First off, congratulations on the twenty-five year anniversary of your groundbreaking novel, Lithium for Medea. I know I'm not alone in saying that your book was a profound influence on my work. Your three-decade long career is impressive: eight books comprised of novels, story collection and poetry, articles and fiction in the glossy mags. You emerged in 1979 with a book vigilant with metaphor, philosophy and quiet rage. Decidedly different from the ardent minimalist guard led by Raymond Carver, your voice was distinctly rich, your prose luscious and dark, your landscape Los Angeles. Tell me about writing then, during an era that was dominated by the stark and severe.

Los Angeles was a tabula rasa. You walk out the door into a colossus of yellow hibiscus, sea-breeze of seductive star jasmine and Santa Ana winds that blow a hot Spanish wind into your molecular structure. We were a sleepy Mexican fishing village rocked by an Okie beat. It was the end of the trail, poised at the edge of the implausible Pacific. We were where the Greyhound ended, next stop China. The larger NY critical apparatus had no effect on us. As a California writer, one always feels outside the Empire, particularly 2 decades ago. Lithium For Medea was born from the last lyrical spasm that was the 60's, in its final manifestation, the Venice canals of the 70's, draped in magenta bougainvillea. My aesthetics and feminist politics were born in the 60's, but I am 20 years younger than Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion. I really came of age as a writer in the 70's of L.A. After 7 years in Berkeley, I returned to L.A. and was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop. John Doe and Exene were students of mine. The scene was intoxicating. Poets and punk rockers were performing together. I had originally run away to Berkeley to become a beatnik, but by the time I got there at 15, they were gone, replaced by hippies. By the time I got back to L.A. the only bohemian scene was a vestige in Venice.

I wrote poetry for six years and used the poems as the spine of Lithium For Medea. I arbitrarily picked 14 poems written in the same voice, about my love affair with a Chonard painter and our love affair with injecting cocaine. It's the first novel in English with a heroine on heroin. It's also a feminist statement that I must address. While male writers are given inviolate protection by the intensity of their writing, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Ginsberg and Kerouac, women are traditionally dismissed on the basis of autobiographical elements. When men etch lives of disturbing chaos, abandon children, collect divorces, drink and drug to excess, we absolve them. We say they are engaging in the traditional behaviors that define the tormented mythic artist. When women dare to delve into these regions, we call them mentally ill and dismiss their achievements. From Edna St. Vincent Millay, through Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, the female who dares to experiment and inhabit the page with the same ruthless and subversive intentions as males are immediately deleted from the larger male dominated region we call literature.

My battle has been fought on the barricades for 30 years over this double standard. When we talk about reality, we're only talking about what men have seen, measured and defined and what other men have said about them. Women have barely entered the page. We must remember that women have only been allowed to vote for less than a century. Our access to the page as we truly are, with the same defects, extravagant passions and criminal impulses as males is still unacceptable. In the three decades I have written about women drug addicts, single mothers, promiscuity, drug fueled hallucinatory incantory prose, I have been disappointed by how little progress women have made on the page. They are still constricted to behave as good girls. They're college professors or the wives of college professors, housewives, librarians and teachers. There are few female experimental stylists, which is the highest range of the writing hierarchy, the upper strata. I write a punk high art so airborne, they should include oxygen masks with my books.

Ray Carver, like Hawthorne's dark forest, never had anything to do with the physical or emotional landscape of California. Los Angeles was a terrific climate to experiment in, since the larger (NY) critical apparatus wasn't paying any attention. The idea of art by an indigenous resident of Los Angeles was considered de facto impossible by the regional newspapers and colleges, so one was liberated of all external influences. I've never liked Ray Carver, by the way. Recently, I reread him and still find his minimalism irrelevant. He doesn't have any depth or edge. I find him a grim whine. In terms of punk, the bohemian scene gradually became edgier. We didn't identify as punk, but we lived a punk life style. By the time I had published Lithium For Medea, I was no longer attracted to the minimalism of punk.

