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Julie Olsen Edwards: Santa Cruz, KBDH San Ardo. Morton Marcus: Hello everybody this is Mort Marcus and this is the Poetry Show and tonight we have a birthday show, a very special show. It is the birthday for Tillie Olsen, the inspiring

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American fiction writer who died on January 1st of this year, 14 days short of her 95th birthday, which is today, and we are here going to read from her work and talk about her. Four wonderful, well three wonderful people, yours truly, Susan Freeman, poet

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and radio announcer as well, Julie Olsen Edwards, Tillie's daughter, and the wonderful poet Ellen Bass, who many of you I'm sure out there know, and we're going to just be reading eclectically from the different books that Tillie wrote and the

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different stories, obviously we're going to concentrate most on the stories in, "Tell Me a Riddle," and we are going to start tonight. First of all, welcome, my friends. Julie Olsen Edwards: Glad to be here.

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Morton Marcus: Great and how are we going to start? In fact, Julie, I would like you to tell us a little bit about your mom. Julie Olsen Edwards: Oh my, well, mom, as Mort said, my mother just died. And we put out a call internationally actually

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asking people to use her birthday today as a day to gather with friends and read her work. And I've gotten emails of over 100 places I know of personally where people are doing that across the country. Hard for me to talk about her,

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she was my mother, she was my beloved mother. But the world knows her as a writer and as a writer who changed the world for many, many people and more than anything gave voice to people who had never had the opportunity to write, who never

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felt their lives were worthy of fiction, who had been told throughout their life they had nothing to say, particularly women, particularly working class people. And the power of that has been astounding. And I took her- one of the last times

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she ever spoke publicly, we were in San Antonio. I had taken her down there, she was already quite ill and quite frail. And she did a reading that night and at the end of the reading sat an autographed books, and in Tillie style stopped with each person

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and said, "Tell me about yourself, dear," would have these long conversations and write autograph specifically to that person. And it's getting to be midnight and one and two in the morning. And one of the people there was a woman, a

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Latina, who said to her, "I never went to high school, but my daughter went to the community college and she came home and read to me, "I Stand Here Ironing," and it was a story of my life and I started going to school with my daughter

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and her teacher invited me to stay. And I read all of Tillie's works. And now I have my Master's in literature and I teach at the local prison and I tell the prisoners if Tillie Olsen could speak the truth from her life, you can speak the

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truth and that's what we write." Morton Marcus: Great. Tillie Olsen was born in 1912 and she grew up in the hard times of this country. She was an activist from the 1930s. She held various labor jobs, and

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really was part of the working class in this country. Her parents were Russian immigrants and she also was a mother of four daughters. And she both maintained the household and sought time to write, time to give vent to her creativity, and

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creativity she talks about, she was actually the author of three books. You know, I'm never going to get through- Morton Marcus: "Yonnondio," a novel that she started in the Julie Olsen Edwards: "Yonnondio."

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30s and finished in the late 60s or early 70s. And of her last book, "Silences," in which she quotes a lot of writers on these problems of finding time to create and the inspiration to create. And then her most famous book, "Tell Me a Riddle," a book

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of four short stories, which really changed in many ways the face of American literature and was the inspirational call, the clarion to women, to really just find and become whole people. But I would like to want to put this in not just women, and

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inevitably even as we'll read tonight, always the word men and women or women and men come in there, so she had a great vision. We're going to start tonight by reading from one of her most read stories, it's the first one in, "Tell Me a

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Riddle," and it is the one that has had the most impact for many women I know and that is a story called, "I Stand Here Ironing," and it's going to be started off by Ellen Bass. Ellen Bass: I STAND HERE IRONING by Tillie Olsen.

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I stand here ironing and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I'm sure you can help me understand her. She's a youngster who needs help

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and whom I'm deeply interested in helping. Who needs help? Even if I came, what good would it do? You think because I am her mother, I have a key or that in some way you could use me as a key. She has lived for 19 years. There is all that life that has

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happened outside of me, beyond me. And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again, or I will become engulfed with all

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I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped. She was a beautiful baby, the first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth, you do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now loveliness. You did not know

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her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been, and would be. I would tell her, and was now to the seeing eye, but the seeing eyes were few or

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non-existent, including mine. I nursed her, they feel that's important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books then said, though her cries battered me to trembling and my

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breasts ached with swollenness I waited till the clock decreed. Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters or if it explains anything. She was a beautiful baby, she blew shining bubbles of sound, she loved motion, loved the light,

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loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls padding the surface so hard in ecstasy, her hands and feet would blur. She was a miracle to me but when she was eight months old, I had to leave her day

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times with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all. For I worked or looked for work and for Emily's father who could no longer endure, he wrote in his goodbye note sharing what with us. I was 19, it was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the

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depression. I would start running as soon as I got off the street-car, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a

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weeping I can yet hear. After a while, I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days and it was better, but it came to where I had to bring her to his to this family and leave her. It took a long time to raise the money for her fare

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back. Then she got chickenpox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came, I hardly knew her. Walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the

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pockmarks, all the baby-loveliness gone. She was two, old enough for nursery school, they said, and I did not know then what I know now, the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only

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parking places for children, except that it would have made no difference if I had known. It was the only place there was, it was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job.

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Morton Marcus: And that is the beginning of, "I Stand Here Ironing," and we're going to read another excerpt, two exerpts from it and Susan Freeman will read the second one.

