1. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? How did you decide upon your
future career?
“As of the fifth grade, when we had an assignment to write our autobiography, I can
remember that I wanted to be a radio singer standing in front of a microphone. For some reason I
pictured myself with red hair—which I have never had. And so I do know that at age 14 or so,
when I spoke with a professor, a family friend, he asked me what I was interested in, and I told
him that I was interested in language and in comparison of languages. He said: ‘So you’re going
to be a philologist!’ Later on, I understood that he actually was a folklorist, though I had never
known the term before, and he specialized in Turkish and Chinese folklore. I do believe that my
interest in languages has had a very deep effect on my interest in studying folklore. When I was a
kid in the 1940s and early 1950s, we all sang Burl Ives songs in the car. Later on, in the late
1950s and 1960s, I was introduced to a group of local urban revival singers in Salt Lake City,
and under their guidance, I became able to do public performance of other types of folk songs.
Some urban revival singers were attempting to be more true to origin, and we called ourselves
“authentic” as opposed to “commercial” like the Kingston Trio. While attending college from
1961-1966, I took a folklore course from Barre Toelken and also a Chaucer class. Those two
classes really moved me, and I was thrilled to realize that folklore was an academic field of study
and that folklore studies emerged from medieval studies; it was a very energizing period for me.
I was drawn ahead by my fascination—love—for medieval things. When Barre asked me what I
wanted to do when I graduated, I didn’t have any idea. I had been thinking about law school or
marriage, and he said ‘Why don’t you come up to the University of Oregon at Eugene?’ He gave
me two pieces of paper to fill out and send to the University of Oregon’s graduate admissions
office, one white and one green, for the fall of 1966, and it turns out one of them was an
application for a $6,000 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) fellowship. That’s how loose
and casual graduate school was in those days. I’m not idle; I’m a hard worker, but I have been
unbelievably lucky in the way things fell out for me. In the end, I just loved school and I wasn’t
even thinking about a job; I was quite unfocused in terms of the future, but I knew that I just
loved what I was doing. I got an offer to teach at Salisbury State College, and that’s where I
spent my entire career--from 1973 until 2004. So I guess what I’m saying is that I didn’t really
decide what I wanted my career to be; I was driven forward by my love of the subject that I was
studying, and by some wonderful convergence of the stars I got a job teaching those subjects.
The job was in the English department because my PhD is in English.”
2. Were you often surrounded by an environment of storytelling as a child?
“We did a lot of collective singing within my family. I don’t believe I was ‘surrounded’
by storytelling, but I do remember particular books that really molded me. The first was The
Tenggren Tell It Again book (1942), and my early memories were of the illustrations in that
book, by Gustaf Tenggren. My brother also had a 1920s book of Russian fairytales, translated by
R. Nisbet Bain from the 19th-century collections of Afanas’ev, that had very elaborate drawings
by Noel L. Nisbet. I also had the Marshall Field children’s book series called Childraft; I had an
edition from the 1940s. Finally, there was a wall-poster that was called The Land of MakeBelieve and it was sort of a whole universe of storytelling all in one 24” by 36” format. The Land
of Make-Believe afforded endless hours of pleasure just looking at all the characters and
something of their stories. For example, there was a story that I never knew anything about until
I grew up and studied folklore; it was called ‘The Babes in the Woods that were Covered with
Leaves,’ and there was also a notation about a story called ‘The Wandering Jew,’ which in later
editions of that poster was renamed ‘The Wanderer.’
We were read to a lot, we did a lot of our own reading, and we looked a lot at these
wonderful illustrations both on the maps and in the books. So, I can say to that degree, I was
surrounded by storytelling. I started reading quite young and my mother didn’t need to read to
me, but my brother loved having my mother read to him and he learned better that way.”
3. In ‘A Response to the Symposium,’ you mention that you were raised as a “wellsocialized girl” and that you struggle with this as an adult now. Would you please expand
upon this?
“I was just an obedient child; I was not a troublemaker or very boisterous. I was the
middle child, and I was peacemaker and organizer. What I meant by being a “well-socialized
girl” is that I was brought up—and I’m not meaning to saying that I would have been prevented
from asking questions—but I was basically an obedient, docile, and tractable child. The reason I
struggled with it as an adult: I realized in graduate school that all of the values with which I had
been inculcated were patriarchal values. It blew me away. What I was struggling with when I
wrote that piece in 1974 was the feminist concepts which really made me want to rebel.
