Each Has It All, in Her Own Words

IRVINE —  Twenty years ago, Nancy Jo Hoy (Jody to her friends) got up her courage to request an interview with author and diarist Anais Nin, whose intelligence, warmth and unusually intense presence had intrigued her at a lecture a couple of years earlier.

The meeting started Hoy on a path of exploration and discovery that resulted, two decades later, in the publication of “The Power to Dream: Interviews With Women in the Creative Arts,” an extraordinarily revelatory and nonjudgmental book about the lives and attitudes of 16 diverse women. (Review, F3.)

In the mid-’70s, Hoy, then married with a young son, was a recent transplant to Southern California from the East Coast. She had just completed her doctorate in romance languages and literature from New York University, and she was--as she writes in the book’s introduction--”thoroughly fed up with my graduate education and feeling alienated from myself.”

Now the head of the French department at Irvine Valley College, Hoy recalls the energy of the burgeoning feminist movement and the “powerfully delighting and inspiring” presence of high-achieving women she met, mostly through successive recommendations from interviewees.

“By the time I got through [interviewing artists] Beatrice [Wood] and Phoebe Helman, I began to realize there was a book here,” Hoy said in a recent interview. “And this was what it was about: the problem of how people live their creative lives without sacrificing their intimate lives, their family connections, their sexual connections.”

A tiny woman with a chic, close-cropped haircut and a mobile face that seems to be perpetually registering warmth and vitality, Hoy said she specifically chose women who have nurtured both their public and private sides.

“Two women who interested me are Rose Bird and Angela Davis,” said Hoy, of Laguna Beach. “[But] from what I could find out, they don’t have a [personal] life, and that’s why they aren’t in the book. What interested me is women who [have] done their creative work, and they’ve either had a husband or children or a partner.

“I think the reason why the theme is such a grabber is, it’s the theme in all of our lives. . . . How did these women do it? With courage and perseverance and usually, not always”--Hoy smiled wryly--”with a sense of humor.”

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In the mid-’70s Hoy was creating a model interdisciplinary studies program in letters and sciences at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, which led to her selection as a grant review panelist by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Meanwhile, her marriage ended. As a single parent, she was able to work on the book only during breaks from teaching, starting with one interview per year and working up (during a sabbatical) to five.

“Years ago, a friend threw the I Ching for me,” she said. “And you know what I got? ‘Perseverance furthers.’ Maybe that’s why I did it. I needed it, and I wanted it, and it’s part of who I am, just as it’s part of who they are.”

The dual focus on work and personal life was of special importance to Hoy, she said, because of the paucity of role models for women of her generation.

“We have [author] Simone de Beauvoir, who never married and was childless,” Hoy said. “We have [poets] Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide; we have [novelist] Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide. I could just go on and on.”

Among the distinctive characteristics of the book are the varying lengths of the interviews and the presence of some lyrical self-reflective passages by the interviewees that go on for pages, uninterrupted by questions.

“Everybody has her own voice, her own rhythm,” Hoy explained. “It wasn’t up to me to limit it.”

Although some of the interviews read as though they were the product of several long sessions, Hoy said each was done at a single two- or three-hour sitting. The challenge, she said, was to “get out of the way so they can talk.”

Another aspect of the book--unusual in the field of women’s studies--is Hoy’s interviewing method. She never challenges any of her subjects’ opinions and injects feminist ideology only as an echo of their own stated views.

Asked whether she wasn’t tempted to challenge poet Diane Wakoski (who says she is not a feminist) or refute some of artist Judy Chicago’s wilder generalizations, Hoy said: “My goal was to allow [each interviewee] to be herself. It wasn’t my place to say, ‘Hey, you’re crazy.’ My goal was not to challenge. My goal was to say, ‘Here’s who this person is.’

“Some people will love Judy; some will find her abrasive. . . . All of these women paid terrible prices personally,” she said. “Nobody’s psyche is so healthy that it can survive people [constantly] throwing rocks.”

Rather than write a sequel, she has several other ideas, from a book on the Provence region of France to a series of interviews with Americans discussing what is wrong with this country and how they would solve it.

In the meantime, her life is quite full, with teaching, lecturing abroad for the Washington-based Smithsonian Associates and keeping up with family life and friends on two continents.

Near the end of the interview, Hoy bragged about her multilingual son, who lives in Laguna Beach, her stepdaughter-the-painter in Boston and her stepdaughter-the-chef in Miami Beach, Fla.

“I don’t want to give any of it up!’ she exclaimed. “You just have to live long enough.”