a good po… - Linda Hogan

of course property is an abstract economic concept on a hidden dollar that has been the cause of the death of people...I mean this country and most others that work out of our economic system are founded on the idea of property, and most of the transgressions that take place here have to do with property. There were massive slaughters of some of the California tribes during the gold rush, and the same thing happened to the Cherokee in Georgia. So, you know, property is no insignificant thing for us to think about if we ever want to change the world.

I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken.
The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me...

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.