In Los Angeles, we took our literary and cultural reference points from south of the border and Asia. Corporate America wants to bury the 70's, as if the whole experience with experimentation was so sordid, no art came from it. That's a lie. Didion, Wolfe and Hunter Thompson demolished the genre distinctions the patriarchy installed and attempts to maintain. Hunter in particular proved that in post-historical times, there is no "objectivity" in journalism. The 70's were a literary fire zone in California. Robert Stone and Tom McGuane did their great work as Stanford Stegner writers. The Santa Anas blew in the revolutionary alternative of Garcia Marquez, Neruda and Paz. Plath still chanted from the grave, buried but still transmitting at a fever pitch. When I recognized that California was a borderland region open to interpretation, my pallet expanded. Perhaps being free of NY was an artistic gift.

I remember you saying that Lithium For Medea evolved from a series of poems, correct me if I'm mistaken. How did you come to structure this novel, and, in general, how do architect new work? Are poems always the storyboard for stories and longer works?

Lithium For Medea was deliberately structured around 14 poems. I now have taken these 14 poems and set them to music and perform them from memory with my band, Dr.G. The poems were like dark stars, so dense with emotional meaning and implication; they were like condensed black matter. To decode the original poems was like unencrypting them and as I opened them, they turned into acres of chapters. I was forced to write fiction between the poems and discovered that I could write dialogue.

No writer has a full arsenal of weapons. If you asked Garcia Marquez to give you a plausible female character and put a Glock to his head, he couldn't. If you asked Roth for a landscape, he couldn't and you'd have to pull the trigger. A writer must come out of denial, recognize their strengths and avoid their weaknesses.

Each novel and the whole field of the short story are completely different. In my second novel, Palm Latitudes, I had written 70 pages of what I thought was a poem. Then I noticed there were no line breaks and it wasn't cut into stanzas, so I realized, by my hand and eye, that it was a work of incantory prose. I let my body lead me. Writing is not sedentary. That's the Zen of it. You do some and the page does some. It's a dance. Since I write as acts of discovery, I don't know if it's a poem or story or novel or essay until I've been interacting with the materials. In Palm Latitudes, I used poems to light my way through the infinite darkness of an epic work done blind. There were days when I just threw in poems, dozens at a time, to flare up and glow, conflagrations to indicate my next step.

I don't write poetry in a conventional way. I want the intensity and burn of the language, but I would rather explore than refine. I keep poems in cardboard boxes under my desk, and whenever I feel exhausted or lost in whatever I'm writing, an essay, a short story, I'll pull out a poem and integrate it into the larger fiction, get that alchemy of the language flaring up and bathing me in the light that falls from skinned stars.

I don't keep a journal. I use the poems as my private journal. Each poem is a story and a sequence of poems is a short story or novel. Still, I identify as a poet, despite the fact that I haven't published a book of poems in 16 years. I identify as a poet because I write out loud, not just dialogue, but every sentence of every paragraph of each chapter. I write for sound and rhythm. When you write out loud, your ear leads you naturally to other sounds. If you just write without saying the words out loud, the next association or idea is obvious. When you write for sound, an entire substratum of other possibilities open that your eye would never have lead you to. When I'm working, I don't call it writing. I call it composing.

The short story is my favorite form. It's the most modern and most complex. A poem is like a one night stand and a novel is like a marriage. A short story is like a love affair on the Amalfi coast or Bora Bora, you are always young, thin, tanned, sun caressed and embraced. I am in love with the vast, eccentric and mysterious region of the page, which is not a flat surface but three-dimensional, with a sound track, a combination of fragrances and textures.

Editing children's books, I'm fascinated with how children come to know language, words in particular. It's through poetry, repetition of language. It almost feels like an incantation, a spell. Repetition is paramount in Lithium from the imagery (the white capped ocean, the blooms, the antiseptic hospital ward to which Rose visits her father struggling with a cancer that keeps resurfacing, water Ð the desire to be near it, submerged in it, riding with it) to the actual repetition of words, to this family's personal history (the narcissistic mother who was an orphan, who slept in a room where rats fell on her head, Rose in a stasis, her being six years old, the father's racetrack vernacular). I've seen this device used beautifully throughout your novels, stories, and most recently, your memoir. Can you talk about how repetition artfully serves your work and your conflicted, pained, self-medicating narrator, a resilient woman who vows to well herself, to go the distance?

