street roots
Feb. 28,2014
from GORE, page 8
I felt a little proud of myself that he kind
of lost his temper and got really red in the
face and was banging the table and
screaming about crack babies in the inner
city because it just showed what kind of
ignorance... that he really hadn’t thought
about these.issues ... that it was just a
rhetorical question for him.
S.Z.: You’ve said, Tve been poor and that
doesnt scare me. What is your experience
with the issue of class in our society?
- A.G.: I don’t come from a family that
identifies as working class. I definitely come
from an intellectual class where thete is not
a lot of money, but there is a different kind
of emotional opportunity and a different ;
kind of way that the world is going to
receive you based on what somebody can
tell when they meet you.
I’ve always had that privilege. The nicfe i
thing about not being afraid to he poor is ‘
that you have to not he ..afraid of being poor
if you’re going to be an
artist or a writer. Part
of that is also having
confidence that I’m not
the b e flB ttia f 1 re a lly
going to experience '
thought the reader w eald
: the kind of abject
lo o k a le t lik e I leaked at the poverty that is a reality
tim e: yoaag, urban, peer/
for. many people
single. P retty Im m ediately , around the world! I
the dem ographic proved
Itself to be t Myjfrtej thaa that.
I t was people whe wauled to
te ll the tru th about th e ir
experience w ith
m otherhood/*
S.Z.: You have two
children. They are 17
years apart. That’s a
Pretty large age spread.
What are thé advantages
and disadvantages of
raising your children -
separately?
A.G.: After I had Maia,
-
hcam eback to
•
California and after .that, I primarily had „
relationships with women — if I was even in
a relationship. So either I wasn’t having sex
or I was having sex with women. You don’t
just get pregnant by accident.
(My son) Max has a donor in Portland
whom he has a relationship with and he has
a donor grandma in the Bay area. I had .
always soft of meant to have another kid, I
and, as I said, the opportunity didn’t present
itself organically.
My partner at the time, Sol, wanted to
have a kid. I thought my daughter Maia
would be home for one more year and so
they would have that year together and I
thought that would be kind of nice. Of
course, as soon as I announced that I was
pregnant, Maia announced that she'was
going to graduate from high school a year
early and so’she actually went off to college
about three days before Max was born.
S.Z.: For both Maia and Max, it is sort of
like they get all the benefit of single childhood
and siblingdom.
; A.G.: I know! When they are older they
can check in and be like, “She was crazy,
right?”
S.Z.: You and the Feminist Zine Culture
have had a huge influence bn one another.
Where does feminism stand?
A.G.: (Laughs). Well I don’t know. It
seems to be going along at its regular snail
pace, I don’t know. I’m pretty bummed
about the fact that there are so few print
publications at this point, but I feel like, the
feminist process is hanging in there in
terms of print publication. Bitch is still
¿round. Ms. magazine is still miraculously
around. It’s nice that it’s not just
main stream misogynist press that still gets
to be in print.
,
When I first started Hip Mama, it was m
the context of a real explosion of feminist
zines and use-created zines and all of that
Was very inspiring to me. I know there s the
internet and all now, but there was
something that was really inspiring about
homemade media - something you could
hold in your hand, and there were all of
these people all over the country making
this stuff. If you didn’t feel represented in
the media you saw around you, you just ■
created i t You didn’t need a big budget to ;
do it.
S.Z.: You started Hip-Mama 2 0 years ago.
The first issue was 500 copies and your senior
project in college. Can you map out the-Hip
Mama experience for us a bit? |
day. ” What observations can you share about
the hospice experience from a class perspective?
A.G.: Hospice is wonderful. But I
thought, and maybe this is just ignorance,
that they would be there 24/7, and they’re
not, they just stop by. They deal with the
medication, they deal with medical issues
that you really aren’t qualified as a home
caregiver to deal with. The people involved
are wonderful and complete lifesaversin so
many ways. Politically, it ,
cer tainlyseem sto necessitate
a lot of money. Hospice,
without money, is to send
people home in a condition
where they can’t be left
alone and just kind of
assume that someone —
usually a female — is going
to step up.
A.G.: Part of the reason that I started
doing it was inspired by the whole “family
valued” campaign and welfare reform and all
of that, but7 it ended up getting a lot of,
attention because I was on welfare and
because I became sort of a welfare advocate
via the magazine. We got a lot of national
attention for it, which was great because it ’
really did get out there to the readership
that I was going for. Welfare moms read .
Glamour magazine and then they found out
S.Z.: In “The End of
about Hip Mama.