The marriage that my mother made with my dad was a very conventional 1930s
marriage; she envisioned nothing more than to be his helpmate, but this meant giving up a great
deal. She had great talent as a poet and a painter. I’ll tell you one thing about my family:
Everyone in my father’s family graduated from college in the 1930s. My mother and one of her
sisters also were sent to the university. I had a lot of female role models, but every one of them
made conventional marriages.
I never thought too far beyond the moment in terms of a career and marriage. As a
teenager and young woman, I thought I was heterosexual and I did have boyfriends, but it was
hard for me to imagine being married to any of them; I didn’t picture a little cottage covered with
vines. At the time I fell in love with a woman, in 1979, I had been divorced for a year after a
marriage of 10 years. I had been tenured and promoted once, to Associate Professor, and I kept
really quiet about my sexuality because I did not want to jeopardize my chances for promotion to
full professor, which I did achieve in 1985. What finally prompted me to go public on campus
was my position as faculty advisor to the emerging gay-lesbian student association and I watched
the things that happened to these students—getting beaten up in the dorms and having people
write scurrilous notes on their doors—and I knew that I could not sit by and let that happen
without making a public statement about myself. So I came out in 1991 after being divorced for
twelve years.”
4. What was your favorite folktale as a child? And now?
“I would never have been able to pick; I don’t really have a favorite of anything. A lot of
adult folklorists will be able to speak of a folktale that was a model for them as a child, but I
don’t feel that way.
I love medieval folk tradition, though. My favorite story in the Canterbury Tales is the
Nun’s Priest Tale about a patriarchal rooster whose little wife gets the better of him intellectually
and he doesn’t even realize it.”
5. What can you tell me about your involvement in Utah’s urban folk revival and, later,
with the Utah “Urban Pioneers” project?
“In the early 1960s, I became involved with an urban revival group in Utah—although no
one used the term ‘urban revival’ back then—but there was a period between 1961 and 1966 that
I was very active with folk music. I was so involved that I never went anywhere without my
guitar! I was in a group with Bruce “Utah” Phillips and Dave Roylance called Polly and the
Valley Boys from 1964 until I left Utah for graduate school in 1966. The Urban Pioneers Oral
History project that I’m involved with now was actually launched almost four decades later, as I
was retiring from my job at Salisbury. In January 2004, I was a reader—upon request of the Utah
State University Press—of the manuscript of this book Folklore in Utah, edited by Dave Stanley.
There was virtually no mention of Rosalie Sorrels and her husband Jim or about Utah Phillips; I
was outraged because I had been involved with that group four decades before. I was shocked
that there was no mention of them in this anthology about folklore in Utah, but what I learned is
that the people who contributed to that anthology were asked to deal only with documentary
sources. The second thing was, no one in that stable of writers had direct experience or
knowledge with the 1960s Urban Folk Revival era. I realized that the reason there was nothing
on that era was that there was no documentation—there were just a few scraps in archives. If
someone did not document that era, when we were all gone there would be no record of us. I
have been involved in the Urban Pioneers Oral History project ever since, and I’ve realized that
it was a very significant era. I have all this research for the project, and sooner or later I’m going
to wrap all the material up and donate it to research institutions for other people to access.”
6. You mentioned in an email that you are particularly busy these upcoming weeks; what
are some of the goals that you are still working towards?
“I never stopped doing folklore. Again, I am currently involved with gathering research
and documentation for the “Urban Pioneers” project. A paper that I just delivered to the Western
States Folklore Society at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles is a branch of
that project about the folksingers in Salt Lake City in the late 1950s and their relation to thenPolice Chief W. Cleon Skousen. I had my own memory of being in Salt Lake City when he was
chief of police and the kinds of harassments he directed towards folksingers, and Skousen is the
same man whose writings have been posthumously elevated to this high level by the right-wing
radio commentator Glenn Beck. I also organize a monthly folklorists’ luncheon in Salt Lake. I
find that being retired does not mean that I have less to do; it simply means that I deploy my time
in different ways. I do choral singing now very seriously, and I belong to a highly-regarded
chorus out here in Salt Lake City. We do several concerts a year, and it’s an honor to be not only
a member of that chorus, but to also be the secretary of the chorus board I’m also the secretary of
an organization called SAGE, Services and Advocacy for LGBT Elders—a national social
service and advocacy program. I’m a social activist.”
