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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Jody Aliesan 
April 1996 
Cassette 1, Side 2 
 
 
Julie O'Grady  00:03 
This is a continuation of our interview. This is side B. 
 
Jody Aliesan  00:07 
In summary, it's just to say that the conditions were such that, um, I felt alone and like I really 
didn't fit in the family, not to mention in-in culture that we're generally speaking, and that was 
not altogether a bad thing. 
 
Julie O'Grady  00:25 
Um... You said that you had, uh, two years of depression. What was--what was your depression? 
What was the nature of your depression for two years?  
 
Jody Aliesan  00:42 
Oh, I was--I suffered a two-and-a-half year clinical depression, starting in 1986 and ending, I 
guess, whatever two and a half years is from there--1989, something like that. Started out in the 
fall of '86. '87 was hell. '88 was better. I started coming out of it in '89 and it was over in June of 
'89. Um, it was just your garden-variety clinical depression. It was [clears throat] all the usual 
things of serious weight loss and-and no appetite, having to force myself to eat. Feeling like I've 
been torn open and the universe is bleeding out your life force. Uh, my hair was falling out. I 
couldn't sleep. Was crying all the time. Got so bad I was in[inaudible] at one point. And I 
couldn't hold down a job. I was, uh, suicidal. Oh yeah, for sure. It came [inaudible], and it took 
everything I had to stay alive and to keep from killing myself. It was like something was 
screaming in the back of my head. It was like a demon, I'd look in the mirror, and I'd see the 
demon's eyes, and I could hardly remember who I used to be. And for a year and a half, I lived in 
other people's houses. That was part of what was crazy-making. It was a number of things 
happening at once. The whole [?love?] of my life was [inaudible], financial emergency, and the 
infidelity and lies, as well, of a partner. My father's heart attack and stroke. Not being able to live 
where my home was, which was up in the San Juans, because I needed to work temporary jobs to 
pay their [inaudible] payments, um, not having any health insurance, you know, or a doctor, just 
sort of everything at once. And I think one of my biggest achievements in life was surviving it. I 
was a girl, scouring, sandblasting [inaudible]. I really identified with [inaudible]. And in life, one 
of the things I could do, one of the knee-jerk ways, try to find the best in things, find what good 
there is in something, or whatever turn life takes, to see what benefit might be. And there aren't 
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many from an experience like that. It's hardly possible finding it at all the time. Even much later, 
with some distance, I can say that there are certain things that-that were benefits. For example, I 
was so completely out of control that it, uh, cured me of, relatively speaking, a lot of need for 
control in life, and certainly struggled with my friends for it. Although most of them had never 
went through it, so they really didn't understand what was going on, but they didn't abandon me. 
And it made me a lot more aware of what basic happiness is all about, which is basically clarity 
and awareness of peace of mind. It returned me into some of those-those values that as I say, I 
realized I had as a child. A totally humbling thing. Simplifies, I feel like, but only if you've been 
through it can you really know what kind of awful, awful pain it is. [Inaudible.] 
 
Julie O'Grady  05:03 
And it--does that bring you back to the values you had as a child? 
 
Jody Aliesan  05:07 
It simplifies things, tremendously. Makes you grateful for small things, for basic things. Just like 
anyone's, you know, serious injury or problems of other kinds, or death. It increases gratitude 
once the pain is over, and the day by day struggle to survive, and the, the shadows uplifted, and 
life is coming back, looking sweet. It makes it easy to be grateful for small things. Takes-- It 
gives a lot of perspective on, uh, what's supposed to be valuable, the strivings in life. 
 
Julie O'Grady  05:53 
Mhm.  
 
Jody Aliesan  05:55 
Goals, financial goals. [Pause.] That's for me, one of my experiences, shaping experiences in my 
life, I suppose. Most recently. There-there have been others, so--we can talk about them. 
 
Julie O'Grady  06:19 
Do you want to talk about them? 
 
