I had the honor of having Judy Grahn as my thesis adviser in 2010. It was through her work in Blood, Bread and Roses that I began to understand urban African-American culture through the lens of the Divine Feminine. Ten years later, I saw Judy again at the Mills College Writers Series, where she, as always had a glittering smile and embodied the glowing spirit of the divine. Judy has a unique way of bringing out the goddess in you as soon as she catches your eye, try as you may to hide from her).  Judy’s work reaches way back into the ancient ways of womanhood, rips through the falsehoods of modern sexism, and propels you into prophetess tales of the future.

Our interview took place over the phone on December 14th 2018, in the midst of the raging California wild fires. The smoke was so thick that we were both seeking refuge in our homes and wearing medical masks. Smoke swirled through our conversation as Judy shared the conception story of the Oakland Women’s movement, her personal triumphs, and never-ending commitments to a radically inclusive society. The discussion left me with honey on my tongue and a dozen yellow roses of wisdom that I am honored to share with you.  

Please anticipate even more revolutionary work from Judy in the next year, with the release of her newest book, Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit. Also pay particular attention as she invites artists to engage with her work through the My Good Judy Residency program in New Orleans. The residency serves the community through literary, critical, educational and live performance programs; to support artists and academics seeking to make a contribution in the area of liberatory cultural studies; and to honor Judy Grahn’s pioneering work and legacy as a poet/activist/thinker.

For more information about the residency contact:  https://commonalityinstitute.org/contact-us/

Describe the climate that bore Judy Grahn the writer, the poet, the activist, and the intellectual.

The climate came from other movements, labor movements, civil rights movement, black power movements, socialist movements and ecological movements. All of that was going on and was really fomenting in the mid to late 60s and on into the 70s. And the gay movement! I was part of the gay movement of the 1960’s when I was in my 20’s and actually had picketed the White House with the East Coast homophile organizations. So lesbians who were feminists, but also had deep roots in all of these other movements, just banded together and we formed our own movement as warriors and on behalf of women in general, especially of working-class women. We called ourselves Warrior Dykes. We founded households, and that was how we managed to do it, because we could live all piled into one house which cut the rents down to be affordable, so that even the working-class people, like me, could participate. And, you know, it was really a great thing that happened. My group founded the Women’s Press Collective, a women’s publishing house. There were two women who co-founded a bookstore called A Woman’s Place Bookstore in Oakland, and when that store closed around 1980, they opened Mama Bears Café in Oakland. We really were Oakland, Oakland, Oakland and very, very proudly Oakland.

Oakland is a germinal place. It is where things really get going! At Mama Bears we did a lot of different things. We were always having readings, presentations and they put out a newsletter. They were a cultural center and bookstore, but they also had a cafe and a little bitty stage. So when it was time for me to work on this book length poem, which is a play called Queen of Swords, that’s where I would stage it, a live workshop. I’d take it in there on a Sunday afternoon and ask people sitting around at the tables if anybody wanted to help read this play and we would get up and act out the different parts. It was really amazing. It was like what Shakespeare had, or what people have in really expensive programs, where their work can get instantly received and put on. And this made it possible for me to see what worked and what didn’t. So, that’s a long way around saying that I have very deep roots with people who were running Mama Bears. I was also in there with Paula Gunn Allen, who is an important writer that people at Mills need to know about. We would do events on Sunday mornings that also had a spiritual basis, of one kind or another, that attracted a lot of people. So, it was a crucially important cultural space for me.

When you talk about the cultural centers you mentioned spirituality, what do you mean by that? How important do you think the spiritual component was to the work you were doing?

Spirituality was very important. And everybody had a different definition of what that was, but the one thing that it never was, was religion. It was exploration. We were exploring. We were called, at the time, cultural workers by the activists. We were the people who were doing the research into the past, doing the arts and in various ways, combining all of that together. They were doing explorations of different ways of being spiritual that weren’t necessarily part of a church, synagogue or temple. There were gatherings of groups, or individuals who were trying new ways. So, we were speaking and writing about that kind of thing.

Spirit has always been of high interest to me. It’s something I’m working on right now. It’s important to me for reasons that I am getting more clear about and I’m finishing up a book that will address that.

