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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Jody Aliesan 
April 15, 1996 
Cassette 1, Side 1 
 
 
Julie O'Grady  00:00 
[Begins with 50 seconds of silence.] The date is April 15, 1996. I am Julie O'Grady, a student at 
the University of Washington, working on the Washington Women's Heritage Project. Today, I 
will be conducting an oral history interview with Jody Aliesan. Jody is presently residing in 
Seattle, Washington, and this interview is taking place in her home there. This is tape number 
one. Jody, would you, um, share with me the story you were told of your birth? 
 
Jody Aliesan  01:29 
What I remember most about the story is that my mother suffered a lot. She had at least, uh, 32 
hours of labor. I was a breech birth. I was told that on her way to the delivery room, she was so 
swollen, her face was so swollen, that my father didn't recognize her. And the number of hours 
of labor fluctuated-sometimes it was [inaudible] 32, but I was told that part of it, every birthday, 
usually culminating in the assertion I was very wanted and very loved, and it was all worth it. 
[Chuckles.] What else I can remember about it is vague. Has to do with how labor began and 
how many days, of course, it was many days then that women had to stay in the hospital, and the 
episiotomy. And the ride home afterwards, and how my father threw the keys of the car to his 
father so that he could hold me and carry me rather than putting me in the crib that was in the 
backseat. Um... It was raining most of my birthdays, all my life, it has rained, which I like. That's 
all I can remember. The other thing about being breech birth that my mother spoke of [inaudible] 
is that I wasn't red and wrinkled. And the doctor and other medical people showed me off as a 
particularly beautiful baby if you can believe that. I know a lot about my life and about my birth, 
too. I don't know much about the truth of it. It-it varies. It's elaborated in different ways, 
expanded over the years to demonstrate one point or another, or express one thing or another, but 
that's what I've been told. 
 
Julie O'Grady  04:10 
What is your earliest memory? 
 
Jody Aliesan  04:14 
My earliest memory [pause] has to do with something that my father and I put together that took 
place when I was about six months old. The memory is of being alone in a dark room, and then a 
tall line of light opening to a rectangle of light, and then there was moving a dark shape towards 
me in that rectangle of light. I'm feeling no fear, I should say here. And then something lifted me 
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up underneath my arms, and the next glimmer I had is of a dark rectangle with white, small white 
movement, like some movement across it. And my father and I were able to theorize, anyway, 
that this could have been a night when he came and snuck me out of my crib to show me my first 
snow. But the only--the first memory that has any sense of what we consider consecutive 
memory--I was still in diapers. I was sitting in my diapers in the garden. Vegetable patch. And 
then memories start becoming more consistent and consecutive [inaudible]. 
 
Julie O'Grady  05:56 
How old were you when your brother was born?  
 
Jody Aliesan  06:02 
I was four and feeling responsible for him, that I was going to be one of his caretakers. I 
remember [inaudible]. I don't know whether it was something I took on inside myself or 
something I was given to understand by the [inaudible]. But it served to jump the hurdle of 
sibling rivalry and agression and all the rest of it. I felt that now I was being called upon to grow 
up to some degree. I took care of him. Not to say there wasn't any sibling rivalry, which 
[inaudible] resentment, his being favored as a boy child, and then it had another element to it, 
because he was the long-awaited boy child who would carry the family line. Man's name. And it 
was clear from the start that this, there's a favorite here. Not that my parents ever did anything to 
try to play down a favoritism, yet it was apparent in my life that he would be the one to get 
privileges first, or a bicycle first, or whatever else, because he was a boy. [Inaudible.] My brother 
would get such and such because he was a boy, so there was, was as if there's an understanding 
and really hard feelings and nothing personal, but... I was to take my position, helping to raise 
him, which I did, and, uh, certainly wasn't mistreated, but it was almost as if he was the first 
child in terms that he was privileged. Another example being that I was expected to earn 
scholarships and find ways to put myself through school, where it was almost understood 
without his applying anywhere, the fact that his school would be taken care of. And it doesn't 
mean that I was mistreated or [inaudible] ordinary way for a person who was born in those times 
and in those places, that was pretty customary. But I recall my first senses of injustice came from 
that favoritism, that sort of institutionally-assumed favoritism, um, and my mother's difficulty 
with the truth, which, of course, recognized as hypocrisy, then we came later on to understand as 
a disability, which people call compulsive lying, pathological lying. And those are, those are two 
of a number of constellated factors that allowed me to understand as early as four years old, that 
I had to turn to myself, and that the life that I built, this idea, and the truth that I moved to myself 
and treasured and protected my survival. And there were times when my mother wasn't capable 
of being a mother, either because of her disabilities of her own, of one kind or another, or 
because her notion of mothering, most of my life, has been instruction and correction, and 
discipline. I was able to fall inwards inside myself to take care of those needs. So I felt alone and, 
and solitary from an early age, but not lonely, and not-not abandoned or--um, not abandoned by 
the world, not--certainly not abandoned by me. I'm not broken or in danger because of it. [Soft 
murmuring. A chuckle? A sob?] 
 