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Susan Freeman: She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look, or thought she should look, a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple. The doorbell sometimes rang for her

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but no one seemed to come and play in the house or be a best friend, maybe because we moved so much. There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months later, she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him

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candy, "Licorice was his favorite and I brought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better than me. Why mommy?" The kind of question for which there is no answer. School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where

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glibness and quickness were easily confused with the ability to learn. To her overworked and exasperated teachers, she was an over-conscientious slow-learner who kept trying to catch up and was absent entirely too often.

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Morton Marcus: And as you can tell out there, one of the powers of Tillie's writing is not just style, but a lot of her writing is interior. She goes into her characters, so you see what they're thinking and you relate to them immediately. This

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is the end of the story now, as the woman standing there ironing really begins to think about the answer to all of these experiences with her daughter, the guilt feelings she feels about her daughter, how she can resolve them, and she realizes

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this and it ends in a sort of summary and a prayer. I will never too little. I will never come in to say, she was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was

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work or I sent her home and to his relatives. There was a year she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples. She was slow, but glibness was

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prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up demanding. Her younger sister

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seemed all that she was not, there were a year she did not let me touch her, she kept too much in herself. Her life was such that she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of

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it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. Let her be, so all that is in her will not bloom, but in how many does it. There is still enough left to live by. Only keep, only help her to know, help make it so there is cause

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for her to know that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron. Tillie discovered that she had written, discovered parts of a novel she had written- started in the 1930s. And of course, one

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of her problems was as a mother and as working eight hours a day in various jobs, she had no time to write and we'll read some things she said about that in a while. But she rediscovered this novel in the end of the 60s and she put it together and

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published it in 1973, I do believe, and we're going to read from the novel now, Julie. Julie Olsen Edwards: Yeah, this novel is called, "Yonnondio," from the 30s. Strange name and it just comes from a poem by

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Walt Whitman. And I'm going to, if I can find it here, read you the Whitman quote that opens the book, which is, "Lament for the aborigines, a song, a poem of itself, the word itself a dirge," and she repeats the first part of then goes,

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"Yonnondio, yonnondio, unlimbed they disappear. Today gives place and fades, the cities, farms, factories fade, a muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is born through the air for a moment, the blank and gone and still and utterly lost." And the

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book is titled, "Yonnondio," it's a book about people lost in our history. The Holbrook family it is for me, I don't know, other people might want to say I think one of the hardest books I've ever read in terms of the story it has to tell of a family

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of decent, hard working, loving people who are truly destroyed by the poverty in their life. And part of mom's genius as a writer I think is, in the midst of describing really the horrors of what happens to this depression era family, her

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ability to see beauty in all sorts of moments and places. In trying to decide which pieces to write, to read, Maude Meehan had hoped to be here tonight and was unable to, she said you've got to read the part about the cameo so, Maude, I'm doing what you've

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told me. They have just moved from the small farm, they have gone to the mining in Wyoming, there has been cadence at the mine because lack of safety precautions, people have been killed there,

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women and men waiting outside the mine. It's been a horrible sort of descriptions and then you hear, "And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it on to your aesthetic hearts? So sharp it is, so clear, so classic. The shattered dusk, the

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mountain of calm, the tipple, clean lines, bare beauty and carved against them, dwarfed by the vastness of night in the towering tipple, these black figures with bowed heads, waiting, waiting. Surely it is classical enough for you, the

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Greek marble of the women, the simple flowing lines of sorrow carved so rigid and eternal. Surely it is original enough, these grotesques, this thing with the foot missing, this gargoyle with half the face gone and the arm. In the war to live,

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the artist's coal sculptured them, it was his masterhgand that wrought the intricate mosaic on this face. Splintered coal inlaid with patches of skin and threads of rock. You will have the cameo? Call it Roscoe, Wyoming, any of a thousand towns

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in America, the night of a mine blow-up and inside carve the statement, the company already is issuing 'unavoidable catastrophe'." And then I'm going to read another section here from,

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"Yonnondio," if only I can find it again. The family moves from Wyoming, they end up eventually- him working in the meatpacking plants. The difficulty of holding life together at this point, Anna and Jim have five children, the baby is Bess. And

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there's a long chapter describing what life in the meatpacking plants is like. My mother worked in meatpacking plants and she knew firsthand that horrible life, this is of course before the years of workers comp and before the

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words, years of any kind of regulations requiring employers for safety. And it's during the time when if a worker had an arm cut off by the machines, he was instantly fired. That's the first thing they did, and that the men who carried him home

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were docked their wages for that day. And there's been a long description of the kind of the horror of the plant, and there's a speed up going on. The employers keep speeding up the lines and speeding up the lines, which makes it more and more

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dangerous. And counterpoint to that, she writes about Anna in her kitchen, who is desperately trying to get the peaches canned so there will be food, and it's unbeli- it's 106 degrees, of course no air conditioning or anything else, and they are all

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sweltering. The baby has a terrible heat rash, the children are sick, Ben has asthma. In the humid kitchen, Anna works on alone. Maisie lies swaft, in sweated sleep in the baking bedroom. Jimmy and Jeff sleep

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under the kitchen table, their exhausted bodies, their hair damp and clinging to their perspiring heads, giving them the look of drowned children. Ben lies in a sleep or an a sleep of swoon, his poor heaving chest laboring on its breathing.

