Justus Ballard

Plagued by Beauty:
An Interview with Eloise Klein Healy

It’s been said that this woman can save people’s lives. When asked how she felt about the accusation that she was God, Eloise Klein Healy shook her head, smiled, sighed, and shrugged—simultaneously! I can’t imagine anyone needing further proof than that.

So she’s not really twenty feet tall, she doesn’t control the weather, and she can’t shoot laser beams out of her eyes. And, as far as I know, her touch has yet to cure anyone of being unpublished. (That didn’t prevent me from kissing a little ass, though—better safe than sorry.)

But she does write some damn fine poetry. Her last two books of poetry, Passings (Red Hen Press) and Artemis in Echo Park (Firebrand Books) were Lambda Book Award finalists. And in addition to her own writing, she’s dedicated a good portion of her life to helping others find their own voices. For the past seven years, she’s been involved in building, opening, running, and teaching at Antioch University Los Angeles’ Low-Residency MFA Program, which offers degrees in Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, and Poetry.

I got a chance to speak with Eloise at Antioch’s June 2003 residency. The usual maelstrom of writerly activity normal to these residencies was augmented by the war in Iraq, a couple of landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, and an announcement by the Canadian government that it would strive to legitimize same-sex marriages.

JB: Let’s talk about the Antioch MFA program. This was your baby. How did you feel when the program opened its doors five years ago?
EKH: It was terrifying. I had a complete meltdown and thought, “What if nobody comes? There’re supposed to be twenty-two people coming, and what if they all call tomorrow morning and say, ‘I’m going to Bennington’?” Oh my god… I was so anxious; I just couldn’t believe that people would show up. But there they were. Oh, boy. Good thing they came.
JB: It seems like most writing programs go through a period of establishing a reputation before they achieve the sort of enrollment success you have here at Antioch…
EKH: Yeah, you go slowly, you get five people, and then you get seven… we got twenty-two the first time out. I think there was a need. All the low-residency programs at that time were on the east coast, and three of them were in Vermont. There are a lot of people in the West who have some anxiety about crossing the continent. It’s a big country. And to go from San Francisco or Los Angeles to Vermont… it’s just not the same, culturally.
JB: Most MFA programs, or arts programs in general, are very competitive… just under the thin veneer of politeness is a lot of backstabbing and scrabbling to the top. One of the most interesting things about the Antioch program is that you don’t see any of that at all.
EKH: That was a conscious decision on our part. We don’t reward any of that backstabbing behavior. It starts with the faculty. If the faculty set themselves up as a hierarchy, then the students are going to model them. If someone shows up with that sort of attitude (here she makes a “They’re outta here” gesture with her thumb), they won’t last very long. There are people who probably would think I’m crazy, who would tell me, “You don’t know what the real world is like.” But I do know. I’ve been there. The art world is extremely competitive. Developing writers and artists need a community. They need a place and a group of people who will provide support and encouragement. There will be plenty of time for them to get beat up later.
JB: Let’s get personal. You were married for a time to a man…
EKH: I met my ex-husband when I was teaching at Immaculate Heart College. He had returned to school to finish his degree. Now, does it not seem I have had a long history with people returning to school? I felt him to be a completely different kind of man, one interested in other people for who they were, not for pre-set categories for who they should be. So, even in those heady and anti-establishment times, we got married. And about four years later, I met a woman who literally turned my world over. At first, I had no way to explain the reaction I had to meeting her—a two-by-four between the eyes—and then very quickly the feeling fell into place in the history of my feelings. Suddenly, much of my past made sense. The friendships, the ways I didn’t fit in, although I was a very high-achieving kind of gal. It took me another four years to put all the pieces together and decide that I had to change my life in a very drastic way. I couldn’t stay married; it would not have been fair. I had to find out what my attraction to women had always been.
JB: At the time you came out, you were already well into establishing your career as a poet. How did that change things?