Julie O'Grady  06:26 
Were there, um, any other children around who you were able to have friendships with? 
[Inaudible question] socialize with? 
 
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Jody Aliesan  10:06 
Well, my parents moved around a lot. Between the time they were married and when I was eight 
years old, they had moved [?twenty-one?] times, because of the kind of work my father did, he 
had to actually train and take on different kinds of work in order to slow down all those moves 
and give us some community and education. So, I-- During the years four to eight years old, I 
remember we lived in a neighborhood in Kansas City, where there were a number of children, 
and we played fairly freely ranging up and down those backyards. [Inaudible] which has since 
been urban renewed out of existence. And yes, I had friendships, if you could call it that or 
playmate-ships with primarily boy children who were interested in the same sorts of things I was, 
um, but I-I really preferred my own imagination. I liked going out with a cake tin, cake pan, and 
playing with insects and watching them move and burrow, play, things like that. I liked what 
people would call daydreaming, reading a lot. Libraries were my favorite places. 
 
Julie O'Grady  12:36 
What would you do with the cake tin? 
 
Jody Aliesan  12:38 
I'd put dirt in it, and then--and then find insects under stones or different kind of grubs on the 
ground, or insects under stones, or flying insects, or whatever, I put them in the, in the cake pan 
and would watch what they did, whether they'd burrow down, or [inaudible] or flew away. I 
never killed them or put them in jars or anything like that. In fact, I'm sure it was an 
uncomfortable interruption for them, [inaudible] much more than that. But from early on, I got a 
lot of solace in-in the natural world. I felt that my first relatives were other creatures, animals, 
plants, particularly trees, insects, and birds, and the forces--the wind, rain, sun, and moon--the 
four seasons were important to me very early on. I started having a sense of ritual around them, 
fairly early in life, and all these things, I suppose with my [?Taurus from the group?]. I'm also 
coming from farming people on both sides that-that grounded me in the earth, in the universe, 
generally speaking, it gave me a lot of perspective on anything and everything that happened 
immediately in the neighborhood and the family. What I would do when I would put myself to 
sleep was imagining that I was lifting up out of my house [inaudible] North America and the 
earth and finally turning and moving out into space. Things like astronomy and geology gave me 
more perspective in a life that was otherwise, if I hadn't had a rich [?relationship?] with my inner 
self, pretty lonely. I'm one of those many probably children who felt I must have been adopted 
because I had so little in common with my relatives, and--and I felt like a misfit early on in life, 
not that I felt self-criticism around that misfit, meaning that something was wrong with me, 
[inaudible] changing to fit more what everybody else seemed to want. But mostly I felt that I 
didn't fit and it was okay. That I liked who I was, and if there was no one else around who was 
like me, that was just part of my [inaudible].  
 
Julie O'Grady  15:15 
What would make you feel that you didn't fit? What did you feel the differences were between 
you and the rest of your family?  
 
