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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Jody Aliesan 
May 7, 1996  
Cassette 4, Side 1 
 
 
Julie O'Grady  00:05 
The date is May 7, 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 four. [Tape clicks.] Okay, so we're going 
to do a test here, and hopefully this will be more receptive.  
 
Jody Aliesan  00:38 
Testing, testing.  
 
Julie O'Grady  00:41 
Try a little bit softer, see if that's-- 
 
Jody Aliesan  00:42 
Testing, testing.  
 
Julie O'Grady  00:43 
Okay, good, proceed. 
 
Jody Aliesan  00:49 
Well, we had two more categories of notes that I took to talk about here, and looking at them 
now, it seems like such a strange little list, especially if we're going to talk, um, as I guess we've 
decided to, about the aspect of this woman's life that gets labeled as writer or poet. Um, so I 
guess I can start out with--by saying that the most important things about this aspect of my 
experience in this life are not the easiest to describe, and basically has to do with the, uh, um, a 
calling, okay? It's a calling, rather than a job or a career or even a, an ac--or an activity or 
anything like that. It's something that you come to be aware that you're supposed to do, even if 
you don't really care to do it, or if, um, it's painful, and especially when there doesn't seem to be 
any return for the effort and the pain, except whatever satisfaction there is in-in doing of it itself. 
It teaches you a lot about that. Also teaches you about rejection and, um, being what you might 
call a spiritual minority. Um... Teaches you about being tapped to do something that in this 
culture in particular, doesn't seem to be action-oriented or productive or have anything to show 
for it that changes the world much. Um, but nonetheless, in my case, I have at times thought and 
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made attempts to leave it as a calling, even after I had accepted the task and arranged my life 
around it, only to find that, no, I couldn't. That anything else I did, uh, was sabotaged in some 
way to lead me back to this particular task.  
 
Jody Aliesan  03:30 
And the task has to do--the job, the assignment has to do with, uh, what is a very ancient, or 
ancient practice in Irish culture of the poet as the truth teller. The poets--without getting into a lot 
of Irish history, here, I can say that when Gaelic culture was intact, poets were as politically 
important as the kings. They had no wealth and they had no position of power, but they were, 
um, they were-- Someone with political power would have a poet sitting alongside because they 
were expected to tell the truth, and they could be counted on to tell the truth, and they were then 
protected from the consequences. After Gaelic culture was crushed, the poets became outlaws. 
They weren't sheltered by anybody. They were itinerant, and they were hunted down for the 
same reason, because they told the truth and they could remind the people of their pas, who they 
were, give them dignity and spirit and--for resistance.  
 
Jody Aliesan  04:51 
Well, that particular function seems to be closest to part of what I feel at my task: to seek the 
truth, to tell the truth as best I can, being an imperfect person, subject as anyone is to-to self-
delusion and denial, but for that to be a central task. And then another task is to speak for those 
who don't have a voice or can't speak for themselves. So that's part of it, but another part of it, for 
me, personally, is coupled with spirituality. It's a form of prayer, in a way. It's a communion with 
whatever it is that's giving you the poems. The poems are, first of all, a form of experience rather 
than a literary genre. And the form of experience is the kind of tingling that you get when an 
event in your life or a series of insights leads you to understand something you didn't understand 
before. And-and it's not something that can just be stated. Someone else will recognize it if you 
can adequately describe the circumstances that led you to the illumination yourself. So what you 
try to do is recreate or use the material of the sensory world and the material plane to reenact or 
recreate the, um, the moment of understanding. And it may or may not be narrative or-or even, 
um, lyrical. It could be just a series of images that, if they succeed, will allow the understanding 
to occur in the mind of the person who reads them in sequence, that kind of thing. 
 
Jody Aliesan  06:54 
So there's a, um, cultural task that has to do with justice, I think. Well, at least it has to do with 
truth. And then there's also the spiritual experience and the desire to communicate. And those 
come first. And when I look back in my life, I can recognize that what came first for me was a-a 
sense of-of shivery, tingly correspondences between this world and, um, and the world of spirit, 
of insight and understanding, grace, um, communication from the plane of, uh, intelligence or, 
um, compassion that's other than human, our sense of how the universe appears to work, what 
our place is in it, all that, um, spiritual communion.  
 
Jody Aliesan  07:53 
So I remember having that especially connected with the non-human world, the "natural," quote, 
unquote world when I was very small, and feeling, um, kinship with what I understood very 
imperfectly and stereotypically of Native American culture at the time because of the 
understanding the importance of life and spirit in everything, and the willingness to be instructed 
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by it. Well, anyway. So then when I get down to my notes here, they-they look pretty puny, but 
they might be of interest, I suppose, when you're talking about one human life.  
 