Jody Aliesan  06:22 
Well, let's see. [Sighs.] Looking back on my life. I guess moving around a lot was really 
important in shaping me. [Inaudible] I suppose, self-reliance might be too strong a term. 
Generating and growing something inside to turn to--which there have been--which has been 
eclipsed and lost in my life a number of times, too. I don't want to make it sound like that it has 
been steady all the way through. Um, I would say that I was raped in 1969, and that experience 
was a powerful one. That I was very fortunate to be able to turn around and transform within a 
short period of time by getting involved in and having to start Rape Relief. And the way that that 
has changed me over times is that since it happened in my apartment, in the middle of the night--
it was the janitor in the apartment building where I was staying that time in Washington, DC, 
when I was working against the war in the Vietnam--I no longer feel safe in my home. I don't 
feel safe anywhere, but I've gotten used to it. So it's not like it's a problem. I just recognize that I 
don't, that something inside of me is always and probably always will be on alert. It's not that I'm 
paranoid or that I'm not opening windows in the summer or anything like that. It's just that I've 
sort of surrendered to the possibility or probability that things can happen, and I can go ahead 
and live, uh, an ordinary life and take the sensible precautions, and then just accept that some 
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places aren't safe. So that's one. Then there are other experiences, like climbing Mount Whitney 
when I was-- I guess I climbed Mount Whitney--second highest mountain in the United States, I 
believe, or at least it's the highest mountain in the lower 48-- um, three times. The first time I 
was 15. And that was an important experience, not only that, the willingly endured ordeal, but 
the great reward of summit means some kind of triumph. But being able--being able to be 
someplace where you can see so far, I like being places, whether it's on the top of the mountain 
or in an airplane, where I can see the shape of the Earth. Something I like about the Southwest, 
although I could never live there, because I was born on the plains. I'm really more of a woods 
creature, but I like being able to see the bones of the Earth, in the sense of as a ball hanging in 
space with other spheres around it, and get that feeling in a place that's so pure, where everything 
is beginning, it's very basic to walk, so climbing the mountain and doing it with other people, the 
team. That's involved there, just like kayaking on the Colorado River, below Hoover Dam, not in 
rapids, but still doing that with a group of people--these were all high school buddies--and being 
in wild, open, remote, natural places where the impact of human beings is smaller, and the 
proportion of human beings to other creatures is-is more healthy. And I suppose that that's 
another thing about these times in my life, and these times is no different from anybody else, that 
all the loss that we experience as these things are compromised and broken and disappear, and-
and dealing with loss and grief, helping each other through that, and not letting that thrown into 
despair, and continuing to live by what you believe anyway, even if you don't think [inaudible]. 
That's a bunch. And then I suppose automobile accidents. I've been in more than my share of 
wrecks, and the experience, again, of-of extreme moments of-of fear and terror and injury, like 
breaking my leg in Ireland last fall, where but--something happens, and maybe it's a state of 
grace, and maybe it's just endurance. I feel everything slows down, and it's very simple, and you 
can even sense that this is what your soul is. This is what's going on, and it's okay. 
 
Julie O'Grady  11:48 
You can sense this is what your soul is? 
 
Jody Aliesan  11:50 
That part of me, it became very calm. It was saying, "All right. Is this time to check out?" And I 
don't have a convention--I don't have a-- I don't belong to any organized religion. Again, don't 
really think I fit into any of them. They've become too complex for me. My feelings are simpler, 
that basically that there's a great unknown, and within that great unknown, there's some kind of 
intelligence that has my best blossoming in mind that isn't knowable. And that within that, there 
are guides or messengers that helped me see the way that's meant for me and the plan that's 
meant for me and as my life has gone by, mostly I just-- the basic prayer I have is please guide 
me and let me see what the plan is, [chuckles]. And o I know less and less what's ahead and don't 
really need to. It becomes more exciting then, when I am given my assignments much more than 
if I planned or chosen ones. So I have this sense that whatever comes after this probably is as 
unique for each of us as this life is. I believe that-- Whatever my essence is gone, whether or not 
I fully recognize myself, I remember this life [inaudible].  
 
Julie O'Grady  13:32 
I think it's interesting that you talk about assignments.  
 
Jody Aliesan  13:34 
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Oh, oh, I always loved school. [Laughs.] And yes, I do feel that I am given tasks, assignments, 
projects, things I'm supposed to do, and I accept them easily and willingly. Things are 
[inaudible] even more, the resistance makes them hard, although sometimes, there's not 
necessarily anything that I can understand about why something is as bad as it is, hurts as much 
as it does, and, uh, if I try to explain it too much, it just makes for more pain. Then it's just a 
matter of enduring. I do that well, endure, better, do that better than others. Better at enduring.  
 