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Bess has subsided in her basket on a chair where if she frets, Anna can sprinkle her with water and try to ease the heat rash by sponging. The last patch of jelly is on the stove between stirring and skimming and changing the wet packs on Ben,

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Anna peels and cuts the canning features; two more logs to go. If only all will sleep a while. She begins to sing softly, "I saw ship a sailing, a sailing on the sea," clears her head. The drone of fruit flies and Ben's raspy breathing are loud in the

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unmoving heavy air. Bess begins to fuss again, "There, there, Bessie, there, there," stopping to sponge down the oozing sores on her tiny body, "There, baby," skim, stir, sprinkle Bess, pit, peel, and cut, sponge, skim, stir. Any second the jelly will

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be right, it must not wait. Should she wake Jimmy to ask him to blow a feather to keep Bess quiet? No, he'll be cranky, he's just a baby himself. Let him sleep, skim, stir, sprinkle, change the wet packs on Ben, pit, peel, cut, sponge, this

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time it does not soothe. Bess stiffens her body, flails her fists, begins to scream in misery just as the jelly begins to boil. There is nothing for it but to take Bess up, jounce her on the hip, "There, there." And with one hand, freehand,

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frantically skim the ladle, "There, there." The batch just poured, cap sealed, all one-handed, jiggling hips, "There, there, it is done." Anna's knees begin to tremble, no she dare not sit. If you know, if you sat down you'll

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never make yourself get up again, don't sit. One of the jelly glasses has burst, the amber drips onto the floor has to be mopped and Bess still to be hushed, "Hush, you, hush. You'll wake every sleeping one. There, there," transferring her

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to the other hip and one-handed sponging her again and her own sweating face as well, "There, there, poor baby." The tenderness mixes with a compulsion of exhaustion to have it done, put Bess outside in the yard where she would scream and

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scream outside of hearing, Anna could be free to splash herself with running water, forget the canning and the kids, sink into a chair, forget the canning, the kids, forget, lay her forehead on the table, do nothing, "There, there, Bessie, there.

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We'll go out a spell, see what's outside." And then shortly after about- the family's all exhausted, Jim has come in from the packing plant and is so exhausted he has fallen to the floor in the kitchen and lies with a water on

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him trying to cool down, it's now 106 and then: Flies bumble and fry in the lamp, peach and amber jars of jelly and fruit cover every surface, Anna sits at last, holding Bess at the kitchen table singing with her

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heat-cracked lips, "I saw a ship pass sailing," waiting for Will to come home so the lights can go out and the trying-to-sleep time can begin again. It's all heat and delirium and near-suffocation. Now, bang! Bess who has been fingering a

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fruit charlotte absently, heedlessly drops it, aimlessly groping across the table reclaims it again. Lightning in her brain, she releases, grabs, releases, grabs, I can do, bang! I did that. I can do, I- A look of neanderthal concentration is

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on her face. That noise, I did it! In triumphant astounded joy, she clashes the lid down, bang, slam, whack, release, grab, slam, BANG, BANG! Centuries of human drive work in her, human ecstasy of achievement, satisfaction-deepened

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fundamentalist sex. I can do, I use my powers, I do! Wilder, madder, happier the bangs and the fetid, fevered air rings with Anna's, Mazie's, Ben's laughter, Bess' toothless, triumphant crow, heat's misery, rash misery transcended.

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Morton Marcus: Great, Susan, you wanted to read something from this also? Susan Freeman: Well, I'm not sure after that. Morton Marcus: No, you can't be intimidated.

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Susan Freeman: It's not so much intimidation. The section I was going to read is not quite as uplifting and it takes us back down under again. But I was struck, this is the beginning of chapter five from, "Yonnondio," and it takes us into the world

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of the packing houses and I was struck by the poetry really of the opening of this which reminded me a lot of Whitman. Myriad and drumming, the feet of sound move always through these crooked streets, trembling, the shoddy houses, jerking the

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skeleton children who scream and laugh so senselessly to uneven rhythms they themselves know not of. Monster trucks shake by, streetcars plunge, machinery rasps and shrieks, far underneath thinly quiver the human noises, weeping and

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scolding and tired words that slip out in monosyllables and are as if never spoken. Signs of lust and guttural, the sigh of weariness, laughter sometimes, but this sound can scarcely be called human, not even in the mouths of children. A fog of

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stinks smothers down over it all, so solid, so impenetrable, no other smell lives beside it. That stench is a reminder, a proclamation, I rule here, it speaks for the packinghouses, heart of all that moves in these streets', gigantic heart,

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pumping over the arteries of viaducts, the men and women who are the streets' lifeblood, nourishing the taverns and brothels and rheumy-eyed stores, bulging out into the soiled and exhausted houses and multiplying into these children playing so

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mercilessly in their street yards, where flower only lampposts. Morton Marcus: And that was from Tillie's only novel. We are going to read now from, "Silences," we're actually going

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to read- Julie Olsen Edwards: I would like to say something about, "Yonnondio." Mom started, "Yonnondio," as a young woman, and- who always wanted to write, who tried to write and plot the

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manuscript lost. I mean, she didn't have time to complete it, and was spent the next 40 years tied up in what she called her everyday jobs and raising the family. And it was in the early 70s that my father came across pieces of the manuscript, and

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portions of it all over and convinced mom to try to put it together again. And she talked about what it was like for her to work in partnership with this young woman who is 40 years younger than she was herself then, not to rewrite it, she