Jody Aliesan  08:44 
One of the important things for me, beyond that kind of connection, seeing that kind of 
connection in the world, which is a metaphorical understanding. I think that seeing metaphor as 
central for me, I find that, um, the ability to perceive and experience metaphor is like many other 
functions in the human consciousness. It may or may not appear in any given person. Just like 
the ability to see color or not, or whatever, and-and so we all have different skills when we fill 
out different parts of the--of the spectrum of human ability. Um, but I don't know whether people 
who don't see metaphor can learn to, or what makes that connection. Sometimes it's, for instance, 
like being able to relate a map, two-dimensional map, to the actual landscape: you either can or-
or you don't.  
 
Jody Aliesan  09:45 
But another thing that really helped a lot for me in my life, generally speaking, is the first thing 
on this little list here, and that is that I've started learning to read when I was three years old. And 
words--finding meaning coming out of marks on a cereal box or whatever--was a magical thing. 
Had a lot of power, and, um, where a lot of people would draw pictures, I would be writing 
words, or putting words on my pictures, and I have to thank my mother for recognizing the 
interest and-and as a former--if only for a year so--one-room school teacher--picking up on that 
and encouraging it and giving me reading material that was more and more challenging, I would 
have been in bad shape if there had been so many, quote, unquote "children's books" then as 
there are now, because I don't think I would have progressed as quickly as-as I did, without 
material that was supposedly focused at my age.  
 
Jody Aliesan  10:56 
And I found, um, I remember-- Well, this may sound... I don't know how this will sound 
[chuckles], but I remember the first time I saw the first scene in Hamlet. I was in grade school. I 
was over at a friend's house who had books, and I'll get back to that in a minute. And I noticed 
Shakespeare, and I knew that that was important, and I recognized [inaudible] him. And I pulled 
it off the shelf, opened it up to the first scene, and I had no idea what was happening. I couldn't 
understand it. But it was like pulling out somebody's alchemical manuscript. I knew it was 
magic. And I knew that I was going to be able to understand it someday, and I wanted to.  
 
Jody Aliesan  11:40 
The household I grew up in had only a few books, a dozen or so, and they were handed down 
and important to the family as artifacts, and my mother cared to buy when she could, because the 
money wasn't--was a problem. Well, if they didn't-- My parents never behaved as if it were a 
problem. We lived within what we had and there, and we knew better than to aspire for what we 
couldn't have. But it didn't feel deprivate--like deprivation. Um... It felt secure, and didn't feel 
either a degradation about being poor or-or, you know, some kind of self-esteem difficulty, and I 
didn't feel that I was not getting things that I needed to-to, um, survive with dignity in the world, 
and I had milk every day and all the rest of it. I don't-- Not trying to paint a dire picture here, but 
we didn't have the kind of money that would make it easy just to have books. And the books that 
we did have, I read [laughs] over and over and over again.  
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Jody Aliesan  11:47 
And finally--I guess it must have been in maybe middle school--my parents finally bought an 
encyclopedia from one of those door-to-door salespeople who may have, uh, put a lot of families 
in a tough spot in terms of playing on their desire to help their children and putting them in debt. 
But that encyclopedia was wonderful, and I just started reading it at Book A. And that gave me a 
sense of all the different kinds of things a person could learn in the world. And that's when I 
started choosing the things that I wanted to concentrate on learning, like geology and astronomy, 
native cultures. So there are books, specific books that were in the one little bookshelf that had 
been passed down in generations in my family that I can still remember now how they--even 
how they felt in my hand, seeing the covers and came to under--to feel about books as I do to this 
day, as friends. I choose carefully what I will own among books, and when I see their spines on 
the shelf and run my eyes along their titles, I feel comfort. So libraries were also important, 
because that's the source of all the books that I could go and explore and find.  
 
Jody Aliesan  12:59 
The other thing about my household that was important to me in development is, uh, how much 
singing went on, and it was, um, the kind of singing, I suppose somebody would call folk 
singing. It included a few hymns, but most of it was, um, maybe popular--songs that were 
popular many decades ago, or traditional songs that-that had been passed down. We did a lot of 
singing, not in any formal "Let's sit down and sing" way, but just as we did other things, 
especially traveling in the car. Um, so singing, and then it was sort of accepted that everybody 
was going to learn a musical instrument. And both my parents played multiple instruments, and 
didn't necessarily own them anymore, but knew how to play them when the opportunity arose. 
My father, for instance, had played trumpet, but he didn't own one. And I think that that has 
something to do with a sense of rhythm and movement of sound that goes into poetry as a form. 
My sense of my place in poetry has more to do with the oral than it does with the, uh, artifact on 
page, although I certainly also find that the poems shape themselves visually, too. 
 