Julie O'Grady  14:33 
You said that you decided to give your life over to poetry, like it or not. Is that--is that one of 
your times, one of your assignments? How does the enduring and the pain and--what does like it 
or not mean?  
 
Jody Aliesan  14:52 
Okay, well... It means that you [inaudible] life, or that you make yourself willing or accept, and 
don't resist, the fact that what you're assigned to do, what you've been asked, or called to do, 
what I have been called to do, requires me to live without many buffers. So joy can be very 
intense, but you could also get hit by a railroad train of pain. There's a necessity to be open to the 
degree that you may forget how to close or can't close quickly enough. There's also certain 
innocence, naivete, that's necessary for reception that I'm only beginning to learn can be closed 
when it's appropriate to deflect unnecessary pain, especially, that comes from other people who 
are desirous of inflicting it, whatever their reasons are. It also means that that free association--
kind of a automatic global search through memory for analogous situations in all of your life isn't 
something that you can easily turn off or on. It happens all the time. And memory is very sharp. 
So living this sort of life, you don't have the comfort of forgetting. Things are very sharp and 
stored [inaudible]. So that's--that's part that can be difficult and painful. And there have been 
times, as I say, when I've said, "Hey, I think I'll tap out now. I've done my part. Think I'll do 
something else." Especially because there's so little place for poetry in this culture that I have felt 
many times that I'm not doing anything particularly useful, especially having come from political 
movement activity. When I accepted this calling, I had to go through a lot of guilt about leaving 
full-time movement, political, social issues, kinds of work, and come to understand that this is 
actually what I do best, the type of memory I'm not suited for the other, and, and I burn out 
easily, or I get sick or whatever. I just can't handle it over, over a lifetime, or whatever small part 
my writing may play, it does have its part, and the only time--if-if I feel bad about it, I'm just 
saying that I'm really not a larger part, or want to-to seem to make more of a difference, but I do 
get satisfaction on finding that individual poems and even a book like "Grief Sweat" was really 
written for other people suffering to find a, a kindred spirit, that they do make a difference, not 
only personally, but politically. And there's a place for it, so it's alright. It's-- I've been asked to 
be on a panel next Saturday. Its flyer is right here. The name of it is "Lunatic or Lover, Madman 
or Shaman: The Role of the Poet in Contemporary Cultures." And I didn't know it was going to 
be quite that flashy of a title. When I signed on, I thought was going to be a poet in the 
community. And one of the things I was feeling is that unconsciously, consciously, my sense of 
the poet in community has a lot to do with Irish culture, and basically, without going into it very 
far, what was necessary for the poet--especially when Gaelic culture was crushed--people 
depended on the poet for two things, and one was truth-seeking, and the other was speaking 
[inaudible]. And so I think I'm trying to do that, even if my poetry, my writing is just as 
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imperfect as anybody else. So the, um, both the truth-seeking and the usefulness, I'm continuing 
to work at it and do better.  
 
Julie O'Grady  20:15 
Um... How did you begin to become involved in the Civil Rights Movement?  
 
Jody Aliesan  20:24 
Well, the moment that I moved out of educated concern and conversations and persuasion and all 
that to actually going to do something was um, when Martin Luther King [?was murdered?]. And 
I realized that, um, for me, graduate school at that time in my life was not making sense. I was 
studying medieval and--medieval drama and Shakespeare, and of course, I can say that the kinds 
of things that we discussed are useful, but a life spent analyzing, that academic life, was 
obviously not one I could live on, I feel I was fulfilling responsibilities, so values and ideals that 
were more important to me. Well, it goes back to that notion, "f you're not part of the solution, 
you're part of the problem." I could not ignore and not do anything.  
 
Julie O'Grady  21:54 
Where were you on the day that Martin Luther King was killed? 
 
