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INTERVIEWEE: In my childhood, in the villages, the men had to go away at least six months in the year to get cash. They went to the oil fields, or the timber, or the gold rush, and women were left. This is true in the Black families and the Indian families.

Now, the real danger and suffering of our economy puts their men out of work. And so the children come back to them. And this is true in my family.

My great grandmother raised her children herself and my grandmother raised her children herself. My mother raised her children and I raised my children. It begins to form a pattern not from choice but because of the economic situation that the men lost their patriarchal heads of the family, and their job, their economic power. And I think now the nourishing exists in women.

INTERVIEWER: Now, your mother worked, your mother and your grandmother as well.

INTERVIEWEE: Yeah they all raised their children alone. The men were-- in my great grandmother and my grandmother, the men were like many men, they were alcoholics. And that wasn't just a moral issue. It was the frontier, and the suffering and losing a job.

For example, one village near us, in one month, all the glassblowers lost their inherited jobs have been three or four generations with mechanization. And they were all thrown out. And this happened. And it's happening now again and the men losing their jobs.

So I think that the feminine-- what I call the circular feminine is very important to return. And what I call the new young women, I think, are doing that or feeling that.

INTERVIEWER: How?

INTERVIEWEE: Well, it's wonderful to me the things that they've freed me from. I call myself Mrs. Lazarus. I was dug up out of the grave by the women, by the new women literally.

A bunch of young women came to my house and said they were from Boston. And they said that they had been xeroxing my old stories of the '30s and they asked if they could make an anthology. And I said, well, I wasn't interested in my past work.

If they wanted to come to my daughter's house and the basement was all my work. And they came and stayed a week and they collected all the stories that they liked or that was valuable to them. And they raised money and printed them.

INTERVIEWER: And now that was what? the '60s, beginning of the '60s?

INTERVIEWEE: No, it was '70s more like.

INTERVIEWER: Did the women's movement, which was renewed in the '60s, create a new audience for you, give you--

INTERVIEWEE: Created a new audience for all women in the arts and all the arts. This great thing is happening here now. It's just incredible to me that there should be two months actually of honor to creative women. I never heard of anything like that.

And I was just thinking, I'm going to make a list of the women in Minnesota who were trashed, and lost, and gone and their work not known because there was nothing like this. This is a concept that is-- well, it had to be built up with the women's movement. And with women, it's very hard to find forums for women circular creative work like writing, or painting and music.

And this is incredible. I wouldn't have come back here in the middle of winter. It had been such an incredible thing to me that there should have a celebration of creative women. You young women can't-- you really can't know how that fits into the drouth of my life. Nobody ever in Minneapolis, Saint Paul celebrated me as a creative woman.

Well, the women's movement is great in the Twin Cities, I think, in the clinics and all their social. In fact, I was just in California. A lot of the women look here to the organizations of women.

INTERVIEWER: Well, let's talk about your dual living places a little bit. Would you consider yourself a Minnesotan?

INTERVIEWEE: Oh, yeah, I think so. I was born in Iowa, but we came here just before the First World War. And I haven't lived here steadily, but I always came back here. Yes, I think so.

INTERVIEWER: Now you live in the Southwest as well.

INTERVIEWEE: No, I just go there because the sun is there. I always come back here.

INTERVIEWER: As I read your work, and I'm Midwestern, the images are familiar, familiar to me. I say, ah, this woman is a Midwestern writer. She's lived in the Midwest. She knows the land. She writes about the land.

Would you consider yourself that, a Midwesterner?

INTERVIEWEE: Oh, I know. I'm a passionate partisan, non-objective Midwest lover. No, I really feel that my roots are here.

And everything that I know have been made by the Midwest, by the people in the Midwest, by the struggles in the Midwest. No, I believe in that for creative artists to belong. That doesn't mean that they become small. But I don't think you can belong to the entire world unless you're in-- live somewhere or are someplace.

INTERVIEWER: That you might identify with.

INTERVIEWEE: Yes and the people, especially. The people in the Midwest to me are a great source of strength and beauty. I think I was created by them.

INTERVIEWER: In the '20s and '30s, you also did reporting. You were a journalist. And a lot of that was about the Midwest.

The story I'm particularly thinking of is, "I Was Marching," which is about the 1934 trucker strike here. That journalism, that reporting was very different from the stories that you wrote. But how was it important, especially that strike?

INTERVIEWEE: That strike?

INTERVIEWER: Mm-hm.

INTERVIEWEE: Well, that was very important with the strike in San Francisco, the longshoremen. It was really a tremendous change in American-- before the '34 strike, the average wage in Minneapolis was $12 a week. For a six-day week, 12 hours a day, that was the average.

There was no unions. The White fathers here, the Pillsburys, they fought unions. You couldn't organize a union. They tried to organize unions here from 1912.

So it was-- and then the depression added on to that. It was a terrific and great strike. It changed in turned because it was not just here, it was related to the entire depression.

But then the CIO came out of that. Out of the American struggle was one of the great organizations in '37, the CIO began. But it was all part of that raising of consciousness in the American people. Of course, the whole depression did that.

They learned how to organize. They learned how to get food. They learned how to demand. Here in Minneapolis were some of the great depression strikes for food, just for food.

One of the first demonstrations we had that was before the new deal, before Roosevelt. But we had these people in bathing suits walk up Nicollet Avenue, all skin and bones with big signs that said, we live on Minneapolis relief. And a woman fainted around 7th Street or something.

And then there was a great demonstration at the courthouse where thousands of people-- you could starve then in a couple of days. There was nothing like food stamps, or relief, or Social Security or unemployment insurance. When you say those things, you get cold. I don't know how we lived.

You could really be without food. You could be without your house. The mortgage, they could foreclose the mortgage in a week. So it was really terrible.

But the first demonstration was Hennepin and Washington. There was a big store there. Women just leaned against the windows. There was a lot of fruit and vegetables. Our children were hungry so they just leaned against the big plate glass window and it broke.

But they were wonderful. They told the owner, we're not thieves. Our children are hungry and we are going to make a list of everything we take. And when we get jobs, we'll pay you back, which was, of course, very-- they didn't know how dim that was, the possibility.

But they were wonderful and it was passed out. The food was not allowed to be grabbed by anybody. That's where the matriarchal feeling came in. It was all organized so most children got most food right on the spot. It was beautiful.