I believe the word is sacred and I am in a state of grace with the page. I'm a post-historical romantic. I believe there is an alchemy to a certain type of writing, a vertigo, transcendence and redemption. In another century or millennium, I would have been a spell caster, a fortuneteller, an oracle or shaman. Shelly said it best, that the vulgar would have us believe prophesy contains poetry, but the truth is that poetry is an act of prophesy.

The repetition in my work is often accidental. Perhaps I need to move the cardboard boxes of poems under my desk to other cardboard boxes from the basement. I'm an improvisational writer, much like a jazz musician. I use repeated riffs as leitmotifs, as structuring devices, since plot is not a skill I naturally possess. My works are built on recurring riffs like refrains in songs. It's the musicality of the writing that interests me, what can be done with sound and repetition, using repeating motifs as rhythm, as the steady 4/4 at the floor of the piece. The alchemy is the language itself, it's like the threads that get woven into other forms. The ultimate shape of the form that I construct is insignificant compared with the threads themselves, which occur as if induced by a magical process. Such writing can only happen when the writers have metaphorically skinned themselves and used the loose tissue for sails. Then the sea and the point of no return that one recognizes and then deliberately passes. I left port 30 years ago.

In Lithium Rose remarks that "fear is merely a condition of the mind, a condition of the mind." Is fearlessness a condition of action?

As a woman writer, as a female, the page is the male dominion. The patriarchy is literature, law and medicine. I've had to wage a war on at least three fronts simultaneously. I was asked at a job interview for a professorship I didn't get, if my views on the women's movement had changed. I said no. When my women go on the barricades, I don't want them waving brooms. I want them waving Uzis.

I write with revolutionary intention. I am a guerilla fighter. As a woman, I embrace my criminal impulses. Writing and crime are almost identical in strategy. The page is about what you can get away with. I teach my women how to recognize and utilize their intrinsic human criminal impulses. In writing, I engage in theft, consciously or unconsciously. I break and enter. Identity theft. Confession, trespass, interrogation, autopsy of the dead and the living. I stalk and steal. I lie and assume aliases. Of course, if I were a male writer, this would go without saying. It would be considered normal, the way males access the world for the purposes of their work. Still, women are always suspect. I teach my women stealth and disguise. I teach them how to procure their weapons and how to use them.

I am an assassin, clarified and purified by my service to the word. I am lean and ruthless. As a woman, I take no prisoners and have no Geneva Convention. All known conventions are made by men for men. I serve the new order and reject the old. We are defined not only by what we know, but also by what we refuse to know. I don't have a TV and I don't have an interest in soccer. I'd like to have car bumper stickers that says, "Just say no to soccer."

At one point Rose says, "doesn't everything come back in a way?" There's a thread throughout your books of return, of starting over, to regress and reconcile. She consistently reminds herself that she is 27 and none the wiser. Do you think that we would fare better if we had the ability to go back, wipe the slate clean, and start all over again?

The human drama is one of metamorphosis. Women don't get invited into the fundamental epic. Females are marginal to the male narrative. But we evolve across time and experience naturally. Science now asserts that memory is not static, new neural nets are formed, and memory itself is in flux. I use myself as the laboratory, feel if something shocks, repels or fascinates me, it will the reader. Of course, more people are writing then reading, there are more journals and books then there are people to read or critically evaluate them. As Marta Ortega says in Palm Latitudes, "to be one woman truly wholly is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds." I look for characters that are more intelligent than I am. Most of my students write what they already know. I write about what I don't yet know. That is the alchemy of it, how you get the luminescent material from which cloth you then stitch into forms with names like novel, short story, and essay. I don't care what the label is. I care that the material is composed of words chosen and arranged like a musical score.

To engage the page with serious intent is to de facto attack the patriarchy. One must be beyond fear. I'm a warrior of the word. I'm a black belt and at this point, the balance, skill and technique of alertness and stamina are completely internalized. I am always ready for battle.

Talk to me about your memoir. From the jacket: Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles is an eccentric and profoundly daring view of social and individual transformation, equal parts history, hallucination, stand-up comedy monologue, travelogue, and philosophy. The memoir is wonderfully unconventional. A lot of the essays, for me, talk about how an artist negotiates space, literally and figuratively. Space in city versus country (Los Angeles versus the Allegheny mountains Ð distinct extremes on the surface, but perhaps not), emotional and physical space within family, space between an artist and their work, how our space is suffocated by the technological invasion, etc. At one point you say, "We manifest our impulses and necessities in our architecture. There are profound philosophical implications within design decisions." Can you talk about the concept of space (architecturally and emotional) in the memoir? This memoir is more external than internal, where space, location and geography figure just as prominently as human experience.