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really wanted it to be the book she had written then, but to patch it together, finding old notes, seeing what she had intended. There are a number of versions of the novel because over the years, she kept finding other little pieces and in the

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most, the last one to be published, I can't tell you which date it was, I don't remember, she does a summary of how she intended to end the novel, which is not in these versions. And so it's a wonderful novel, not just for

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what it is, but also for the sort of partnership she had with herself from a time early in her life and she dedicates it to my father, so. Morton Marcus: We have a few more minutes to go. Would you

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like to talk a little bit about the poem that your mom wrote before we take a break and talk about that? Julie Olsen Edwards: In the 30s, when mom was a beginning writer, this is hardly- actually for many years she had this but she

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didn't ever let it out because she felt it was not that good writing. And she finally began reading it to people when she would be invited to union meetings to read or to the working class literature groups, or when she was working on

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issues around what was happening with all the peace work that was again happening in San Francisco and all over the world. And this is a poem called, "I Want You Women Up North to Know," which I WANT YOU WOMEN UP NORTH TO KNOW

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is based on a letter by Felipe Ybarra, which was published in the "New Masses," in 1934. And 'm going to read you the pening and then she describes ach of these three women's ives and I'll read you just one ittle piece of it because it's

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ong. But this is the young author's voice and I must say an issue still way too much with us if you all will- when you get g to bed tonight, take a look a the labels in your clothes an see where they are being made except now it is children wh

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are making them. How those dainty children's dresses you buy at Macy's, Wannemakers, Gimbels, Marshals, Fields are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh down in San Antonio where sunshine

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spends the winter. I want you women up north to see the obsequious smile the sales lady trail, "Exquisite work, madam. Exquisite pleats," vanish into a bloated face ordering more dresses, driving wages down, dissolve into Maria, Ambrosa,

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Catalina stitching these dresses from dawn to night in blood, in wasting flesh. Maria Vasquez, spinster, for fifteen cents a dozen stitches garments for children she has never had and never will. Catalina Torres, mother of four, to keep the

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starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to night, mother of four, what does she think of as the needle poked fingers shift over the silk of the stubble coarse rags that stretch on her own brood and jut with the bony ridge that marks

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hunger's landscape, a frat little prairie-roll bodies that will budge in the silk she needles. Be not envious Catalina Torres, look on your own children's clothing, embroidery more intricate than any thousand hands could fashion there with a

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cloth as raveled or darned, designs multitudinous, complex, and handmade by poverty itself. Women up north, I want you to know when you finger the exquisite handmade dresses, what it means, this working from daw to midnight. On what strang

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feet the feverish dawn must com to Maria, Catalina, Ambrosa. Ho the malignant fingers twitchin over the pallid faces jerk the to work and the sun and th fever mount with the day, lon plotting hours, eyes burn like oals, heat jellies the flying

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ingers, down comes the nife-like blindness. Long hours ore with the dim eye of the amp, the breaking back, eariness crawls in the flesh ike worms, gigantic like arth's in winter.

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Morton Marcus: And that was Julie Olsen Edwards, the daughter of Tillie Olsen, reading from a long lost poem actually, by Tillie, which she wrote in the 30s and tonight we are celebrating the 95th birthday of Tillie, who, alas

00:31:41.020 - 00:31:59.950

died fourteen days ago. And we are here with Susan Freeman and Ellen Bass as well as Julie. And we will continue after a moment with more work by Tillie but first some announcements. Right now thousands of local consumers are listening to this message.

00:32:00.310 - 00:32:23.950

They could be listening to the name and description of your business instead, we can make this happen when you become an underwriter of KUSP, a programming. Call us now at 476-2800, that's 476-2800 or 800-655-KUSP, 800-655-KUSP to

00:32:23.950 - 00:32:39.820

find out how easy it is. And Sunday night at nine, KUSP presents 'From the Bookshel ' hosted by Gary Shapiro. Ea h week, Gary presents a spok n word program with storie , authors and special guests. Jo n us tonight at 9pm following t

00:32:39.820 - 00:32:56.770

e Poetry Show on Central Coa t Public Radio, KUSP. And we' e going to go right on with t e show. And we're going to re d from- and we're going to go b ck to the book of stories, "Tell Me a Riddle," but before th t, we're going to read from

00:32:56.770 - 00:33:14.860

he third book, which is a v ry interesting book. Tillie ad great trouble writing and we re going to see some excerpts h re that show us why. Not only d d she not have enough time, wh n she did have enough time, th old ways had so gotten into her

00:33:14.860 - 00:33:31.330

soul that she found great ifficulty getting writing don . And she did an entire book, w ich was a study from different perspectives of how eople are forced to have silenc s, or how they take on silenc s and she did it by actually

00:33:31.360 - 00:33:46.510

ollecting enormous amounts of uotations from famous writers, oth women and men, about the ifficulty. And that's a book as I said, called, "Silences " and now, Ellen Bass is going to read us from one of thes pieces in which Tillie talks ab

00:33:46.690 - 00:34:00.410

ut her o Ellen Bass: If I talk now, quickly of my own silences, almost presumptuous after what has been told here, it is that the individual experience may add. In the twenty years I bore

00:34:00.410 - 00:34:17.420

and reared my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Nevertheless, writing, the hope of it was the air I breathe so long as I shall breathe at all. In that hope, there was

