 When did your publications, when did your writings become acceptable in the academic community? Well, I didn't really feel safe bringing out a lot of it until I applied for my full professorship really, you know, I just, could I just show you what I've got here? Let's do that. What I produced during that time. This is a book called The Autobiography of Deborah Carr, C-A-R-R, and it's actually the journal of a year in my life in 1980, when I was being a teacher, a mother, a lesbian, a writing. So this is my car at the time, Deborah, C-A-R-R, and it's partly written from her point of view, but it's full of pictures. I published one in handwriting, which this is, and then I didn't actually officially publish them because these people wanted so much money to reproduce these pictures of Deborah Carr. Deborah Carr, for people who don't know, was a movie star in the 50s and 60s and probably most remembered for roles like Mrs. Anna and the King and I, or From Here to Eternity. Anyway, she has been a kind of a, talk about ways of solace, or she has been an icon in my life for a long time. It was when I was growing up as a teenager, I worshipped her, really, and was pretty obsessed with her, but also took a lot of strength from her, strength that I didn't see as such in the women in Ashland, Oregon, where I was growing up. And when I became a lesbian, I kind of went back to thinking about what she had been in my life and she became, again, a huge source of inspiration for my writing. So I have written a book which I do not have a paper manifestation of called Tenderly Lesbian Meditations on Deborah Carr, which is in part a memoir of those teenage years and looking at her movies and remembering what they meant to me at that time and looking at them from the feminist perspective of 50 years later. But before I wrote that, in 1980, I took this journal and wrote The Autobiography of Deborah Carr. So it really matters to me that this gets published again. I really want to see it out there before I'm done. I'm at that stage of my life where I'm just trying to kind of pull together my legacy of what it is that I've done. So these are things that I've had pieces published in. A book, Our Lives Lesbian Personal Writings, actually had a couple of pieces that were taken from here. Other Lives was a meditation on reincarnation by a bunch of us in Writer's Group, and Sophie's Wind was a short-lived philosophy publication that published a little bit of some of my Deborah Carr writing. So then also during those years I produced this, which is a book about my great-grandmother and her poetry. She herself had a book published by Putnam back in the day of her sonnets. She wrote Italianate sonnets, which are really complicated sonnets. But she also wrote other things, so there's some autobiographical material in here and other stuff. I put this together, and it was such a thrill in those days. We could actually make our own books, aside from the first time in history. We didn't have to wait for somebody else to say, okay, this is a good enough book, and I can make some money off of it. We could just make them. And there's a whole line, a couple of lines of books there, many of which are like just hand produced and just an outflowing of the lesbian feminist imagination. So then this is also a book I put together, this historical novel that I worked on about Christina of Sweden, who lived in the 1600s, and was a really interesting person. But I was not able to do it, and it's kind of on the back burner now. We'll see if it ever gets forward. So then this is the Womanly Art of Teaching Ethics. This is the article that I wrote about how I do my ethics classes and why I do them the way I do. I typed this up. It was like the first attempt I'd had to publish something and sent it into teaching philosophy and waited and waited and waited and waited and didn't hear and didn't hear. And finally I got an acceptance and it turned out the guy had given it to this reviewer who completely believed a lot of the things I said in there that hated feminism and feminism. So he'd set this guy this funny puzzle, and so here I was waiting and waiting and waiting to hear. But anyway it did get published in the end. It got cited twice, which is more than most articles in philosophy do. And then this is both the paperback and the hardback versions of Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy, which is put out by Claudia Card. This was probably in the 90s and has several pieces of mine that have to do with philosophy, all of which are going to turn up in my book Magic and Philosophy. And then meanwhile I had this kind of underground life as a writer of erotic stuff. So these are two of the three books that T. Corrine was a dear friend of mine. She was a well-known artist and as I said a very productive writer, and she put together three anthologies of erotic writing. And so I published these under the name Pearl Times Child, which has sort of been my non-plume of choice for all these years of our stuff that I really didn't want the school to get wind of. So here they are, and here I am out with it. This one is called The Body of Love, and this one is called Writing Desire. So when this is not self-published, T. did manage to find some presses that at the time she got some work published through them. So I guess that's just, I just wanted to show you what I was producing during these years and doing. I also have an article in a big set called The History, Women in Western Civilization or something like that, History of Women in Western Civilization. And I wrote the article on