Q. I called you just as you were making arrangements, I think, and you're working on the screen play of Crazy Woman. We had an interesting conversation on the way here about some of the gyrations you went through. Maybe we could start talking about that first. How it came to be becoming a movie.

A. Well, the book got some interest from various film companies, and the interest that it got made me nervous because it was not -- perhaps it didn't match the intention I had for the book. I think there was a lot of excitement about savage sex and a woman who would get her clothes ripped or something in the desert. And that's not really what the book is about. So, I contacted a woman in LA - actually a group of women in LA who are film makers and asked if they were interested in -- if anyone was interested in working on this as a project, and there is a woman who is interested, and her name is Julie Dole. My husband Michael and I are going to see what we can do to put together a screen play with Julie and make some contacts and control somewhat what happens with the story.

Q. What is the book really about in a nutshell?

A. Well, in a nut shell, it's about a woman who comes from Virginia to New Mexico in the 19th Century as a missionary wife, and she is captured by a group of Hickorea-- a band of Apaches, and the story really is about a woman who discovers her own strength and power -- who is usually considered crazy. At least, she was considered crazy by the people in her culture, and she actually discovers herself as the result of the captivity. Instead of a woman becoming a victim or continuing to be a victim, especially in the 19th century, she is a woman who takes power from her experiences and really refuses to be a victim.

Q. I think something that struck me about her is that she really is on the edge in both societies, in the white culture and in the native culture. I think there's a lot of white women who have very similar feelings about not belonging and, yet, not belonging where they're going either.

A. Right. That's absolutely right. We're not sure. We're not really powerful as whites, and we're not really accepted as minorities, so I think that the personal experience I have had is just that. That same experience, going through the Sixties, finding that the materialistic world that I was in was not -- I didn't fit into it. And then going to Europe. I went to Europe for a while, and I realized that a lot of what I didn't like about the east coast in the United States originated in Europe. A lot of attitudes. So, I decided to give the West, a chance -that sounds very arrogant that, you know, I'm going to be the judge of what's right. But, at least, I was going to try to see if I could somehow fit in. And I think that in the book, Sara, the main character, one of the things she has to come to grips with is that she is not Native American. She is not Apache, and that's the same for a lot of white women who, I think, sometimes, as a result of a kind of a New Age naiveté, want to adopt another culture, and that, I think, can be very shallow and insulting to that culture. Sara has to learn. That's one of the things she has to learn, that she's not a Native American. In a way what this book is about is a very universal and timeless theme that I'm sure a lot of writers have explored and will explore, which is the theme of the outsider, the person who is not a member of any group, an outsider. The other character in the book who is an outsider is a Native American called Broken Nose, who is a Hickorea Apache, but he was raised by Hopis, and he's never really in one culture or another.

Q. Where does your knowledge of the Indian culture come from?

A. Well, I went through the usual aging hippie readings, such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Black Elk Speaks and was very touched by them, very blown away. I don't think I was very sophisticated in my responses at that time, but it certainly gave me a beginning feel that here were people that I had a lot of respect for and wanted to know more about, politically, as well, because I was very much interested in the AIM movement, the American Indian Movement and very supportive of their efforts. So that's part of it: reading and just being interested politically, and then I got my degree -- my masters degree in "international studies", which is a real fancy way of saying "folklore". And my interest was in Native American use of folklore in their literature. Leslie Silko, who wrote Ceremony and wrote a book of poetry called Laguna Woman seemed very powerful to me, as a writer, and as a user of folklore. So I came out here to do my masters thesis on her, and then I ended up getting a Ph.D. here at UNM in American Studies and my dissertation was on women who came from the East to New Mexico and how they interacted with the Native Americans here. The reality, the firsthand accounts of their experiences were so amazing to me in their strength. There is not this Hollywood stereotype of the weak and wailing woman. These women were very strong and very wise. I wanted to do something with them. I wanted to put them together in a way that would show something that ironically is fiction, but hopefully is a more accurate picture of what women experience.

Q. You have a new book coming out?

A. Well the book that's coming out in October of '96, from La Alameda Press again, is called A Killing In New Town, and it's about Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the 1880s, when the railroad was just coming in, and when it was bringing in even more snakes and scumbags than were here before. And it's a look at the early stages of capitalism in a place like New Mexico. That's coming out in October.