Jody Aliesan  16:01 
Well. Yeah. The first, my first, uh, my first national publication was in seventh grade. It was the 
result of a song that I wrote in sixth grade. And there was--it was called sixth grade camp. For-
for a week, each class would go into mountains and supposedly do things like clean up trails and 
things like that. But mostly, I think it was to teach us tolerance of one another, work habits, 
discipline, and to get away from the usual school situation. It was a very fine thing. I don't know 
if it's still happening. But when we were there, I made up a song, and my tentmates--it was kind 
of a cabin tent, sort of canvas with a wooden floor--heard me singing it, and they and they asked 
me to teach it to them, and I did. And then one of them was singing it in the kitchen when the 
director of the camp was around, and he happened to be on the faculty of the music department 
at USC. It was owned, owned by USC, this camp--I think it was for the music department. 
Anyway, he called me in to sing it to him, and then he liked it enough that he--that he included in 
a book [of] songs called "Music Across the Country." I think it was intended for, uh, use in 
elementary schools. Um, so that was my first, first check, you know, check for it and copyright, 
and all the rest of it, which happ--which I was awarded in seventh grade.  
 
Jody Aliesan  17:49 
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And then, um, there were publications. I was in a national anthology in 10th grade, thanks to, 
um, an English teacher who picked up on what I was doing and-and entered the poem. Then 
there were various writing awards here and there. Um, and that-that was all fine, but mostly I 
was sort of a misfit, and I didn't really feel all that comfortable having attention called to me, 
because people had a way of, um, turning it around. I don't mean to ridicule--they were ridiculing 
me, but it would often put me in an uncomfortable position of being singled out, and I would 
bend over backwards to behave in ways that wouldn't either be intimidating or appear to be 
taking advantage of a spotlight to be better than someone else is. I don't-- I suppose this must be 
true anywhere among young people, but, um, the communities that I was part of, and I-and I 
associated a lot with working classes, lower classes, that you--it's really important to have 
loyalty, to where, to your origins, to--and not be uppity, not get on the high horse, not pretend to 
be better than where you came from, or better than the other people around you, and to have a 
reputation for that is, uh, was very damning. So I have found in my life that over and over 
again... excelling in something, taking delight, especially in-in excellence for its own sake, can 
often be punished, and-and, um, ostracism is one of them. So it's necessary to pick up on some 
kind of social skill so that you can not necessarily discount yourself, but eliminate people's 
feelings of discomfort around that.  
 
Jody Aliesan  20:04 
So I mostly just went along on my own. My-my teachers weren't that was great [chuckles], well-
meaning, but not that great. And my teacher, I was a senior in high school finally told me that--
my English teacher--just told me that she had nothing, there was nothing she could teach me, and 
she wanted me to go to the library every day during that hour. Which, on one hand was 
wonderful, I wrote papers and then delivered them back to her, but on the other hand, it did 
separate me from everybody else, and for all the reasons I mentioned above that had to be 
compensated for.  
 
Jody Aliesan  20:42 
Um, I also sort of looked into the visual art and music, but I kept coming back to words, and I 
finally settled on words in high school, and I would--I could write poems that other people could 
recognize as-as poems. The definition of what poetry was was fairly unlimited, but what I did on 
my own and didn't show anybody, were the really honest ones, where I could be the scary person 
that I really was inside, and write about the things that people would be shocked about and didn't 
really want to hear. So my best work never got anywhere--there were--it was never seen. And the 
other work did the achieving that my parents, my mother in particular, expected was the sort of 
situation where, uh, the achievement would serve the reputation of the family and, um, cement 
her position as a good mother. But on the other hand, I wasn't to be praised because it was 
important for me not to think too highly of myself. 
 
Jody Aliesan  22:05 
Um, in college, there were--there was only one course in the four years about writing poetry, just 
as in graduate school, there was only one course, and neither one of them was of any help at all. I 
remember in graduate school, when I was the only woman in the seminar, and-and everyone was 
else was acting really [?cool? ?cruel?], and pretty much dismissing me or ignoring me. And 
when my poem came up for criticism, it was--it was really glossed. And I finally stopped and 
spoke for myself, and spoke up for the poem and tried to show them what it was doing, and the 
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more I got into it, the more I just decided I didn't care if I was speaking for myself. I wanted 
them to see all of what they were missing in this piece of writing. And then one of them said, 
almost contemptuously, "Well, did you intend that?" [Laughs incredulously.] As if I couldn't 
possibly have, it had, had to have been an accident, that all those things were there. It was--it was 
uh, not at all helpful. Either one of those courses. I have felt, all my writing life, that I am and 
I'm supposed to be a solitary.  
 