Queen Christina for that. So that was nice to be able to put history in that way. I really wish I'd been able to write the one on Deborah Carr, but somebody else had already written that by me and my friends, but there's a lot of them that are there. Also some formative books for me. But you know there were women's bookstores, there were women's concerts, there were just so much women's culture at the time. Yeah, so that's my journals that go from about 77 to the present actually, but mostly in the 70s and 80s. And after I was teaching full time, I just couldn't keep up with such extensive journal writing. And those are typed up. I did have a friend of mine. I did pay her to type. And this is a production that is still viable after all these years that is actually made by women on land. It's a beautiful date book that has astrology, but has plenty of room to put things in. It has wonderful art and writing. And it's been going since about 1983, I think. And has gotten bigger and bigger, they get thousands of submissions from all over the world. So it's quite a phenomenon and supports a few women. And what my connection with it for the past few years has been that I annually host a weekend where we do a selection circle where we sit and go through the art and read the writings and say what we think about them. So here in this house and outside here, there's just women everywhere sitting around, going through folders, sitting and reading, ever it's all quiet. It's really a wonderful event. So that's one thing I do now. I was thinking of that question. Another thing I do now is I run a listserv that has about 200 women on it, lesbians and their friends. But everything filters through me. But it's about everything, concerts that have news among us, places for rent or sale, just any kind of thing that would be useful for the community to know. But I think it has helped keep a community existing by having a common source that women can feed into. Oh, and I wanted to show you something else. This was made from scraps from that chair over there by my friend Glenn Morris. And on the back is a quote from this book here that she embroidered. She had a machine that does, you could program it and it does embroidery. It says, sometimes the universe gives no evidence of caring and it seems the goddess will never speak again, never spoke. And then something happens that seems to say you've been dancing all along and that at the heart of everything is loving laughter. So she embroidered that for me. It was one of the sweetest presents I ever got. So what was that like growing up? I think about my grade school experiences. There were a lot of kids of farmers and loggers, of which I was one. My dad was a logger. My friends had parents that owned a hardware store in one case and shoe repair shop. They're just that kind of people. They were pretty conservative and I would every now and then get crosswise of them. I remember one time I wore my aunt's bridesmaid dress that she'd kept that had long full skirt. I just wore it to school one day because I thought it would be fun and this was in my junior high and I just learned very fast that that was not a cool thing to do and I thought it would be cool. But anyway, so things were pretty rigid in that way. On the other hand, from junior high on, I was sort of in with a bunch of girls who had gone to Briscoe school that were kind of smart and kind of proud that we didn't cheat on tests and kind of good. We had this eighth grade teacher, Miss Foster, who was named Kony, was her camp girl scout name and she was clearly, I found out later, she was clearly a lesbian and I even found a little card that she sent me. I'd evidently, when I met Deborah Carr, I'd written to her about it and told her afterwards and she wrote back, sent this card with little purple pansies on it and said something about, oh, I'm so pleased that you knew I'd want to know that. So anyway, so we had this thing called girl scouts, which was really pretty informally girl scouts, but we'd go like camping up to the Apple Gator or hiking up here. And so during high school, we had that as well. And it was a lot of that same group of girls that were doing that. And then through one of them, actually, I also got into the Shakespeare Festival for a couple of years, just doing little tiny parts, you know, fairy and Midsummer Night's Dream or Pickerton Page or things like that. So, but that gave me a taste to a little bit of another world. So, but when I left, I thought I'd never come back to that little town. You know, I wanted something more. And indeed, when I get to college, people didn't think it was so weird if I wanted to wear a cloak instead of a coat. And, you know, it was a little more open. And I just thought I didn't want to come back. But then John, my husband's first job, was in Northridge in California. And so we lived there for two years. And he taught at that kind of cutthroat school there. And I was raising the baby at the time. Oh, dear, where was I going with that? Oh, just that living in Los Angeles, the more I lived in Los Angeles, the more beautiful Ashland looked. And also, I grew up around my family. My grandparents had a paratrooper back of Phoenix on Carpenter Hill Road. And so I, and you know, my brothers and I would spend time out there with them. And it just seemed to me, and my parents lived here. And I liked them quite well. And so it just seemed to me right that to move back here, you ask about that, why I returned. And it just seemed such a good idea to move back here. And I love the part about Ashland work. You know, everybody, I