Jody Aliesan  15:22 
Oh. It appeared to me that no one else around me had the same inner life as mine. I was 
interested in, I guess, things of the spirit or, um, reading, imagination, or observation, even, 
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questioning. They always seemed to be relatively practical, superficial preoccupation roles, and 
in my mother's case, for reasons I'm sure that have to do with her own pain and her own life that 
I don't know, was very concerned about appearances, about social position, and what other 
people would think or say. A lot of energy went into that, and she's a more gregarious, social, 
outgoing, expansive person. A lot of my life was also very directed, controlling, and wanted 
someone--body else was like me, who really continued to try to talk me into believing that I was 
ugly, effervescent, feminine little girl.  
 
Julie O'Grady  16:48 
[Inaudible]. What did it feel like to be [?looked down on?]? 
 
Jody Aliesan  17:04 
Well, can't help but feel that some-somebody thinks something's wrong. But somehow, I 
grounded early enough in a person inside me that I liked and that I enjoyed being with that 
mostly, I could feel that that was wrong. And basically what just came of it was the sense that I 
was not seen, and I'm still not seen for who I am, and that they don't really care to know, and 
don't understand what I'm about. And I guess as a central example is to say that 25, 26 years ago, 
I made the--what is I think, the most important decision in my life--and that was to surrender to 
and accept the calling that I was meant to, to write, to be a poet, in particular, to fulfill the 
function and do the job, like it or not, of the poet in the world [inaudible] culture that functions 
fairly against it, but somebody has to do it. And I realized that I was supposed to. There have 
been times when I tried not to, tried-tried to escape that assignment, but I pretty much finally 
accepted it and everything that it means, which includes a sharper vulnerability and an increased 
sense of pain, as well as a [inaudible] that comes from that openness to meaning in the world. 
Anyway, for 26 years now, I've arranged my life around that, which has meant that I have not 
done conventional things that would lead to a position, the title and income or alignment with a 
person who had those things and therefore would mean success to, um, immigrant background, 
working-class, lower-class people, in effect a-a failure, from that point of view, and just as 
recently as last May, when my mother came to visit, I picked her up at the airport, I told her that 
I would need to work four hours that afternoon for a receptionist job at PCC offices, and she 
said, "Oh, do you think you'll ever be able to work full-time there?" And I said, "Well, I don't 
really want to." She said, "Well, why not? You're making money." I said, "Well, if I had a full-
time job, I wouldn't be able to do my work." I should say that every Sunday night for years, 
we've had telephone-telephone conversations, and so it's like she's known what I've been doing. 
All my publications, all the readings, everything, for all these other things. But there it was like 
she and I had met at the airport and didn't know each other. And I said, "I wouldn't have time for 
my work." She said, "Your work, what's that?" So I just said, "Writing." And nothing happened 
for a while, and then she became polite, and as she is these days, and said, "Well, how is your 
work going?" And I felt all the effort that had gone into communicating what I've been doing 
week after week for years hadn't found a place inside her to get stored. She didn't know how to-
to--where to put that. So I just summed it up, as if, as if I were meeting her. She was someone 
else's mother, and we hadn't met before, and told her what I was doing. And she said, "Oh, is this 
a hobby?" And at that moment, it really freed me. I realized it wasn't my fault, that, in other 
words, it wasn't the problem in communication, that I should just put more effort into 
communicating and find some new way of letting me know what life was all about. It just wasn't 
going to get through. And like so many other things, with my blood relatives, at least my 
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immediate nuclear family, which is the only relatives I've really ever known, mostly at all. But 
that just isn't going to be understood. And if I can accept it like I--if I can accept the fact that she 
doesn't like what I write, and she doesn't read it, and it's a hobby, and I haven't succeeded, and let 
go of it, then I'm fine. And I really have been mostly able to do that because my parents 
disapproved of a lot of what I've done in my life. So it was a long time ago that I was able to get 
past moving, to do something, to please them. It's just the realization that even now, when we're 
getting along better than we ever have, she still doesn't see me, and so that's been the case since I 
was really little that I've learned to live with and as I said, it's not all that bad. There's certainly 
freedom in it. And, um, one thing I keep learning over and over, and I think one of the main 
things in my life is how to be alone. [Inaudible.] 
 