Jody Aliesan  23:44 
Um, in a--in a way, I'm really glad that I grew up at a time when there weren't any Master of Fine 
Arts writing programs. And I'm really glad that I didn't have anybody around me who liked 
reading or did any writing or understood or-or appreciated poetry, um, or even gave me 
examples to-to learn from or imitate, because I had to do it all on my own, and the writing itself 
was the teacher. And that has meant for me that what I do, although I'm sure any number of 
people could show me how all the people I have read have influenced me, I wouldn't deny any of 
it. Still, I have a feeling that what I do is-is unique to me. Whether anybody likes or not, it's--it's 
itself. It's not imitation or derivative, and it's not, um, an attempt to placate a market of any kind. 
I mean to satisfy a market. I don't mean that financially, necessarily, or at all.  
 
Jody Aliesan  24:22 
Um, and it isn't part of a mutually self-recognizing group of people, it just reflects one life, and 
it's different because of that. One thing that happened when I was in high school that I--at the 
time, I thought was pretty amusing--but as an example of my parents ambivalence about my not 
being ordinary, being strang, was that when I went in for my first gynecological exam, which 
was--oh, really late high school, early college, somewhere around there--to the family doctor, he 
told me, he advised me that too much studying would be hard on my ovaries. Which I almost 
laughed in his face, because I could see through it, that somebody was trying to influence me 
away from academic study or love of learning and books and all that, telling me that it would 
harm me as a female. What does that mean? [Laughs.] 
 
Julie O'Grady  26:23 
Did he try and explain to you what harm would, how the harm would--? [Laughs.]  
 
Jody Aliesan  26:26 
No, I--I [laughs] wasn't interested in what else he had to say about it. I thought I was pretty 
ridiculous.  
 
Julie O'Grady  26:26 
[Whisperered] Oh, my god.  
 
Jody Aliesan  26:33 
And I could see my mother behind it, putting him up to saying it. I mean, I could also imagine 
him just saying it himself. So this was a small oil town, you know. The doctors, the dentists, the 
people of the clergy, were the aristocracy in this town. They were the ones with the most, um, 
prestige. They were the ones who, relatively speaking, were rich, so they were the authorities.  
 
Julie O'Grady  27:08 
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Was this El Segundo? 
 
Jody Aliesan  27:11 
El Segundo? 
 
Jody Aliesan  27:11 
Uh-huh [affirmative]. [Pause.] I don't know whether she put it up to saying that, or whether he 
took the initiative himself, but he was basically telling me that I was, um, unnatural to be female 
and wanting to study, read and write, past competence. 
 
Julie O'Grady  27:18 
Segundo. Mhm.  
 
Jody Aliesan  27:31 
Um... When I was in graduate school, I went into college studying English and American 
literature out of the desire for the love of--love of it, and some sense that it would--I would learn 
more about how it had been done in the past and it would help me learn how to do it now. But 
then, by the time I thought through college, it was well, what am I going to do about making a 
living? And the next step seemed to be, alright, graduate school, because then I'll be able to, um, 
be prepared, get the training for teaching in college, just putting off this question about what is 
someone like me going to do to make a living. But when I got to graduate school, I really found 
that I was, uh, in a--well, it was a trap for me, because the further I got into graduate school, the 
more the-the juices were drying up. The more desiccated I became emotionally, the less able I 
was to interact with the work on a human level, the more analytic it became.  
 
Jody Aliesan  28:49 
And I remember the moment when I was reading, rereading King Lear for who knows how many 
times. I was reading the last scene, maybe I've mentioned it already, where, where he's holding 
his dead daughter in his arms. And I realized suddenly that I was taking notes in three colors of 
ink. I wasn't feeling at all, and it was really scary. I thought I'd gone so far that now I'd ruined 
that capacity for empathy and the beauty of the transmission of it, um, and that was part of the 
reason that I wasn't sorry when time came and circumstances made it necessary for me to choose 
to leave graduate program and, um, and to not finish the degree. I feel I-I saved some point--
some part of my life. Way, and when I left, it was for work that I cared about politi--[tape cuts 
off.] 
 