00:34:17.420 - 00:34:35.270

conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing, and always the secret rootlets of reconnaissance. When the youngest of our four was in school, the beginnings struggled toward endings. This was a time in Kafka's words, "Like a

00:34:35.270 - 00:34:54.680

squirrel in a cage, bliss of movement, desperation about constriction, craziness of endurance." Bliss of movement, a fully extended family life, the world of my job, transcriber in a dairy equipment company, and the writing, which I was somehow

00:34:54.710 - 00:35:13.280

able to carry around within me through work, through home, time on the bus even when I had to stand was enough, the stolen moments at work enough. The deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household

00:35:13.280 - 00:35:30.620

tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began, "I stand here ironing and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." In such snatches of time, I wrote what I did in

00:35:30.620 - 00:35:47.960

those years but there came a time when this triple life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours of daily realities became too much distraction for the writing. I lost craziness of endurance. What might have been I don't know, but I applied for

00:35:47.960 - 00:36:04.010

and was given eight months writing time. There was still full family life, all the household responsibilities, but I did not have to hold an eight hour job. I had continuity, three full days, sometimes more and it was in those months I

00:36:04.010 - 00:36:22.190

made the mysterious turn and became a writing writer. Then had to return to the world of work, someone else's work, nine hours, five days a week. This was the time of festering and congestion. For a few months I was able to shield the writing

00:36:22.340 - 00:36:40.490

with which I was so full against the demands of jobs on which I had to be competent, through the joys and responsibilities and trials of family for a few months, always roused by the writing, always denied. I could not go to write it down, it

00:36:40.490 - 00:36:59.600

convulsed and died in me, I will pay. My work died. What demanded to be written did not, it ceased, bubbled, clamored, peopled me. At last moved into the hours meant for sleeping. I worked now full time on temporary jobs. A Kelly, a

00:36:59.600 - 00:37:18.800

Western Agency girl, wandering from office to office, always hoping to manage two, three writing months ahead, eventually there was time. I had said, always roused by the writing, always denied. Now, like a woman made frigid, I had to learn

00:37:18.800 - 00:37:35.810

response, to trust this possibility for fruition that had not been before. Any interruption dazed and silenced me. It took a long while of surrendering to what I was trying to write, of invoking Henry James, passion, piety,

00:37:35.960 - 00:37:53.090

patience, before I was able to reestablish work. When again, I had to leave the writing, I lost consciousness, a time of anesthesia. There was still an automatic noting that did not stop, but it was as if writing had never been, no fever, no

00:37:53.090 - 00:38:10.010

congestion, no festering, I ceased being peopled, slept well and dreamlessly took a permanent job. The few pieces that had been published seemed to have vanished like the not-yet-written. I wrote someone, unsent, so long they

00:38:10.010 - 00:38:29.240

fed each other, my life, the writing, the writing or hope of it, my life, but now they begin to destroy. I knew but did not feel the destruction. A Ford Grant in literature awarded me on nomination by others came almost too late. Time granted

00:38:29.240 - 00:38:47.480

does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used as the congested time of fullness would have been. Still, it was two years. "Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise," says Emily Dickinson. I do not agree, but I know whereof

00:38:47.480 - 00:39:04.460

she speaks. For a long time, I was that emaciated survivor trembling on the beach, unable to rise and walk. Said differently, I could manage only the feeblest, shallowest growth on that devastated soil. Weeds to be burned like weeds were

00:39:04.460 - 00:39:18.800

used as compost. When the habits of creation were at last rewon, one book went to the publisher, and I dared to begin my present work. It became my center engraved on it, "Evil is whatever it distracts."

00:39:21.480 - 00:39:37.560

Morton Marcus: And that was Ellen Bass reading from, "Silences." We're going to go on and get back to the four-story book called, "Tell Me a Riddle," and we're going to read a section from "O Yes," and this i a story that begins with a b

00:39:37.560 - 00:39:57.000

ptism of a black girl and a w ite girl is attending this, h r friend, they're both o viously thirteen years old. A d the white girl thinks of all the emotion around her and she cannot understand what has hap ened to her. And the story is

00:39:57.000 - 00:40:12.690

bout the drifting away of the races at this time in young liv s, which is still going on in merica, and it's amazing how tim ly all of them Tillie's sto ies are. Julie Olsen Edwards: I'll change one word you used, which is that

00:40:12.780 - 00:40:22.230

it's not about drifting, it's about the sorting and pushing away. Morton Marcus: And that's the word she uses, yes. And with that, Julie, will you read us some from the story?

00:40:23.770 - 00:40:43.540

Julie Olsen Edwards: Okay, um, Carol is the young girl. Sorry, Carol is the young girl and Helen is her mother, Paraialee is her friend. They have been very close friends, they're- she's there for the baptism and then they go to junior high and

00:40:43.540 - 00:40:56.830

there's a tremendous process in which these kids are kept from each other, taught to live in different worlds despite their parents not wanting that to happen. And I must say many high school kids read, "I Stand Here Ironing," that's in a lot of

00:40:56.830 - 00:41:11.950

books and I've always felt that was the wrong story, that the one that should be reading is this one, "O Yes," And it's a very powerful section about what happens to young people but I am going to the very end of the story right now. Carol has

00:41:11.950 - 00:41:28.700

gotten the mumps, these were in the days before inoculations kept our kids from getting them, and Paraialee has come to see her bringing her homework from school. That afternoon before, Parry had come by, skimming up the stairs,