Eve,”you make reference to
In the beginning I really thought the
a pretty horrendous role *
reader would look a lot like I looked at the
model for mothering and
time: young, urban, poor, single/ Pretty
you give a few concrete
immediately the demographic proved itself
examples of your mother’s
to be bigger than that. It was people who
abusive behavior. As a
wanted to tell the truth about their ,
experience with motherhood.’They could be* reader, I felt as though
there was d lot we didn’t
married, gay orstraight, they could be of a
different income level, or education level.
know about Eve, and though you never
More than talking about my experience as , discuss ^ explicitly, did your mother suffer
being younger, urban, in college, I think
from mental health issues? v
people really responded to telling any truth
about being a m o m . The world of parenting
A.G.: In the ’80s, when I was a teenager,
media at that time was just completely
she had a bipolar diagnosis. She didn’t deal
dumbed-down, stupid ‘how-to’ articles:
with it. She tried to be medicated for a
Experts telling you what to do and a bunch
while and she had violent reactions to the
of minivan ads. ?
medication. She was very adamant that
there was nothing wrong with her. She
' S.Z.: Digital media vs. print media? .
rebelled, against her diagnosis and was .
essentially unmedicated.
A.G.: The Portland collective that has run
. Psychologists who have read my book are
Hip Mama wanted to go all digital for
n k eb h ,v ^h ’sIi^s(^^ssic ^ o ^ S rn n e.T nereys
fin a n c ia l reasons/which is to ta lly *
n o q u e stio n , it o fte n c o e x is ts with b e iiig '
understandable. Hip Mama has always been
bipolar. To my knowledge, she’s never had
really important to me as a print project —
that diagnosis. But“if she did have that
something you can hold in your hands, take
diagnosis, she wouldn’t have shared that
to the park. I’m not against digital media. It
with me.
has its place.
S.Z.: “The End of Eve” is a memoir you .
wrote about your hospice experience. In the
book, there is a part when your mother asks
you, “Do you think memoir writing is a way to
express anger ora way to pay tribute?” Does
this memoir express anger, pay tribute or,both?
I S.Z.: There was a stigma around, having a ,
bipolar diagnosis in the 1980s. There is still a
stigma that is attached to mental illness, but
today there is also a gentler understanding of*
living with mental illness.
A.G.: Particularly something like bipolar.
It’s considered treatable. She was very
A.G.: I thought that was an interesting
beautiful arid in her world, she was
question th at she asked me. I’d never
functional. So there’s that too. I didn’t really
thought about that in those terms even
want to talk about diagnosis in the book
though I had written a memoir and had
because it wasn’t part of our experience. We
been teaching memoir writing in Portland
always knew that she was pretty much
Tor seven years. I
crazy. But we didn’t deal with the mental
I think it’s really bigger than that. Ideally,
health system or anything likethat.
the people you write about in a memoir
aren’t going to read it. That’s not who it’s .
for. It’s not about processing our
S.Z.: What does, it mean for life to bear
relationships with each other. It’s about ..
witness to death?
having a conversation with people who
weren’t involved.
A.G.: We have this cultural fantasy about
My daughter is a pretty good sport about
dying with .dignity, that taking care of people
my writing in Hip Mama, but the stories
as they are dying will be this hard but
aren’t for her. They are for other parents,
ultimately beautiful thing. We imagine that
for the, most part. They are for other people
relationships will be healed and everyone
who are going through hard, times or even
will die the way We imagine some Tibetan
fast, times.
Buddhist master would. My Facebook
Did you know that like something like 30
friends kept sending “16ve and light” and
percent of Americans are taking care of |
talking about the beauty of death. But for
disabled or dying relatives at any given
me it wasn’t like that. Death was ugly. And
moment? But you very rarely hear people
undignified. Not. everyone is ready to die
talk about it in an honest way.
when their time comes. Very little was
I think it was kind of a narcissistic
resolved, My mother died the way she’d
question (that my mother asked), knowing -
lived — mean and complicated.
that she would appear in the book. ‘What
does this have to do with me? Are you angry
S!Z.: You have such a resilient spirit. Where
at me?’ |
do you think that comes from?
So the answer to the. question is kind of
both, but the answer is also kind of neither..
A.G.: The upside of being abused as a kid
The book is, of course, all about Eve - I
is that you do develop a resilience and you
wouldn’t want to take that away from her -
do develop a kind of fearlessness. I’m 40
but it’s not for her.
now. I can say that I like living, my life-this
way. You Wonder if it’s the wisest way to live
’ $.1.: Atonepoint in the book, early on in
your mother’s care, you make the comment, “It your life to be likej Well, if all else fails, it’ll
make a good story. So far, that’s served me
boggled my mind to think that people poorer
well enough.
than me dealt with this kind of thing every
Ariel Gore will be
a t the new
Reading Frenzy on
Mississippi on
Sunday, March 2
at 4 p.m. for the
relaunch of Hip
Mama and then at
Powell’s on
Burnside, 7:30
p.m. March 3 to
promote her
memoir, “The End
of Eve.”