You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Mike Silverblad, and this is bookworm.

Today, my guest in the studio is Paula Gunn Allen, an anthologist who has put together a collection of traditional tales and

contemporary writing by Native American women called Spider Woman's Granddaughters, which has just

been published in paperback by Fawcett.

Tell me, how did this collection, what was its origins?

Beacon Press brought it out in Hardback, and my editor, I had done a book called The Sacred Hoop with Beacon,

the subtitles recovering the feminine in American Indian traditions. And since I'm a poet and a novelist and a critic and a scholar

and so forth and so on, and the Sacred Hoop was essays about Native American women's literature

as well as some other kinds of things.

Joanne Wyckoff at Beacon called and said, would you like to do an anthology of American Indian

Women's Short Stories? Would I like to, listen? And I had just been thinking about it,

maybe a couple, three weeks before, I had been doing a review of a book by Beverly Hungry Wolf and her husband.

I can't remember the name, Children of the Son. And in it, they had done some stories that had been

written at Carlisle Indian School earlier, I guess, in this century. My great-grandmother had gone there.

And I didn't know that there were these stories that had been published in the newspaper at the Indian school, but they were

very moving, wonderful stories. So I was thinking, gee, wouldn't it be grand to be able to put

together an anthology like this, you know, and of these stories. Well, I never was able to locate any more of the stories,

and so none of them find their way into this collection.

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