used to say it's like an Ingmar Bergman movie where, you know, somebody's a gas station attendant one time and a night another time. And sort of, you know, my students would turn up doing all kinds of things in town. And that was fun. And we had free babysitting of somebody who loved our kid and wanted to take care of him. We're talking about, as a child, I was born in 1940. So essentially, the 40s I was a child, the 50s I was a teenager. So when I left in 50, I started college in 58, in the fall of 58. Hooks writes about that. She bought a house next door to her parents. And all her colleagues said, why would you do that? Why would you want to live next door to your parents? But to her, it made all the sense in the world. And I feel extremely fortunate that I was able to come back here to my hometown, where I had all these ties and connections and live here. Oh, I remember, of course, in those days, you never heard of such a thing as homosexuality or lesbians or anything. And I remember when I was about eight, these two women bought a house down here on Terrace Street from our family. And we ended up buying it back later. But two women together. And it turned out one of them was a widow. And I remember going, oh, you could do that. When the men died, then we could move in with each other. And so that was sort of my one exposure to the actual possibility when I was a kid. And then I have a whole book about being a teenager and the only one who'd ever thought of such a thing in the world. And, you know, which it was at that time, people just did not talk about it. It not only was abominable, but it didn't exist. So, you know, and you lost all credibility if you were one. So I have a piece about learning the word homosexual from teen sympathy. I don't know if you heard of that play. Anyway, it was a play that Deborah Carr was in that at least mentioned the word. And that's where I first learned about it when I was 13. So I've got a piece about that that's actually already up online called Remembering Teen Sympathy. So, yeah, but it was, there was just, there weren't words. And it didn't exist. What were you experiencing in graduate school as the first female PhD? It was almost all men. There was a large graduate, well, a large department or probably eight or ten men in it. One woman for a few years. I remember asking her why she measured in philosophy whether it was because she thought it had profounder truths and other stuff. And I think she'd been in science before. And she said, no, I was better at it than I was at chemistry. So, anyway, she and then she left. So it was the sense I was always dealing with men. My classes, my graduate school classes were all men. There was one woman again for a year and then she got pregnant and left. And so, and I know one graduate student who I talked to later talked about how kind of abusive that felt to her. Her family had been abusive. Her father had been abusive, physically violent. And she talked about what fear that graduate school experience evoked in her from that. And I think I probably struggled with that the rest of my life from, you know, how hard that experience was. What happened was I increasingly became silent. I just, I couldn't compete with these guys for floor space. And I was running into all the problems I solved later by passing around in orange, you know. What I wanted to say was ten points back or something. And so I just sat there and listened and wrote excellent papers and got excellent grades because of that. But I also sort of ran out of ideas. I had less and less ideas. I had one thing that I wanted to write my dissertation on and luckily that one was about to get me through. But it's just otherwise I just couldn't, I found it harder and harder to write. So it sort of began to come back when I wrote my dissertation and then really my writing ability really came back when I started keeping a journal, which was a dream journal at first, which was in the 70s. So one thing, a memory that just came back to me recently at a memorial service for one of my old teachers is that when I was a graduate student after I was through with everything except my dissertation, I had asked just one professor to be my dissertation, what was that called anyway, chief overseer. But I was free at the time. I had just, John and I had split up and I was living by myself. And he kind of started an affair with me and I just the kind of thing they tell you not to do and for very good reason because pretty soon I was saying that I didn't really want to do it. I mean at first I was flattered, I guess, but then he got kind of nasty and started threatening my dissertation to like. And so I didn't know what to do, but I had this other friend, the guy whose memorial service I just went to who was an old teacher of mine. And when I told him about what was happening, he suggested that he could be my dissertation advisor and he asked some good questions and made it a better dissertation and I got through and was able to have a career in philosophy. But this first guy was really putting up a roadblock by, you know, holding that power over me. So it did happen back in those days. I mean, there were no words for it, there were no rules for it. You know, I'd hear many times about this and that professor who slept with all the women graduate students it is career and that just was one of the things that happened in those days. And I'm not even against policing all relationships between people, but not definitely pitfall. So but also in graduate school, I sort of didn't believe the orthodoxy of the time where