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The interview that follows took place in December 1988. By granting me an interview, Tillie Olsen intended to help me to reenter college teaching after I had been working in the health care industry. English teachers were a dime a dozen then, and job postings scarce, especially in the Northeast. To improve my chances and my resume, I decided to interview Olsen about the courses she taught at Amherst College in 1969-1970, and the reading lists she circulated at the Modern Language Association meetings in 1972.
When we first met, Olsen had completed a yearlong residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, New Hampshire, and had been appointed the visiting writer at Amherst College. I had followed my spouse, Jan Dizard, a new assistant professor of sociology in the same college. We had come east straight from Berkeley, California, having chosen not to become cause célèbre faculty, fired for our anti-Vietnam War protests and Black Panther Party sympathies. (Jan Dizard defied the regents of the University of California by speaking at antiwar rallies from the steps of Sproul Hall; I made students buy Malcolm X Speaks for my remedial English classes at Merritt Community College.) Tillie and her husband,Jack, were also picking themselves up after bruising encounters with fifties-style anticommunism, and then reorganizing their lives after new encouragement forTillie's writing from Wallace Stegner at Stanford, Harper's Magazine, and Delacorte Press. Mutual friends had urged us to look them up, so as soon as we had a telephone, I called them, and they walked over to meet us that same day.
For the next year, we were exiles from California together. As a new "faculty wife," I had ample time to enjoy Tillies extraordinary friendship. While we shared meals, excursions, stories, and jokes, I heard for the first time about wide stretches of literary and labor history that my college courses omitted. Both Tillie and Jack recommended books (Emile Zola, Germinal; W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth); lent me pamphlets (Pat Mainardi's "The Politics of Housework" and Anne Koedt's "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm"); and, crucially, prodded me to enroll in the Black Studies department, then starting up at the University of Massachusetts. With Tillie's permission, I...