00:41:28.700 - 00:41:40.430

filling books and binders on the bed, "Hey frail, look a here and well, your mom asking for homeworks, what's she got against you?" Looking quickly once they're not looking again and talking fast, "Hey you bloomed! You're going to be your

00:41:40.430 - 00:41:52.850

own pumpkin Halloween, your mama know yet it's mumps and lumps. Mama says no distress, she'll be by tomorrow morning, say do you need anything while your mama do work, sending a whole lot of shaking going on. All your assignments' inside. Miss

00:41:52.850 - 00:42:08.420

Rockface says the teachers to write them because I mightn't get it right all right." But did not tell. "Does your mother work for Carol's mother? Oh, you're neighbors, very well. I'll send along the monitor to open Carol's locker but you're only

00:42:08.420 - 00:42:26.060

to take these things I'm writing down, nothing else. Now, say after me: Miss Campbell is trusting me to be a good responsible girl and go right to Carol's home after school, not to stop anywhere on the way, not lose anything, and only take

00:42:26.060 - 00:42:43.370

what's written on the list. Remember not to loiter on the way." So the girls meet and Carol falls back to sleep. She- one of the young women, girl who she'd seen at the baptism, who had been filled with emotion had fallen down weeping and

00:42:43.370 - 00:42:58.460

screaming and so frightened Carol is named Vicki. Not for anything would Helen have disturbed her except that in the unacustomednessof a morning at home, in the bruised restlessness after the sleepless night, she clicks on the radio

00:42:58.880 - 00:43:13.190

and the storm of singing whirls into the room, "Of trouble all mingled with fire, come on my brethren, we're going to go higher, wade in the water," and Carol runs down the stairs shrieking, and shrieking, "Turn it off, mother turn it off!"

00:43:13.430 - 00:43:30.650

Hurling herself at the dial and wrenching it so it comes off in her hand. "Oh, oh!" and Helen tries to hold her, "Mother, why did they sing and scream like that?" "At Parry's church?" "Yes," rocking and strangling the cries, "I hear it all the

00:43:30.650 - 00:43:46.490

time," clinging and besieging, "What was it mother? Why?" "Emotion," Helen thought explaining, "A characteristic of the religion," no, and discarded. "Mother some of the teachers and kids don't like Parry and they don't even know

00:43:46.490 - 00:44:08.150

what she's like just because," rocking again, compulsive and shamed, "I'm not really her friend anymore." No news, betrayal and shame. Who betrayed whose shame? Brought herself to say aloud, "but maybe friends again, Carol, as Alva and I

00:44:08.150 - 00:44:23.150

are," and soothed the sobbing whisper. "That girl Vicki who got that way when I fainted. She's in school, she's the one who keeps wearing the lipstick and they wipe it off and she's in trouble. Maybe she's suspended mother," "I know,

00:44:23.150 - 00:44:41.780

Lammy." "She had so awful outside, but I remember how she was in church. Whenever I see her now I have to wonder in here, like I'm her, mother, like I'm her!" Clinging and tremblin, "Oh, why do I have to feel it's happening to me too? Mother, I

00:44:41.780 - 00:45:04.130

want to forget about it and not care. Why is it like it is and why do I have to care?" Caressing, quieting, thinking, caring, asks, doing. It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter, "Better immersion and to live untouched.

00:45:04.700 - 00:45:24.170

Yet how will you sustain?" "Why is it like it is?" Sheltering her daughter close, mourning the illusion of the embrace, "And why do I have to care?" Well in her, her own need leapt and plunged for the place of strength that was not for one

00:45:24.170 - 00:45:41.200

could scream or sorrow while all new and accepted and loved in loving hands, waited to support and understand. Morton Marcus: And that is the wonderful end of "O Yes." The two other stories in the book, one we will not read from is

00:45:41.200 - 00:45:58.570

called, "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" And is the story of a sailor by the name of Michael Jackson, who over the years has become totally desolate because he has really lost his sense of the importance of life. And he stays with these people he had once

00:45:58.570 - 00:46:14.380

boarded with and the man who he had saved his life during a strike in 1934. And it's a wonderful story in many ways but it also, and I should tell everyone out there, that three of the four stories are all about this family. It is a

00:46:14.380 - 00:46:30.670

family of Helen and Lenny and their children and Carol is one of their children, their oldest daughter is Jeannie who feels very- who figures very much toward the end of, "Tell Me a Riddle," and I would like to go on and read part of, "Tell Me a

00:46:30.670 - 00:46:46.780

Riddle," does anyone else want to read part of "Tell Me a Riddle?" Okay very, very quickly, because what we want to do for you people listening out there is we have a wonderful recording of Tillie reading and we want to get to that within

00:46:46.780 - 00:47:05.200

the next three or four minutes. So, Susan reads, "Tell Me a Riddle." Is this going to be the end of, "Tell Me a Riddle?" Okay, let me before then read, I wanted to read from, "Tell Me a Riddle," which is only one paragraph, and it is- the story

00:47:05.200 - 00:47:26.860

is about, I gotta find it here. The story is about this old couple, and one member of this old couple, and they're always sort of fighting and bitter with each other, develops cancer and is going to die. And this is one of the great classics of

00:47:26.890 - 00:47:52.060

American literature and if you can get a hold of Tillie's writings, I certainly urge you to, but at one point, the old husband, and I just had it here and I'm missing and losing it all, okay should be right there. Okay, the grandfather, the old

00:47:52.060 - 00:48:06.680

man, towards the end of the story thinks this very telling and timely sense about his grandchildren. HE ESCAPED TO THE GRANDCHILDREN Whose childhoods were childish, who had never hungered, who

00:48:06.680 - 00:48:23.060

lived unravaged by disease in warm houses of many rooms, had all the school for which they cared, could walk on any street, stood a head taller than their grandparents, towered above. Beautiful skins, straight backs, clear, straight-forward eyes.