they were Vigonstinians. I'm not the easiest thing to say is that they were behaviorists, kind of that language had meaning, equaled what behavior you did that accompanied those words. And it ruined, it made metaphysics and some of the philosophical doubts completely impossible and therefore everything was wonderful according to them. But to me, philosophy has a lot to do with wonder. And I don't want to really resolve those puzzles and I don't think it brings clarity to do it. I'm more sensitive to how words mean. As a writer, I know something about, you know, what resonances words have and the kinds of meanings they can have and to reduce it all to this kind of behaviorist thing that will solve all the problems in philosophy, I thought was pretty awful. And that was essentially what my dissertation was about. So I was kind of set loose to work on my own philosophy, I think, from that. That also the doll work, my writing, my career as a builder. Kind of believed in dolls was taught that it was virtue to believe that dolls were alive and secretly alive. And it's part of believing in magic. There's just things like that that I'm really interested in, these kinds of states of consciousness where you both believe and don't believe. It's like philosophers don't look at that much. It's like you either believe it or you don't. And things like reading a book or whatever, but also pretend play of every kind and dolls. And so I have this kind of love of showing dolls as being alive. But then also it's like you're in charge of the scenario. So like I love to make happy doll stuff where the women are kind of empowered in one way or another. I love to have little lesbian interactions of various kinds. For years I worked with Barbie dolls because they were the best miniatures around, essentially. And they had all this stuff. So it created the possibilities of doing all kinds of scenes, even though the dolls were not all that great, but the wardrobes were wonderful. And so I worked with that until sometime in the 2000s, I think, when I found out about these smaller scale dollhouse dolls that are called Heidi Ott dolls. They're made in Switzerland and they're very poseable. They have charming faces. And before that, I just knew that there was all this good stuff made in the 112th scale. But the dolls were just impossible. They were stiff and not poseable at all. But once that opened up, I kind of moved into this smaller scale. So now for a long while I worked on little stories and vignettes having to do with the life of these two older, it's called Boston Marriage, and these two older women move into the dollhouse together. And then there's two younger women who help them out and gradually also move in. And so they build an edition. And these little stories from their lives, little stuff. But I love to photograph them just to create the feeling that they are alive, that they become characters. And I think for me, playing with dolls is so elementary. It's back there such long ways in my, I grew up playing with dolls and reading raggedy Anne's stories and believing in dolls. And so I love the illusion that they're alive. And it is worth a lot of work to me to actually be able to create the feeling that these little beings exist and have these lives. So for a long time, I did this Victorian dollhouse. And actually the key was I read a novel that was set in suffrage times. And they were in the attic. The kids were in the attic sewing these banners that said, both's for women. And I thought that would be so cool for a dollhouse. They have tiny sewing machines and stuff like that. And you know, rather than replicating the standard family, I wanted to do something completely different with the medium of dolls. And so there's the Boston Marriage dollhouse, which is set in about 1868 or 1870, something like that. So when they want to actually live in it, it turns into one house. This part I bought and this part I made. Now I have also a modern Dyke dollhouse I call it, that's just with so I can use some modern stuff and have some modern things happening. End of a long dirt road out in the country. Why is it called a Dyke dollhouse? Because it's lived in by two country dykes from the 80s. And since they live way out in the woods, they don't have to worry about clothes if they don't want to in the summertime. So they've had this cabin forever. And then fairly recently, a couple of years ago, I built this in here so they could have a writing annex where they could go to work. So on they have a little rainbow flyer thing. And they've had over the years, various yard signs that said no on 13 and no on egg and all the various things that we've had to try to outlaw teachers from teaching about homosexuality and stuff like that. So they have a little set of women's spirit magazines and a copy of Tea's Yonters of Woman Love, which are ironic photography. Oh, I'm kind of documenting the culture of the country dykes of the 70s and 80s who lived out on the ends of dirt roads on women's land. So I read your piece about how your dolls became live as a child. Yes. When did you start putting together the context for the dolls? When did you start creating the scenes? Creating the scenes? Well, I did a whole lot more since I retired. It's like I was just tired of talking almost, you know. It was nice to just go into a medium that was completely different than that. But I started doing Celine, the greatest bullyber on earth, which is a 30-minute story set back in ancient Greece and ancient Crete done by Barbie dolls. And my daughter and I started that back in 1978 from a book