So that’s what’s to come next? Do you want to say anything about that work or when we should be looking out for it?

The title is Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit. Spirit doesn’t have a body and yet you can sense in various ways, there’s something there, that’s interacting with you. Oh, well, I’m planning to finish it by the end of this year, which is two weeks away. (Laughing) I love working on it!

What is your practice? How do you sit down and write? What is your creative process?

Every day I write what to do and write it in my notebook every day for a year. It’s a form of praying to do that. I think a big part of my practice is asking questions, you know, really just asking questions of whatever it is that guides me as a muse or whatever spirit guide I have around. Also it is to say—I want to, I really need to, I’m going to do this. And being persistent with that information starts coming in. Sometimes it just flows really easily. Other times it just takes years. Literally, 23 years for Blood Bread and Roses because it was such a big subject.

Your work in Blood, Bread, and Roses illuminated a taboo associated with menstruation however it also transformed a negative and shameful taboo into a purposeful and meaningful one. How did this breakthrough happen?

My mother was always interested in science, yet women seemed to have scant presence in that. I wanted to find ways that women had made major contributions to culture and thought that I could at least show that menstruation’s relation to the moon would give us credit for calendars. After twenty years of research, the breakthrough was realizing women’s rituals around menses could be key to understanding us as humans and connected to everything about culture. My Mom, who never finished the ninth grade but had a curious mind, read Blood, Bread and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World, and told me it was “interesting, and a pretty good theory too.”

You have produced some highly evocative and controversial work in your lifetime. How do you deal with criticism?

I consider the source and what their motives might be. And try to put my hurt feelings into an anger cauldron that turns into more energy to do more evocative work.

What was the point of contention that catapulted you into using writing as activism? I read somewhere that you had a stint in the military? Can you talk about that and its significance?

Yeah, I wrote about that in A Simple Revolution. And that was just a case of me, literally being too poor to support myself, so joining the Air Force and then getting into deep water being a lesbian. At a time that they just kicked you out for being a lesbian.

And you were out, and you weren’t hidden or secret about it?

Well I should have been, to stay in, but that was the thing, the hypocrisy was something I just couldn’t deal with. There were so many people in there that were gay and that were running it. But still, you could not talk about it, live openly or anything like that. So in the process of being kicked out and being on the bottom of the social scale, I was radicalized and instead of becoming depressed and turning all that anger on myself I turned it into a desire for social change. It turned out to be a motivational experience. It took me almost 10 years to get my feet completely underneath me and to have turned my work, because I’d always wanted to be a poet, and turn it towards the social cause of feminism. And the way that we acted it out, we weren’t sitting in the living room talking to each other. We were activists and so we founded these, I call them portals. Bookstores, presses, journals, theaters, self-defense classes, college courses, battered women’s centers, rape crisis centers, foundations, and on and on out into the world. We founded portals that showed ways for women to know about each other and about themselves. To know about the past and to study issues that were valuable for women’s ways to get involved in the world and in social change. Feminist movements spread all around the world and it is continuing as we know.

You and your work has been so influential in both my personal life and my professional life. You taught me that blood was the first ink which validated my passion to write from my perspective as a Woman of Color. It gave me a new perspective on feminism. Where do you see the feminist movement going in the future?

Clearly there is a great deal of focus on political power, and that has to happen. Young people will increasingly join and form effective green movements and capitalist scale-down movements, as man-made climate change creates more crisis situations. I expect feminisms to stay very involved with grassroots community building that helps all of us unite in common causes. I would like to see happen: that the Queer movement restore its activist roots by connecting to the major issues of our times.

As an activist for social change, we all would like to reach and inspire as many communities as possible to help make the world better for all. What communities of people would you like to reach that you haven’t yet?

I certainly think about. I really do think about all different kinds of communities, and I keep that in mind. I wrote a poem called “Mental” which is in Hanging on Our Own Bones, a collection out of Red Hen Press. It is one of my longer politically orientated serious poems and is a critique on the whole idea of what mental illness could possibly be given this state of leadership in the country and the ways that people who are considered “sane” act.

