In Life as in Writing, Susan Griffin Addresses Large Themes

Susan Griffin’s voice is clear but just soft enough to demand absolute attention as she talks by telephone about how chronic, disabling illness has affected her life and work for the last six years.

A Berkeley writer who will be the Laguna Poets Winter Festival reader Saturday, Griffin has never hesitated to take on life-and-death matters in her work. Until recently, however, she hadn’t had to address them quite so directly in her life.

Griffin’s nonfiction books, poetry and plays examine the world from a feminist perspective. She’s written about pornography, rape and human relationships with nature. Her new nonfiction book, “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War,” will be published by Doubleday next year.

In 1975 she won an Emmy award for her televised play “Voices,” and she’s now revising a new one-person play, “One Two Three . . . Loss,” which actress Ruth Zaporah will perform in Berkeley this fall.

Griffin has had a fair amount of writering success. Yet she must still struggle to make ends meet. “The assumption is I’m financially well off because I’m recognized,” she said, but the reality is that publishers’ advances for serious writing are small, and more grants are available for younger writers than for “established” ones.

In past years Griffin has supported herself as a waitress, Teletype operator, house painter, assistant magazine editor, artists’ model, actor, director and teacher.

Such jobs are no longer possible, for she’s one of a growing number of people with chronic fatigue immune dysfunctional syndrome (a recently discovered illness in which the body’s immune system is suppressed). The disease can sometimes make it difficult for her to cross a room, much less teach, although she still occasionally takes on private students.

Yet, despite a recent worsening of her illness, Griffin will perform in Laguna because “I like to read. I consider my poetry meant to be read aloud,” she said. She plans to read from her most recent book of poems (“Unremembered Country,” 1987) as well as some newer poems, excerpts from the new play and bits of “A Chorus of Stones.”

Griffin feels that the recent proliferation of immune system-suppressing ailments (such as AIDS) results from the deterioration of the earth’s environment, a deterioration that has not been examined enough.

“A lot of my work has dealt with denial, the psychology of denial and the kind of schizoid division of the self into a physical and a spiritual part,” she said. “We say, ‘I’m not a body, I’m a soul,’ as if the body could be thrown away.”

Griffin says that she, too, denied her illness for several years, despite her often-expressed idea that “sensuality and bodily knowledge carry the most profound significance.”

It helps, she said, to live in the Berkeley hills, a community where she has deep roots and where she can maintain her connection to nature because “I live in a place with a lot of trees around. And of course nature isn’t just outside, nature is also in my own body.”

Griffin was born in Los Angeles. Her childhood, which she wrote about in a still-unfinished, autobiographical play called “Thanksgiving,” was hard. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and after that “I was moved around from one member of the family to another.”

At 16 she was living with her father, a fireman, when he was killed in an accident. Subsequently she was adopted by a friend’s parents. Her adoptive father, a painter and sculptor, demonstrated by example that an artist could have “a viable way of life,” Griffin said.

In 1960 Griffin moved to the Bay Area. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Francisco State University, studying writing with Kay Boyle, Robert Creeley and Josephine Miles. “I think it’s critically important for young writers to study with established writers,” she said, “to have the example of someone who has that sensibility and way of life, and see they’re normal people who brush their teeth and get up and work, like a bricklayer does.”

Her own work began to be published around 1970.

A self-described “radical feminist,” she’s written for Ms., Ramparts and many other publications, and she’s published three books of nonfiction, five of poetry, a play and a collection of selected work.

Griffin’s writing has won praise over the years. Critic Valerie Miner wrote: “Griffin moves us from pain to anger to communion with and celebration of the survival of woman and nature.” In “American Women Writers” critic Kathleen Klein stated that “the power of Griffin’s work comes from the clarity of her perceptions of the role, conditions, existence and aspirations of women.” And poet Adrienne Rich has called her “one of the wisest and most lucid writers in America today.”