Q. And you're actually working on another book now.

A. The book I'm working on now takes me back about, I guess, 1300 years and across the ocean. I'm working on a book called Confessions of a Pagan Nun, and it's about a nun in the 5th Century in Ireland. I began to get interested in that sort of thing because the tribal energy, I guess you could say, or the tribal culture of Native Americans in the United States is not very different from tribal cultures in other places, including tribal cultures amongst the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts before Christianity. So I began to say why not look into those tribal cultures from my own ancestral past and see what happened when Christianity came to a place like Ireland, compare it somewhat, I guess, to Christianity coming to New Mexico. Q. If you had to describe yourself, would you call yourself a historical writer?

A. I love history. I think that it's an escape, for one thing, to be perfectly honest. But it's also -- it satisfies a curiosity I have about how things come to this present point, and I just love to look at the beginnings of things, especially.

Q. People can look at history through rose tinted lenses.

A. Well, I think that one of the things I'm interested in doing is not being a romantic about anything. My interest in history is as a social historian. I'm not interested in what Custer did. I'm not interested in what Hadrian did or what Martha Washington did. I'm interested in what -- when there was a war, when there was a change, what the person who had to feed the pigs did. And so with both the novels I've already published and also the one about 5th Century Ireland, I refuse to romanticize -- I think the most powerful thing there is, is peoples' struggle with reality. So I try to find that in the past. It's like being a detective, in some ways, but I really try to find that, and demystify it too- somewhat. That's one of the reasons that the Jicarilla in my novel are not all wonderful, great people. They're people. They're just like anybody else, only they have a specific culture. But I don't want to romanticize it. The 5th Century Ireland novel I'm working on shows that - suggests that the Druids were just as fallible as the people who came after. I try to demystify that.

Q. So we had fallible women who had a better position in their society maybe than we perceive that we do --

A. -- yes. That I think you can quantify in various ways. I think you can actually look at historical records and make a statement that women were better off in a certain period. I don't think that's romanticizing, and I think that's true. I think that in the pre-Christian Ireland, for example, and in Native American cultures, I have clearly seen through records, through whatever -- that women did have more respect, more power in terms of sometimes a separate kind of power, but definitely more power. For example, in the thing about Ireland being Christianized, somewhere in the 8th or 9th Century there had to be a Christian law that said women could no longer be warriors. Well you look at that law, and you say, oh, wait a minute -- that means before then, they could be.

Q. One of the most moving scenes, to me, in Crazy Woman that really stands out in my mind, is when once she has returned to the white culture for various reasons, not really out of choice, and she's been struggling to survive with one of the Jicarilla women,whose men eventually come and retrieve her. Now these two women earned a lot of money, or maybe not a lot, but they've earned money, in the meantime.

A. We don't know exactly how the Apache woman in this situation you're talking about has earned the money. There is some

question that she stole it from the quartermaster at Fort

Union. That's not really supposed to be obvious. It wasn't

-- but, yes, they have. They've gotten a lot --

Q. -- they have the money --

A. --the Jicarilla woman does --

Q. -- and she leaves it laying on the table.

A. Yes.

Q. To me that was such a striking image. It almost explained perfectly the difference really between the white Anglo culture coming in, and the culture that was basically being destroyed and changed beyond repair. But we can't necessarily go back to that either, you know. And I'm wondering, as a historical writer, how you see yourself as fitting into the present. If it points us in any direction, or if you just prefer to let it lay in the past and leave it there.

A. That's a great question. I'm so glad that you liked that particular image because it's one of my favorite in the book too, and you're the first person who said that, and I just love that image. And I think it's -- I feel like she left that money on the table as though it was so much trash. And that where she was going she didn't need that. I think that where we're going in the future with the knowledge that we get from the past, I no longer have this idealism that I used to have. That Santiago saying that you're doomed to repeat the past -- something like this, I'm paraphrasing -- that if you don't know the past, you're doomed to repeat it: I've come to realize that even if you know it, you're still doomed to repeat your mistakes. I think that my place is as an outsider and just to do what I can with that. I do feel that I'm an outsider, and I have a sense that my family in this world are other outsiders, in some ways, and that's about it.