7. What do you believe you have the most of: talent, intelligence, education, or persistence?
How has it helped in your life—either personal or professional?
“The talent component is seen in my involvement with folk and choral singing; I do
believe that my ability to sing is a gift that I’ve been given. My PhD has recently given me the
opportunity to edit a book of my mother’s poems; the reason I was asked to do this was because
of my doctorate—just having the education was a plus. I really believe that it’s a mixture of
talent, intelligence, education, and persistence.”
8. What else can you tell me that would help me understand your most fundamental beliefs
and values about life and the world, the spiritual dimensions of your life, or your
philosophy on life? What is your best advice on living?
“Pain is inevitable but misery is optional. I avoid misery by recognizing that I don’t have
any power over anything but my own responses to things that happen outside myself.”
9. In ‘A Response to the Symposium,’ you mention the importance of two organizations:
HOW and NOW. Looking back, what persons, groups of persons, or organization/insitute
has had the greatest positive influence on your life and your research?
“HOW, ‘Happiness of Women,’ was a short-lived organization of right-wing women
formed to subvert NOW in the late 1960s; HOW held the belief that women exist to please their
husbands. The organizer of HOW, Beverly La Haye, is still producing activities for right-wing
women, e.g., “Women Aglow.”
In terms of the folklore and politics aspect of my life, the American Folklore Society has
been the greatest support for me; it has been my solid rock. I have been a member of AFS for all
of my professional life—40 years.”
10. Do you believe that it is possible to separate the concepts of folklore and feminism? In
other words, do you believe that it is possible to study folklore without taking into
consideration the feminist aspect of it? And vice versa?
“Your own experience with folklore study has been exclusively within a feminist context,
but folklore exists everywhere. Most of the works that I have published do not nod towards
feminism. The majority is about local traditions; it wouldn’t necessarily be fitting to use the term
‘feminism’ in the presence of most of the people whom I have studied in the field. When you
think about the Western culture that we live in, the first values that we learn are patriarchal
values. A feminist must unlearn those values and develop a new way of thinking; learning to
read against the grain. And that’s wonderful! But most of society doesn’t know anything about
that. If you’re doing fieldwork with women who have been brought up in patriarchal culture, the
chances that they will know anything about the term ‘feminism’ are very slim. Or if they know
of the term, it may be negative for them, in somewhat the same category as ‘hippie’ or ‘lesbian.’”
11. From your experience of studying folklore, have you come across any culture that
promotes matriarchy? Rather than the perpetuation of patriarchal folklore, is there a
culture that does the opposite?
“I don’t think it’s possible to think about the term ‘feminism’ except in an adversarial
way within patriarchal culture. I do believe that if you study Native American cultures—Navajo
culture is what I learned about from my mentor Barre Toelken—there exists not matriarchy but a
strong female presence. For example, Navajo tribal leaders are male, but they do not make
decisions without consulting a council of female elders. I don’t think the Navajo are unique in
this. Native American cultures, in general—because most of them are grounded in huntergatherer cultural principles stemming from the Paleolithic—typically have a high regard for the
female. I’ve stopped using the term ‘matriarchy’ because in extant cultures that are not
patriarchal, you don’t get the opposite; what you get is a modulation using a way of solving
problems and organizing a society that is not based on the dominance of one gender over the
other.
12. Several years ago, the American Folklore Society lost a significant member, Karen
Baldwin. Is there anything that you would like to expand upon concerning her influence on
folklore?
“Karen Baldwin was a brilliant woman and she was my closest friend for over three
decades, from my first meeting her at AFS in 1973 until her untimely death from cancer in 2007.
The term ‘family folklore,’ which she developed in the early 1970s while theorizing the
dissertation research she had conducted among members of her own extended family for the
University of Pennsylvania, was revolutionary for the time, encompassing the concept that the
first folk group to which we belong is our family. This idea is a commonplace in folklore today,
but no one had ever articulated it before Karen did. It was inadvertently shared with other Penn
folklore graduate students before the dissertation was completed and before Karen had had a
chance to publish through regular channels; the term ‘family folklore’ was taken up by others
and it caught on very quickly. The appropriation of Karen’s theory was not ill-intentioned, but it
hurt her deeply.”
14. What else can you tell me to help me further understand your life story?
“Being a passionate person has a lot to do with why I do what I do. I am not lazy, and
because I am uneasy about unstructured time I load up my schedule. I live my life with energy
and with complete joy and gratitude.”