00:48:23.570 - 00:48:39.220

Yes, you in my village of Olshana, he said to the town of 60 years ago, where he came from, they would be nobility to you. And you out there are those children and what you do with

00:48:39.220 - 00:48:53.330

your tradition and where your parents come from is what Tillie's writings are all about. Susan, finish the story. Susan Freeman: Well, I'll pick it up from there. "And was this not the dream then come true in ways undreamed?" He

00:48:53.330 - 00:49:15.230

asked, "And are there no other children in the world," he answered, "As if in her harsh voice, and the flame of freedom, the light of knowledge, and to spill no drop of blood." And he thought that at age six, Jeannie would get up, and it would be

00:49:15.230 - 00:49:30.860

his turn to go to her room and he thought that at six, Jeannie would get up and it would be his turn to go to her room and sleep, that he could press the buzzer and she would come now, that in the afternoon Ellen Mays was coming, and this time they

00:49:30.860 - 00:49:47.630

would play cards, and he could marvel at how rouge can stand half an inch on the cheek, that in the evening the doctor would come and he could beg him to be merciful, to stop the feeding solutions, to let her die, to let her die. And with their

00:49:47.630 - 00:50:07.610

youth of belief out of which her bright betrayed words foamed, stained words that on her working lips came stainless. Hours yet before Jeannie's turn, he could press the buzzer and wake her to come now. Instead, he went back, checked her pulse,

00:50:07.880 - 00:50:28.010

gently tended with his knotty fingers as Jeannie had talked. She was whimpering, her hand crawled across the covers for his, compassionately he unfolded it, and with his free hand gathered up the cards again, still, there was thirst or

00:50:28.010 - 00:50:46.730

hunger ravening in him, that world of their youth, dark, ignorant, terrible with hate and disease. How was it that living in that in the midst of corruption, filth, treachery, degradation, they had not mistrusted man, nor themselves,

00:50:47.090 - 00:51:09.620

had believed so beautifully, so falsely. "Ah, children!" He said out loud, "How we believed, how we belonged." And he yearned to package for each of the children, the grandchildren, for everyone that joyous certainty, that sense of mattering, of

00:51:09.740 - 00:51:29.360

moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of the past, with all that freed, ennobled; package it, stand on corners in front of stadiums and uncrowded beaches, knock on doors, give it as a fabled gift.

00:51:30.650 - 00:51:55.790

Morton Marcus: And Julie, can you read the last paragraph of the story? Julie Olsen Edwards: The last day, the agony was perpetual. Time after time it lifted her almost off the bed so they had

00:51:55.790 - 00:52:13.580

to fight to hold her down. He could not endure and left the room, wept as if there never would be tears enough. Jeannie came to comfort him. In her light voice she said, "Granddaddy, granddaddy, don't cry. She is not there, she

00:52:13.580 - 00:52:29.810

promised me. On the last day. She said she would go back to when she first heard music. A little girl on the road of the village where she was born. She promised me it is a wedding and they danced. While the flutes are joyous and vibrant tremble

00:52:29.810 - 00:52:46.510

in the air, leave her there, granddaddy. It is all right, she promised me. Come back, come back and help her poor body to die." Morton Marcus: And we will go right now to Tillie Olsen

00:52:46.810 - 00:53:03.470

reading a piece she wrote about the death of her mother. Unknown: A story of your own for us? Tillie Olsen: Yes, I do. And and this too comes out of a- in a se se an atypical family, a family ho had certain beliefs that w

00:53:03.470 - 00:53:27.770

re not generally shared. In he winter of 1955, in her l st weeks of life, my mother, so much of whose waking life ad been a nightmare, that com on everyday nightmare of hardsh p, limitation, longing, of baffl ng, struggled to raise six chil

00:53:28.040 - 00:53:48.800

ren in a world hostil to human unfolding. My mot er, dying of cancer, had beaut ful dream visions in color. Alr ady beyond calendar time, she c uld not have known that the ast dream she had breath to ell came to her on Christmas

00:53:49.580 - 00:54:09.680

ve, nor conscious, would she ave deemed it so. As a girl in ong ago Czarist Russia, she had sternly broken with all our observances of organ zed religion, associating it ith pogroms and wars, mind-fo ged manacles, that's an expres

00:54:09.680 - 00:54:29.750

ion of the English poet, Wil iam Blake. A repressive state we did not observe relig ous holidays in her house. Per aps in her last consciousness, she did know that the year was drawing towards the sols ice time of the shortest light,

00:54:29.750 - 00:54:52.070

the longest dark, the cruelest c ld, when, as she had explained t us as children, poorly shelt red ancient peoples in nort ern climes had summon th ir resources to make out of so g: light, food, expressions of human love, festivals

00:54:52.070 - 00:55:13.040

f courage, hope, warmth, belie . It seemed to her that there w s a knocking at her door. Even f she rose to open it, she guess d who would be there before s e heard the neighing of camels. I did not say to her, "Ma, came s don't neigh." Against the fros

