Interview with Alice Walker, USC, 10/12/2000. Tape 1 of 2. Gussow discusses the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that destroyed his home in 1970. They discuss themes of opposition to violence in Walker's work. Walker discusses themes of love in her work amidst evil. Walker talks about her family and her writing. Walker talks about her recent book,"The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart," with stories that deal with care and intimacy in relationships. Walker discusses other work including "The Color Purple" and "Meridian." She talks about her time living in Mississippi, the suffering faced by black and non-white communities, and reading and works that influenced her, including Zora Neale Hurston and Leo Tolstoy. She talks about her childhood, meditation, hate, and spiritual beliefs. High Background Noise on Tape; Program Distorted at Times
Description provided by the Harry Ransom Center.
| Time | Annotation | Layer |
|---|---|---|
| 0:09 | Walker sighs loudly. | Speaker |
| 0:14 | Walker explains that earlier in the day she was a guest on an episode of the Rosie O'Donnell Show. | Speaker |
| 0:21 | Walker says she used to walk in Washington Square Park when she lived nearby. | Speaker |
| 0:36 | Walker clarifies that she lived in student dorms at NYU with her then boyfriend (and later husband) in the late 1960s. | Speaker |
| 1:10 | Walker leaves to wash her hands. | Speaker |
| 1:33 | Walker laughs quietly. | Speaker |
| 0:50 - 1:50 | Gussow and Walker discuss how close their children are in age and the fact that they lived nearby each other (in the Washington Square Park area) in the late 1960s. | Speaker |
| 2:01 | Walker initiates a "cheers". | Speaker |
| 2:06 | Walker laughs more loudly. | Speaker |
| 3:27 - 3:32 | "The violence is not gonna work for me. I don't care who's doing it. There's just no end to it." | Speaker |
| 4:05 - 4:09 | "In a way, it just isn't radical enough. Violence—it's not radical enough." | Speaker |
| 4:12 - 4:24 | "Well, actually love is more radical than violence. And it's more subversive, generally. And it's harder to do. And that's why people would rather, you know, have violence." | Speaker |
| 4:23 | Walker laughs loudly. | Speaker |
| 5:11 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 5:22 | "People do change. And they change radically." | Speaker |
| 6:22 | Walker attributes a family history of alcoholism to Irish-Scottish ancestry. | Speaker |
| 7:04 | On her grandfather's past abuse of her grandmother: "I feel that I was born partly to heal that, to look at it and see who they both were in essence." | Speaker |
| 7:31 | Walker confirms her grandfather was a "role model" for the character of "Mister" in The Color Purple. | Speaker |
| 8:06 | Walker on her ex-husband: "He's a very good man." | Speaker |
| 7:50 - 9:22 | Walker describes the nature of her relationship with her ex-husband. | Speaker |
| 8:40 | Walker says her marriage (the first interracial marriage in Mississippi) changed the state "a lot". | Speaker |
| 9:20 - 10:52 | Walker discusses being tired and how it changes her as a person. | Speaker |
| 11:11 - 11:23 | Walker on her grandfather's domestic abuse: "He had no other outlet for this kind of anger. If he had been angry at the white people who were actually the basic oppressors, he would've been killed right away." | Speaker |
| 12:34 | Walker says she's never been to this restaurant before and asks what Gussow recommends she order. | Speaker |
| 13:40 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 13:32 - 14:08 | Walker orders a special dish with scallops, beans, and mushrooms, as well as a small green salad, and an iced tea. | Speaker |
| 14:37 - 15:06 | Walker details a conversation she had with Mililani Trask, a Hawaiin political leader, about publishing a collection of short stories. | Speaker |
| 15:12 - 15:52 | Walker describes her marriage as a "cocoon". | Speaker |
| 16:00 - 16:07 | Walker attributes her prioritization of friendships over romantic relationships to her astrological sign, Aquarius. | Speaker |
| 16:28 - 17:26 | Walker explains why she didn't make The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, a story collection, "more novelistic". | Speaker |
| 16:52 | Walker mentions her relationship with Robert Allen. | Speaker |
| 17:27 - 18:28 | Walker explains that one story in The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, which centers on cuddling, was inspired by events in her own life. | Speaker |
| 19:40 - 20:25 | Walker explains that the first story in the collection was written nearly last. "The Brotherhood of the Saved" was written last. | Speaker |
| 20:05 - 20:24 | "I was ready to transform all of this into a story that was just fiction, just art, but with the spirits of my parents and my spirit in it, as we might have been had we done these things." | Speaker |
| 20:45 - 23:08 | Walker talks about the growth of characters Suni and Anne in The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. | Speaker |
| 21:12 - 21:20 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 21:05 - 21:30 | Walker explains she is "speaking from experience" when talking about a man living with his wife, his mistress, and his baby. | Speaker |
| 23:27 - 23:43 | "I'm not sure I want to keep writing. I think that... I feel like this is the end of a 30 year cycle, and it's a really good time for me to think about what I wanna do for another 30 years." | Speaker |
| 23:43 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 23:57 - 24:15 | Walker explains that this recent publication "completes" her 30 year cycle. | Speaker |