Her writing has been influenced by African-American poetry, jazz, haiku, Asian philosophy and French poetry and prose poems, Griffin said, by the women’s movement and by the fact she was born on the West Coast. “People make fun of California, and I do too, but the truth is a lot of really important thought has been initiated here. It’s a place where the whole mind-body dichotomy has been challenged,” she said.

Married in 1966, she was divorced in 1970. She raised her daughter Rebecca on her own. Rebecca, who renamed herself Chloe a few years ago, now lives with her fiance while attending Mills College.

The theme of women being silenced by cultural forces recurs throughout Griffin’s writing. She resisted writing about her sexuality shortly after her divorce, when she was “newly lesbian.”

“I wanted to protect my daughter, and I had some questions about child custody. . . . It did have a very dampening effect on my work. If you’re being so very careful not to speak about who you love and what you’re feeling, it radiates out into the rest of your life. You end up censoring things without even thinking about it, before they even reach the stage of consciousness,” she said.

Once she allowed herself to begin describing her sexuality, “I remember it as this incredible burst of energy, and joy, and anger,” she said.

She feels that societal changes of the last two decades have made it possible for some, but by no means all, women to be less silent about their lives. “I think we’re just beginning to open up and understand what (sexist) oppression is. That situation has not changed for many women, in many ways it’s worse than it was before,” she said.

Griffin’s new nonfiction book, “A Chorus of Stones,” draws from a long look at nuclear policy, at “the effects of gender issues, family structure and intimacy on war,” she said.

To write it, she studied existing literature and interviewed many individuals around the world, in the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan. Like her earlier nonfiction books, “Stones” draws undisguisedly on her own reactions to the material.

The book is “very hard to describe, it doesn’t fit in a category,” she said. “I’m talking about states of mind, states of body. The only way to approach it is in more artistic language.”

Her new play, “One Two Three . . . Loss” is “a play about encounters with death,” Griffin said. “I had a very close friend with whom I was living. She was killed very suddenly in 1985. The experience was very profound for me. She’s hardly in it except that she dies. (The play) goes to a place more primal” than the one specific death. “I’m looking at the direct experience of death from the point of view of the one who doesn’t die.” The play also draws on Griffin’s own heightened fears of mortality since the onset of her illness.

Many of the poems of “Unremembered Country” deal with loss, but they also echo with the need “to love this world.” The poems she’s written since publishing the book, Griffin said, address “the ecological situation.”

Her writing draws on her life, but it isn’t straight autobiography. “I think unless you are really writing an autobiography, it’s important to look at things from your life as material, but not as things you have to be faithful to,” she said. “I don’t make up things in poetry. Everything there is literally true, (but) it’s sort of the case that you may choose to tell this moment, and then leap 500 years and tell this (other) moment. I don’t bother to explain, I let the music, the association, the juxtaposition do that.”

Despite her reduced energies, the writer tries to work regularly. Soon, she wants to begin writing some nonfiction “about the experience of illness,” as well as continuing to write poetry and plays.

“If you go to your study every day, even if you just put in an hour, then your mind is working when you’re not there,” Griffin said. “You can’t depend just on flashes of inspiration, there’s an awful lot of spadework with writing. Writing is like having a relationship. If there’s a particular regularity it allows things to open up and unfold.

“It may feel that not much is happening, it goes on that way for six or seven days, or even two weeks, and then I’ll have a click, and it’s illuminating,” she said. “All those days I worked fed into it, worked up to it. (Writing) requires a lot of stick-to-itiveness, faith, and daily work.”

Susan Griffin will read from her work at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Forum Theatre, 650 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door.

I went very far away from life

with its torpor. I was out there

in the ethereal air

the cold rush against my face

was exciting

and even more

there was a kind of star that broke

my heart and made it wide

as space itself.

Now I have fallen again

and I rush arms open like a lover

or prodigal daughter.

Streets, gleam of pavement after rain,

my very human thoughts, my very human wants,

those old songs just now I am writing again

I love you, I love you again.

(Reprinted by permission from “Unremembered Country,” Copper Canyon Press, 1987.)