EKH: I was right back to the basic questions. What’s real, what isn’t, what can you do? And I had to come out in public. I had always been the good girl, student body president. I had to start from scratch. Luckily there were a lot of role models. I was spending a great amount of time at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, and I’d met a lot of lesbian artists and writers. Once I definitely was out, it changed everything I knew. For instance, I’d always known about Gertrude Stein as a person who influenced Hemingway. I had to reread everything, to make all these new connections in my head about her relationship with Toklas, their being a lesbian couple.
JB: What’s the story on The Woman’s Building?
EKH: My first contact with The Woman’s Building was in 1975. I attended a conference called “Women's Words.” It took the top of my head off—there were over 300 women writers in attendance. Here I had been schlubbing along with not a clue about how to be a poet, and suddenly I’m in the midst of a whole flock of them. I had a community, something I had never had before. So, I got involved with The Building, doing what we all did then. I learned how to hang sheet rock to make a new classroom. I taught a course on Gertrude Stein in the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was a member of a committee that ran The Women Writers Series. I took courses, too. Letterpress printing from Susan E. King of Paradise Press, who eventually published my third book. Also, my second book was published by two women who had started a journal called rara avis, and subsequently a press called Books of a Feather. Eventually, I was on the Board of Directors of The Woman's Building for many years. It was a transformative experience to work in the world’s only freestanding feminist cultural institution—meaning we had our own building, made our own money, paid our own bills, struggled uphill most of the time, and made an indelible historical mark.
JB: Transformative experiences… that could be your motto.
EKH: Yeah, I’m in the change business. I’ve always been interested, in my educational philosophy, in the relationship between the subject and the student. I don’t think education is about the subject, I think it’s about the student. And getting the student to change.
JB: I heard a story that your work was recently rejected by an anthology because of your bio, of all things. Care to comment or elaborate?
EKH: Well, this was a strange occurrence. I sent a poem in—it was accepted—but when the letter from the editors came back, it said they couldn’t print my bio because the book was for a high school text—and they didn't think it would be wise for me to be described as “a lesbian writer.” Fortunately, I was out of the country when the letter came, and I missed their deadline for return. I don’t think my reply would have been very reasonable. The call for submissions was an “open call” with no restrictions on what kind of people could submit. Obviously, the poem was all right. They did offer to publish it. The poet, however, was not all right.
JB: I understand you’re also involved in something called Eco-Arts, “an ecotourism/arts venture”…
EKH: Eco-Arts is about developing awareness of the environmental situation. This happens on two fronts. We take small groups of people to environmentally sensitive areas and let them see for themselves what is to be protected. We’ve mainly been going to Costa Rica, but next year we're going to the Galapagos and Ecuador. Colleen, my partner, is of the mind that any change in awareness has to be made at the most basic physical level. Charts and graphs won’t do it. People need to have a first hand experience—a change of perception—to understand the threats to the environment. My part of the bargain is to structure writing exercises to give people a way to feel the fit between themselves and where they are. Most people walk around with many untested ideas in their heads. For example, one exercise we do asks people to locate nature. Not easy—there are many philosophical bends in this road. Are people “in nature,” outside of “nature,” part of “nature”?
JB: You don’t seem to do anything half-assed.
EKH: Well, I don’t dust too well.
JB: I read an interesting article in last month’s Harper’s (“A Gospel According to the Earth” by Jack Hitt) which posited that environmentalism is replacing organized religion. Even secular humanists need something bigger than themselves to revere/care for/provide a worldview, and science, long derided as spiritually vacant, has provided a blueprint for a “religion” of the future.
EKH: I haven’t read it, but I know Colleen would agree with me that the world and all that's in it is our “religion.” We are hoping to serve that spirituality. Perhaps we’re pantheists!
JB: So how about this political climate?