that Ze Budapest wrote that had the story in it. And we had always kind of liked to take Barbie dolls and act out stories together. We'd done various stories and we thought it would be fun to have a little bull leapers. And so we made little bull leaper costumes and stuff. And then we liked what we'd done so much. We ended up going to the beach and she was like eight years old at the time and staying overnight and doing a photography shoot with some of it. And that was kind of the beginning so that would be like 70, 76. And then it went on off and on for like 20 years that various people helped me with it. Marcella helped me, my daughter helped me with it several times than my niece. Then one of my assistants in the summertime that we got very elaborate with some of the scenes. And so for a couple of summers, actually, we had a big table set up here on the deck and tried to shoot before the dolls got too hot and fell over. And so it was a big production that went on for quite a few years of my life. But to me, the thing is I couldn't really use it because Mattel was standing there in the way. So, but ideally I would have loved to show to children because the Barbie at the time what her life was supposed to be was so different from the life I could imagine Barbie's living. So I really wanted them to have better lives. So this was the way to do that and to kind of model for little girls. An ancient creed was able to both be this sort of symbol of feminism and at the same time make way for big busty Barbies with lots of eye makeup and that kind of thing which comes so naturally to Barbies. And so it was just a really fun project to do. And your work with dolls has ranged from play, the Nutcracker series, yes, that's right, to more political and more radical feminist. So was there an arc to that narrative? No. Or it was just as you felt that picture? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the Nutcracker was kind of a regression but I just had all those great costumes that I'd always wanted to put it on. And if I go on, there's part two of the Nutcracker and I could have the Nutcracker turn into a woman and have a more interesting. I was working with a little girl and her frame of reference was heterosexual and a male Nutcracker and he was quite a charming Nutcracker. So I don't know if I'll ever finish that but I kind of like to, I've got all the costumes. But talk about Sunday morning. Sunday morning was, well, my friend T. Corinne who wrote the erotic books and did lots of photography, including erotic photography. She had found at a garage sale or something the Barbie that has the sort of big hair that's tied back and she had a soft cloth body and T made her a kimono. And then I had this other doll, a rosy odonal doll who just looked a lot like T, actually. And so I just thought it would be sweet to make a little tribute to, you know, how nice it is to get up in the morning with somebody you've had a good time with the night before. And oh, and I had this wonderful kitchen set at the time that I wanted to use. Well, not entirely pink. There was more pink than I would like. You know, Barbies at first were not pink and that became something they did afterwards. But, you know, they were like real colors. You know, like a typewriter was gray and green keys and it was not pink. So I always hated that pink aspect or not. I don't hate pink, but they really overdo it with the Barbies. My question about the dolls, you've, you controlled your environment, you played, you expressed your femininity in all of its forms. Was there ever a time when you used the dolls to express a fear or a negative emotion? No. No, I like doll play to be reassuring and positive and I just feel that there's not enough positivity in the world and I don't actually like it when people like created haunted houses with dolls or used doll baby parts, my God, to do some bizarre thing or Barbies. People have done all kinds of weird art stuff with Barbies and Mattel proves that, but not my sweet little story. Where did those thoughts for you go? Where did those fears and those negative thoughts go? Did they go to your journals? Awesome. I smoked them away a lot. I really, I don't live in a lot of fear, I guess, or I don't have a lot of anger. I mean, I lived a pretty good life. I can get mad at people for sure, but, but, you know, I wasn't abused as a child. I didn't even, you know, hate my husband for most of the reasons that people do. You know, I, though I did have a hard time getting the floor with him, but, but that's typical, isn't it? This one, so that's one set. You know, people don't take Dollhouse work seriously. It's hard. There's a kind of a scorn about it. Like, you know, you're supposed to lose interest in that when you grow up. So anyway, here, four little girls live with Miss Clevelle, who is over here visiting the horses. Dolls, especially at the time that I did the Celine work and the Barbie dolls and, you know, the image of Barbies at the time and what I wanted to do with them is that, to me, Barbies were kind of like a language that a whole bunch of little girls and women had spoken in their life. And I thought it would be a trip for them to see these dolls speaking in a whole other language, which has to do with feminism and empowerment for girls and magic and stuff like that. Thank you for your story. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for asking. Nobody's ever asked. Yeah. Well, it's been kind of wonderful to go back and revisit it and think about it again and think about the people who helped me and and just lots of things.