There is a new movement that’s exciting to me called NeuroQueer. It’s a bigger metaphor for difference—a gender difference and a neurological difference, thinking about ways that human beings are neurally diverse, and really are wired differently, is one way to think about what is otherwise just labelled “pathology.” And so this means that there is more room for people who have visions, people who have to be on medication and who are engaged in trying to handle the energies of their own emotions. It’s a broader category for thinking about human experience, and applies to me, so I have very deliberately started to hopefully engage with this movement.

I just recently had a reading with Nick Walker, who is self-identified autistic and nueroqueer, and edits an annual anthology published out of his Autonomous Press. It is very powerful to have a press because then you have a voice. Anyhow, I’m really pleased to be included in this anthology.

I just feel like my work is more like water. You know how water seeps out and just goes where it wants to go. I’ve had the sense that even if I can’t always know exactly what is happening with my work, that it really is continually seeping out, seeping out, and finding its own way along tracks I would never imagine.

For example “A Woman is Talking to Death”, is a lesbian story, but it’s a long poem and has all these political parts. I was astounded to see that there was a punk rock group from North Carolina that had incorporated it into their band and they were performing it for a while. In Tasmania, “A Woman is Talking to Death” was taken apart and put to music. Or, another example, some of my shorter poems were translated into Turkish for a burgeoning Turkish lesbian and gay movement. That just takes my breath away—the kind of courage people have to have in a really repressive antigay country. I am always continually being surprised about where the work goes. I guess I should say that once in a while I do make a conscious decision to engage and something unexpected happens, like with the neurodivergent community.

It sounds like you have to relinquish control a little bit to allow the water to go everywhere. Speaking of flow, in honor of women writers who have passed, I did want you to talk about Ntozake Shange, did you work with her or did you know Her?

There’s a way of thinking about the women’s movement as a movement that initially expressed itself primarily through poetry. And that is an astonishing thing. There were lots of poets in the early 70s, with whom I was reading, and lots of people were sponsoring feminist readings. So I crossed paths with all kinds of just extraordinary people and Ntozake was one of those.

I did go to her house, about nine years ago. She was thinking about taking classes with me at New College, so I went to her house and finally was able to give her some flowers. I had wanted always to give her a dozen yellow roses. I wanted to take them to her stage production, For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which I was so fortunate to see debut in New York City in the 1970’s.

I had known her before that, before she wrote For Colored Girls who Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuff. She would be at my readings and I’m sure she was on the same ticket with me because we were all mixed in together—Susan Griffin, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich—reading together on stage as well as reading each other’s work. I was reading Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and other poets. There’s a way that poets have connections we can feel even if we’ve never met that aren’t as obvious as friendships. I think it’s because we pour a lot of passion into the work. If you read the work, that passion passes over into you. There’s a two-way connection that is pretty remarkable. Ntozake always credited my early set of 7 poems about women, the Common Woman poems, for helping inspire her choreopoem, For Colored Girls. That was acknowledged recently in the New Yorker and in her introduction.

For oppressed people, love is revolutionary. Can you talk a bit about how revolutionaries find love in this world that is often riddled with hate?

Love isn’t “found” outside ourselves. Love is created within us; to love you find your way to your own heart. Keep your heart as open as you can even when you need to protect it. Love keeps us connected—to other humans, other beings, and to the spirit in the cosmos. Love is linked to beauty, so don’t be afraid to express that.

What is the Commonality Institute?

The Commonality Institute reaches out to communities sharing my ideas of commonality and social change and facilitates education and engagement through an artist residency in New Orleans, public events and workshops. Directors Anya de Marie and Gregory Gajus have the visions of where the institute is going and how to pull wisdom from these movements that have informed my work all of these years. I am ecstatic that my work is going to be carried on! It keeps it spinning, you know, and that just frees me up to finish the rest of it. And that’s the intention of the Institute. That’s what they keep telling me. We will do all this, and you just finish your books.

You have remained involved and activated for many years. What do you suggest the artist/activists keep in their medicine bag?

Keep on learning; Learn to collaborate, help form communities, make use of psychology and other healing tools; and find your own path to spirituality—all without compromising your revolutionary zeal for positive social change.