EKH: This morning, we won the affirmative action case in the Supreme Court, 5 to 4 (Grutter v. Bollinger). A slim margin, but it’s better than 5 to 4 against you, as we all know. But there are a lot of people with no moral compass who are now running things. And we’re all advocating for equal rights for marriage and other rights, but at the same time there’s pressure from the other side. And it’s not simply to throw us all in jail. It’s much more insidious. The agenda of the anti-gay faction is to move into areas like science and research—you get somebody doing research on a topic related to transgender health concerns, for example, and a committee comes to the campus wanting to see everything else that professor has written, who they are, what they’ve done in the past. It’s nothing overt, but it makes professors avoid doing research on sensitive topics. No academic needs his or her ass in a sling with a federal agency. So we’ve entered a new era of institutional pressure. Rather than bop a gay guy on the head, they really are willing to come to your house and make you feel “observed”—as much as they claim they do nothing of the sort.
JB: The Poets Against the War campaign garnered a good deal of attention, and no small amount of derision (from left-wingers as well as the right). Granted, every citizen should feel obligated to speak out against things they feel are wrong—but in the ongoing aftermath of Gulf War II, what are your thoughts on the influence of writers on politics, and vice versa?
EKH: Writers have influence on people, and in turn, on politics. It was a stunning revelation that Poets Against The War would raise such an incredible response. I don’t know if it said more about the power of the Internet or the depth of unease about the political moves of the Bush Administration in their drive to war. I think there has always been a tie between the arts and politics, even though we don't often see it as overtly in the U.S. because we have this weird split between the arts and life in our cultural paradigm. But my feeling is “the powers that be” are more comfortable when people feel that arts are divorced from life and politics. That art is somehow removed from the business of daily concerns. I’m thinking of somebody like Neruda who spent a great deal of time in the diplomatic corps. How, in fact, his life as a political man and a man of letters was seamless. I find it very interesting that lately in the U.S. we see more actors going into politics…
JB: Let’s talk about our President. I’ve heard at least one person claim that he’s a spoiled rich kid with no concept of personal responsibility who should be “repeatedly kicked in the nuts.” On the other hand, there are those who feel he’s a religious zealot hell-bent on destroying all that’s good and pure in the world; crushing people’s hopes and dreams; grinding baby kittens, adorable puppies, and other sweet things under the heel of his cowboy boot. And then there are those who believe he’s only pretending to be stupid to attract votes. I could go on and on, but what’s your take on this guy?
EKH: The current president is a member of a firmly entrenched oligarchical American family with enormous investments in and ties to oil production and the financial markets. He is not a “cowboy” except in presentation and staging. He is a dangerous man with dangerous ideas about the separation of church and state. He was put in place by the Supreme Court. He is the front man for a cadre of very aggressive and hard knuckle imperialists, among them Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. And oh, yes, lurking in the background and occasionally coming up out of the ooze to suggest wacko ideas is the completely maniacal John Poindexter. Did I make myself clear? I could go on and on, too.
JB: As much as I’d like to bash Bush all day, the editor of Gertrude reminded me that interviews of this sort are customarily obligated to include the following three questions: One, what are your favorite recent books, authors, or developments in the world of words?
EKH: I am really glad that Anne Carson came on the scene a few years ago. I think her books are dynamite because she is so smart. I have been completely overwhelmed by discovering Po-Chu-i, even though he’s from the 9th century. And I can hardly wait to see what moving to Los Angeles will do to The Atlantic Monthly.
JB: Two, what is at the core of your poetry?
EKH: Beauty is at the core of my poetry. Perception, beauty, and sound. Communicating these things. All of these are intimately connected with my poetics and my politics.
JB: And three, who is your muse?
EKH: She is the one who stands at the dark doorway.
JB: And one more that should be included in these types of interviews: Who, in your estimation, rocks?
EKH: Queen Latifah.
JB: Going back to beauty for a moment… in a lot of your work, and especially in Passing, you take some very dark subject matter—for instance, the death of your father, deaths of friends, AIDS—and write beautifully about it. Do these subjects deserve beauty?
EKH: Human beings are plagued by beauty. We look for it everywhere—not always as a palliative—but just because we can’t help it. How do we deal with the fact that we are dazzled by beautiful things, beautiful words about horrible things? We have to bring the best we can to these horrible things, just so they won’t get swept under the rug. We need to look at them.