Frantic Transmissions is actually a book about writing. It's like Vollmann's Europe Central in that what it seems to be about is in fact an illusion. When you replace Random House for Russia in Vollmann's book, the etiology of the artist verses the marketplace monolith of corporate publishing becomes absolutely clear. Frantic Transmissions is a book about what a writer can do with any topic, following my own teaching rules that there is nothing intrinsically interesting. It is the writer's job to take anything, no matter how banal, and make it exciting. Frantic Transmissions is a compendium of sophisticated writing tricks and I'm teaching it that way, explaining the juxtapositions, transitions, architectural devices and how to achieve the effects. Since my publisher refused to print the ending I'd written, in their attempts to conventionalize and sanitize me, I find it most useful to examine this book as a writer subverting the constraints placed on them with grace, elegance and relentless rage.

How did you come to write the memoir?

It's an accidental memoir. I wanted that in big letters on the book, but my publisher did not allow me that. I went back to the most basic tricks of the trade I teach my students, just write in fragments and allow them to coalesce. Return to the fragments in a year or five years and see what has adhered to what, and which fabrics can be stitched or collaged together. My books have always been called painterly. This book is more sculptural, more about assemblage and strategies of solving writing problems. I didn't realize Frantic Transmissions was a book until I had glued, welded, sewn, built bridges of music and stand-up comedy to it. After I won the Prize, I completely rewrote it to make it not a quilt, but a single dazzling fabric. From the purely literary point of view, Frantic Transmissions is the equivalent of Katherine Hepburn doing Diet-Pepsi ads.

I was going insane in this remote, rural stretch of true nothingness; one wrong turn from a part of Pennsylvania where they call the border Penntucky. It was the northern tip of the Appalachian Mountains. I somehow got a column in the L.A. Sunday Magazine to write essays back to L.A. I viewed these essays with profound distaste. Los Angeles hates me. I know. I just got back. I call San Francisco land of 10,000 votives, each with a dozen devotees like a bouquet of roses and it's always Valentine's Day. L.A. is the basin of pseudo-intellectuals. Their mediocrity is intrinsic to their residence there. It comes with their driver's license. Must have intellectual pretensions of the most primitive nature.

Thus, the essays were desperate attempts to contrive a personality that would not offend the readers of a newspaper committed to pseudo intellectuals and the morality and aesthetics of mediocrity. I thought of what such a reader might be able to tolerate, like shopping malls. As a writer of my sensibility, I had to restrain myself with the language itself. Once I won the Prize, I went back and put in the poetry and insurrectionary impulses that I'd omitted originally.

Despite the compromised ending and other sordid matters, like the three separate and ever diminishing introductions written by the judge of the contest---he began with Daniel Defoe and Virginia Wolfe, then the galleys which featured lesser writers to the actual book which puts me in the tradition of people we had to goggle to find out who they areÑone is a mud wrestler, I believe---I think it is accessible enough to find a large readership. I predict it will be taught in colleges as genre demolishing creative non-fiction and in women's studies and gender studies. It will probably be taught in journalism and MFA programs. I invented a new form, birthed a narrative that hasn't existed before. The methods of the construction of this book will probably be of interest to writing teachers. I hope this book will find its way to Jewish studies. The way I'm telling Jewish history as stand-up black comedy is quite funny.

Stealing a question from your Marilyn Monroe essay: would you consider living a different life?

I've lived more lives already than most. I've lived my incarnations simultaneously. I was a 15-year-old hippie runaway. A Berkeley anti-war and feminist activist. I was a bohemian with a punk aesthetic. I've been Professor of Creative Writing. I've taught writing privately in intensive workshops in my house. The novels that came out of that workshop were not just rewritten by me as they occurred; they were actually Òdirected." I had a baby in the barrio of Los Angeles. It's hard to believe how fast life happens when you are young. I went from the bohemian punk of Venice to the barrio in two years. In the barrio, I went native. I only spoke Spanish; the entire area was Spanish speaking. The Spanish pulse blowing in intoxicated me. It is still my favorite language. I lived like a Mexicana for years. Then a palimony suit induced me to go on the run with my daughter. Most women are not fearless enough to refuse the dictates of the patriarchy, in this case, law and medicine.