Julie O'Grady  22:42 
How did your father-- Was he able to relate to your work? Did he understand?  
 
Jody Aliesan  22:57 
No, but he--I thought he was a very dear, sweet, um, man whose connection with the world 
around him was more difficult because he was deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other. 
Very honest, straightforward man who certainly had his, uh, his outbursts of anger and we were 
not in any way in the same political circles. Those are other stories to tell some other time, how, 
how I was disowned when I was doing all the things that they disagreed of, like civil rights work, 
and work against the war in Vietnam, and I was taken out of the will. For a period of time, no 
one was supposed to speak to me, but my brother John did call me, but he called as the 
spokesperson of the family. He found a way to let me know that they thought I was doing things 
to shock them, their people, because I had fallen into the wrong company and things like that. 
And so my father, if he had lived as long as my mother has now, might have come around the 
way my mother and my brother have to speak as if they agreed with me at the time. A lot of 
Americans haven't made that circle, and I would just accept it as proposed as they come to 
acknowledging that they think that I did the right thing after all, or that they agree with me now, 
or that they are apologizing. So I mean to say that, for instance, once, when I was working in 
Alabama, came back to their house, which I didn't feel and still don't talk about as home. Some 
of my worst nightmares, that house has their backdrop, and my brother asked me at the dinner 
table if I recommend any books by African American authors. And I did, and my father stood up 
and shouted, and [inaudible].  
 
Julie O'Grady  25:20 
What did he shout? 
Jody Aliesan  25:20 
I don't remember now. I have, I have-- Something happens to me when things like that take 
place, whether it's him shouting at me or automobile wreck or sexual assault, everything 
becomes very, very calm. I always remember becoming very calm. But if he--what he shouted 
had to do with, um, very strong disagreement with whether or not those writers should be 
recommended, whether people should read them. So anyway, what I'm saying is that there were 
political differences, differences around racial issues, and it's-it's hard, sometimes very difficult, 
to keep open and compassionate when there was a gulf like that. I remember seeing Joan Baez's 
album "Come From The Shadows" where that old couple was being [inaudible] by the National 
Guard and they're holding peace signs with their hands, their fingers, for the photographer, and I 
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cried when I saw it. Though how wonderful would be if my parents were like that, and they 
weren't-- Nonetheless, um, my father was the sort of man that some people would say was weak 
because he was quiet and sensitive, gentle. Where my mother was impatient with him, and 
directed and dominant, and felt that she had married beneath herself, had social aspirations that 
he didn't meet. She was very impatient with his hard of hearing, deafness, and, um, and so he 
was a distant sort of person in my life. I feel that I'm much more like him. For instance, he had 
serious difficulty with clinical depression. He was hospitalized a number of times. Had shock 
therapy around the time of his retirement, and I think maybe was chronically depressed much of 
his life. I used to think it was because of their marriage and the sort of person she was in the past. 
Um, and I myself have had a serious experience of two-and-a-half years of clinical depression, 
which doesn't appear to be chronic, either before or after. But because of that, I have a sense of 
what my father's been through, what had gone through, and a sense that we were more alike, but 
for whatever reasons, the male role, which considering that he wasn't a seriously masculine man, 
was turned down when he tried to go into the service in World War Two. Um, he felt more than-
-he felt it would be more necessary to do things that seemed masculine to him. One of those was 
the separation from the act of childbearing, and another one, I think might have been just the 
usual conventional incestual fears of not getting too close to the female child, and feeling that he 
was supposed to be the role model for the male child so that he would do sports with my brother, 
which [inaudible] that, when he himself wasn't that much of an athlete in the first place, so it put 
him in a position of once again, looking foolish, but he did it out of the sense of community 
responsibility I mentioned before. I can remember times when my mother was particularly unjust 
and off the wall, partly because of drinking, if not mostly because of drinking. Just 
unpredictable, irrational, somebody that couldn't talk things over at all, couldn't defend yourself, 
because you'd be punished for [inaudible], and he would come sit with me in my room 
afterwards, as if he were another sibling. 