Jody Aliesan  22:02 
I was in--at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Then Bobby was killed in 
[inaudible] July. Those two events really shook my life up, woke me up, changed my life. I left 
everything that you might call the career track, all of the education that I had worked so hard to 
gain. I'm talking here about somebody who escapes the harm of the family but the entropy of the 
community, it finds a way out into the larger world, the way maybe some other people might 
find a way out by athletics, I found my way out by scholarship. So when the moment came that I 
abandoned all of that, it was a pretty important break. And at the same time, going to Alabama 
and working there, I had yet more to learn. I had to learn about my motives, which were, I'm glad 
to say, questioned constantly by students and other people in community, in the African 
American community. Um, I learned, it's easy to say, more than I taught in that respect, had to 
come to terms with how the best thing I could possibly do, even according to the students who 
loved me the best and I got along the best with, was to leave and quit, so that someone of their 
own race could take me place. And there was a powerful time of some of this, feelings of arrest, 
being threatened with death, the power of guns. Lynching. 
 
Julie O'Grady  24:16 
Were you personally threatened? Your life? 
 
Jody Aliesan  24:21 
I was. 
 
Julie O'Grady  24:21 
What happened? 
 
Jody Aliesan  24:22 
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And I was, awakening and distancing. And I should say, it's hardly worth mentioning, 
considering what African American people were suffering on a daily basis all their lives. And 
one of the things that--that keeps me from claiming too much here is that I was told, "We live 
here, you can always move away." And I eventually left. So I feel a certain humility around all 
this and the threat that was made against my life was made in a newspaper, not face-to-face, and 
was part of a succession of similar threats made against other European American people, a 
handful of us that were down there together, we happened to be photographed walking in the 
march protesting the deaths of the little girls when the church was bombed. So it was an 
intimidation of us as quote, unquote, outside agitators that fairly clearly could be seen as the 
threats continued to return, not to be serious. Nonetheless, you just never know, especially when 
people were shooting [inaudible] and appreciated [inaudible] by anybody. 
 
Julie O'Grady  25:40 
The ad was placed by an anonymous-- 
 
Jody Aliesan  25:41 
Oh, it was on the personal notes of the newspaper. That page of the newspaper. 
 
Julie O'Grady  25:48 
What did it say?  
 
Jody Aliesan  25:49 
Marked for death. Just our photograph. [Inaudible.] 
 
Julie O'Grady  25:57 
March for death? Marked for death. 
 
Jody Aliesan  25:59 
Uh-huh [affirmative]. But much worse things were happening [inaudible].  
 
Julie O'Grady  26:08 
What newspaper was it? 
 
Jody Aliesan  26:10 
Oh, like the [inaudible] Times [inaudible] 
 
Julie O'Grady  26:19 
What was your job? In Alabama? What was it called? 
 
Jody Aliesan  26:19 
Oh, "Alabama Independent." I think that's what it was. It's been a long time, [inaudible]. But it 
was not a big deal. It's just, uh--well, you did what you did. Anybody who lived through those 
times of [inaudible] late sixties early seventies, knows every day, something more happened that 
was so stunning and so powerful, all you could do was just keep moving. You know that, uh, 
saying, "She never stumbles because she has no place to fall." My life is like that for a number of 
years. A lot of really strong and [?big and?] scary things happened. And they were happening all 
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the time, and they weren't happening just to me, you know. That's how you get through some of 
them, and actually without too much scarring, partly because you're not the only one, and-and 
the forces are larger than anything that [inaudible] injure you personally, [inaudible]. And 
besides, in that experience, anyway, it was clear that I was in a, a privileged position, and for me, 
when I, like many other in the movement, that turned from involvement--I'm talking here 
European American--turned from involvement in manners of civil rights of African American 
and the war in Vietnam, I realized that a lot of the energy we were putting into those things were 
appropriate, and some were also reflective of personal understanding of the justice that we 
needed to [inaudible]. Oh, I was--I did, um-- I was on the faculty at the, at, um Miles College, 
African American college in [inaudible].Did a spectrum of things everywhere from counseling of 
people interested in graduate school to leading different kinds of literary courses in 
between.There was also a four-person team that put together a multi-disciplinary program [?for 
sophomores?]. And then with the students at the time, we designed a curriculum for the next year 
which wasn't based as it traditionally was on Western, European, Great Books. We incorporated 
many more materials, literary, philosophical, visual, musical materials from other continents. But 
the administration decided that it-it wasn't the classical education that they wanted their students 
to get so that they could compete [inaudible], so they, um, cancelled the program all together. 
And that was really the reason I left. There was no longer a program for me to teach at. 