00:55:13.040 - 00:55:37.820

y lights of a far city she h d never seen, a city holy to thr e face, she said. The three wi e men stood magnificent in jewel d robes of crimson, of gold, f royal blue. "Have you lost yo r way?" She asked, "Else, why o you come to me? I am n

00:55:37.820 - 00:56:01.940

t religious. I am not a believer " "Oh, to talk with you we came " the wise man whose skin w s black and robe crimson assur d her to talk of wise, of wisdo , "Oh come in then, come in and e warm and welcome. I have starv d for such talk." As they began

00:56:01.940 - 00:56:23.030

o talk, she saw that they were n t men, but women, that they we e not dressed in jeweled robes b t in the coarse everyday shifts, in shawls of the old country, w men of her childhood. Their eet wrapped around and round ith rags for lack of boots. Snow

00:56:23.030 - 00:56:44.600

now sifting into the room that t eir speech was not high flow ng, [unintelligible], her w rd. Their bodies not lordl in bearing magnificent, but stunted, misshapen, used all their lives as a beast of bu den is used, that the camels w

00:56:44.600 - 00:57:07.490

re not camels, but farm beas s such as were kept in the hou e all winter, their white c w breath steaming into the co d and now in the dream, it w s many women of Babel. One o d woman seamed and bent began o sing, swaying, the others join

00:57:07.490 - 00:57:31.070

d her, their faces and voic s transfiguring as they sang, y mother, through cracked-li s singing too, a lullaby. For i the shining cloud that thei breaths, a baby lay, breathin the universal sounds every huma baby makes, sounds out of which

00:57:31.070 - 00:57:53.930

are made all the separate languages of the world. Singing, one by one, the women cradled and sheltered the baby, "The joy, the reason to believe," my mother said, "The hope for the world, the baby, holy with possibility that is all of us at

00:57:53.930 - 00:58:17.600

birth," and she began to cry out of the dream and its telling ow, "Still, I feel the baby in y arms, crying now so I could carcely make out the words, the uman baby, before we are isshapen, crucified into a sex, color, a walk of life, a

00:58:17.600 - 00:58:41.150

ationality and the world yet orings and wither. I had seen y mother but three times in my dult life, separated as we were y the continent between, by ack of means, by jobs I had to eep, and the needs of my four hildren. She could scarcely

00:58:41.150 - 00:59:02.810

rite English, her only ducation in this country a few onths of night school, when at ast I flew to her. It was in he last day she had language at ll, too late to talk with her f what was in our hearts or of arms and crucifyings and

00:59:02.810 - 00:59:29.990

trengths, as she had no one and xperience then or of wise and nowledge of wisdom. She died a ew weeks later. She, who had no orldly goods to leave, yet left o me an inexhaustible legacy. nherent in it, this heritage of ummoning resources to make out

00:59:29.990 - 00:59:56.570

f song: those bells, food, armth, expressions of human ove, courage, hope, resistance, elief, and this vision of niversality before the essenings, harms, divisions of he world are visited upon it. he sheltered and carried that

00:59:56.570 - 01:00:16.910

elief, that wisdom as she heltered and carried us and thers throughout the lifetime ived in a world whose season as and still it is a time of inter. Morton Marcus: And that was Tillie Olsen reading a piece she

01:00:16.910 - 01:00:37.040

wrote about her mother's death. We have been celebrating Tilly Olsen's birthday today, January 14th, she would have been 95, she died two weeks ago. I've been here with the poets Susan Freeman and Ellen bass, and Tillie's wonderful daughter,

01:00:37.160 - 01:00:57.380

Julie Olsen Edwards. I would like to end this with what I hope is an inspiring program, which is what really Tillie left us. And I want to read something that Julie told me years ago and this is some- I hadn't seen Tillie myself in maybe around

01:00:57.410 - 01:01:08.110

eight years and it's very quick, and it's this story and I'll leave you with this. By the start of the new millenium, Tillie's husband Jack had died, she was in her late 80s and her mental faculties

01:01:08.110 - 01:01:21.730

were rapidly deteriorating. She needed care day and night and rarely knew where she was or the content of what she had just read. Julie and one of Tillie's other daughters Laurie took turns caring for Tillie on weekends. And in the fall of

01:01:21.730 - 01:01:35.430

2004, Julie told me the following story, one of the most touching accounts of what motivates someone to take up the writing life I have ever heard. One night Laurie notice that the light in Tillie's bedroom had

01:01:35.430 - 01:01:50.550

come on again, long after it had been turned off. When she went to investigate Laurie found Tillie, now a tiny childlike woman, sitting bent over in bed and weeping, "I don't want to go to school. I don't want to go to school," she kept repeating.

01:01:51.390 - 01:02:03.090

Laurie sat down on the bed and assured her mother that she wouldn't have to go to school but asked why she didn't want to go. "Because the girls will laugh at me and my tattered clothes. Don't they understand that my parents haven't enough

01:02:03.090 - 01:02:16.320

money to buy me new dresses?" Laurie took her mother in her arms to comfort her but suddenly with a determined shove, Tillie sat erect and said, "When I grow up I'm going to write a book about why my clothes are so shabby, so other people will

01:02:16.320 - 01:02:32.550

understand." "But you have grown up." said Laurie, "and you have written a book about that, several books." "I have?" Tillie replied, her body softening and settling back in the bed clothes. "Good," she said.