| 24:23 - 25:10 | Walker explains that she now studies the dharma and is searching for her "internal imperative". | Speaker |
| 25:11 - 25:17 | "Everything that I have written in my entire life has felt really—I feel like I had no choice." | Speaker |
| 25:17 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 25:55 | Walker clears her throat. | Speaker |
| 25:55 - 27:50 | Walker explains why writing feels like "mediumship" to her, especially when writing The Color Purple. | Speaker |
| 28:00 - 31:29 | Walker talks about the "mystical" way that she was inspired to write both The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar in a dream. She also describes "hearing" imagined dialogue between "spirits" who would eventually become characters in her books. | Speaker |
| 28:22 | Walker mentions working as an editor at Ms. Magazine. | Speaker |
| 31:40 - 32:10 | "I think the foundation of it was love. I love my grandparents, and I loved my parents. It just was heartbreaking to think that somehow they wouldn't survive—that who they were, the way they sounded, wouldn't survive in a form that was really faithful to them and loving of them and not interested in caricature." | Speaker |
| 32:29 - 33:13 | Walker describes her process of writing The Color Purple as "almost like dictation". | Speaker |
| 32:47 | Walker mentions an article published in the New York Times Magazine that included photos of the notebook she kept while writing The Color Purple. (This could be the same David Bradley article mentioned again later.) | Speaker |
| 33:38 - 34:02 | Walker says that parts of The Color Purple capture the "spirit" of her family's real history, but are not based on real facts in most cases. | Speaker |
| 34:02 - 34:52 | Walker describes how she wove her grandmother's real life into the novel, while at the same giving her, through fiction, life experiences she never had. | Speaker |
| 34:53 - 34:59 | Walker explains that her mother never read The Color Purple because she was too ill, but she enjoyed the film adaptation. | Speaker |
| 35:51 - 37:00 | Walker explains why she says she might stop writing: "I just want the feeling of freedom.... I want it to be more than just writing a book, I want it to mean that I'm connected to creation." | Speaker |
| 37:39 - 38:12 | "There's actually a real ecstatic side to writing, when you really are in the, sort of in the current, with the rest of creativity in the world. Even when it's really horrible, like writing Possessing the Secret of Joy, which was very difficult, I was so happy that I was alive to write it." | Speaker |
| 38:13 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 38:32 | Walker describes herself as "disturbed" by the things she faces in her writing. | Speaker |
| 39:20 | Walker laughs loudly. | Speaker |
| 39:19 - 39:50 | Walker talks about the effect fame has had on her life. | Speaker |
| 39:49 | On writing: "It's kind of like giving birth." | Speaker |
| 40:45 - 41:18 | "I understand the love of craft, you know, that's also a joy, but what I like is when you get the craft, and you know you have it, you can write a sentence that does what it needs to do, and then you just go. It's like jazz. It just has a life." | Speaker |
| 41:26 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 41:37 - 41:48 | "And that's the joy: to create books that are just totally what they are. They dictate everything." | Speaker |
| 42:22 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 42:03 - 42:42 | Walker and Gussow discuss an article written by David Bradley in 1984 that critcized her work. | Speaker |
| 42:50 - 44:13 | Walker explains how the film adaptation changed her life. | Speaker |
| 44:25 | Walker says she didn't initially like the film adaptation. | Speaker |
| 44:36 | Walker says she "really loves" Steven Spielberg. | Speaker |
| 45:07 | "Ooh, yum." | Speaker |
| 46:04 | Walker laughs. | Speaker |
| 46:17 - 46:27 | Walker says the film adaptation makes her cry every time she views it. | Speaker |
| 46:45 - 47:02 | Walker says she contributed to the screenplay although she isn't the true author. | Speaker |
| 47:05 - 47:35 | Walker says that publishing her own version of a screenplay allowed her to accept the film's deviations from the book. | Speaker |
| 47:23 | "So much about life is about learning, is lessons and things you can learn from events. You can't control how they come out." | Speaker |
| 47:33 | The tape abruptly stops; it has run out. | Technology |
| 1:18 | Walker's chair scrapes across the ground as she stands up. | Environment |
| 2:02 | Gussow and Walker clink glasses in a "cheers". | Environment |
| 12:24 - 12:32 | Gussow and Walker take a moment to look at the menu. | Environment |
| 12:43 - 13:06 | Gussow and Walker take a moment to look at the menu. | Environment |
| 13:06 - 14:06 | A waiter tells Gussow and Walker about the day's specials and takes their order. | Environment |
| 21:35 | The waiter drops off some simple syrup for Walker to use to sweeten the iced tea she ordered. | Environment |
| 30:47 | A thud, not acknowledged. | Environment |
| 37:03 | Someone passes gas..? | Environment |
| 43:19 - 43:20 | Walker thanks a waiter, who says "you're welcome" in reply. | Environment |
| 45:07 | The food is served. | Environment |
| 45:14 | A waitress asks if she should remove the bread; Walker confirms she can. | Environment |
| 45:36 - 45:50 | Prolonged sound of ice moving in a glass—perhaps Walker stirs some sweetener into her tea. | Environment |