Being on the run with my baby was a fascinating experience, particularly in retrospect. I went to Maui and lived in a shack in the jungle without electricity. I've written about my experiences as a single mother in my short stories in Squandering the Blue, which is out of print, and Small Craft Warnings, which is available from the University of Nevada Press. Becoming a mother was a transformative event. I went into Cedars Sinai a bohemian artist and came out, 72 hours later, a Jewish mother. Examining the complexities, ambiguities and betrayals inherent in the mother-daughter relationship has consumed my interest for decades.

Since I have ethnographic bent, I took my undergraduate in anthropology, I've explored all the social strata I've been exposed to. I seek exposure. I like Rome in August. I love Tucson in July. I skate, sail, do yoga. I'm a method writer, like a method actress. I require experience with the elements, danger, and landscapes as vivid and unpredictable as possible.

I've been a faculty wife. Marriage is a subject I've been exploring and will continue to examine. I've been married 16 years now and find the voluntary union of two to be the most intricate human configuration I've ever known, the mystery of another, the accommodations and synthesis in real time. It's the great performance art piece of this gal's life. While Frantic Transmissions is the conventional and sanitized version of my six years in self-exile in the remote rural Allegheny Mountains, these are just the sketches or drawings of the terrain. I've written 19 short stories about this terrain; about half of them have been published. McSweeneys published ÒThe Women Who Sold Communion."

I'm living a new life as we speak. I love San Francisco and feel integrated into the literary life of this city. I've been writing critical apparatus pieces about this region, doing interviews of artists that intrigue me, like Bill Vollmann. I'm on my way to Paris where Lithium For Medea is being published in April, then Istanbul where three of my novels are in print.

Of course, after so many publications and such acclaimed literary stature, I am troubled by how few people know about my seminal contributions and me. I invented the California woman's short story. I have employed techniques to subvert and redefine larger fictions. I feel a bit like Diane Diprima at this point, when Diane had to basically tell everybody that she was there with Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac, that famous Thanksgiving, well, she was the one who cooked the turkey. She's the only beat woman who found even token mainstream acceptance. In terms of my generation, I'm the last woman standing. I'm a bit tired of standing alone. I would like to be engaging MFA students around the country, teaching master classes, attending women's studies, cultural history, Jewish studies and forums of this nature.

From your recent Los Angeles Times interview regarding women writers and their addictions: But when male writers such as William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson used drugs to fuel their creativity, "people lionize them as geniuses," How do you think women writers are faring now? In your opinion, are we better off?

As I mentioned earlier, women remain viciously constricted on the page, must behave like conventional women in thought, word and deed, even in dream. When I first read the Jewish writers of the 50's, Bellow, Mailer and Roth, I immediately understood that I could be a female intellectual on the page. Inward and intellectual is a natural turn for me. I didn't realize female intellectuals don't exist on the page. I remember the electric shock I had when I read Vonnegut's great Breakfast of Champions. He begins by releasing his characters on the occasion of his 50th birthday. I thought then, my god, a woman could never write such a book. There are no 50-year-old women on the page. Since I am now 50 something, I am putting age appropriate women on the page. After all the battles of my life, I now have ageism to deal with. We barely allow young beautiful women to exist. Will the reader allow a 50 year old woman to speak to them as they do 50 and 60 and 70 year old men? I am speaking from a position of wisdom and generosity. Will anyone listen?

What's next on the horizon?

Writing. Teaching. Travel. Our daughter graduates from law school in May. Recording my out of print poems with music. Master classes. Forums devoted to social and cultural issues as well as the literary. I'm interested in the gap between artists and scientists, how scientists think the imagination has nothing to offer them and the fear artists have that science will delete them from the cultural agenda. They are right, but being informed on the movements and tactics of the enemy is superior to denial and paralysis. I will continue my service to the word in whatever capacity avails itself. One thing I am absolutely certain of is this----I'm not dying with my short stories out of print.