1. What motivated you to write The Boundaries of Her Body…?
A great many things, chief among them that we seem to be living in a time when women — as individuals — are being erased in the law. The language of many laws being enacted today speak specifically of "unborn children with freedom and rights." This is not a mistake. It is a calculated measure intended to put living women "with rights and freedoms" at odds with those of "their unborn children." Thus, when women make certain choices (i.e., birth control, the morning after pill, abortion, selective reduction) that are lawful but that others don’t like, they condemn women as "people who don’t care about children" or, worse, as "murderers" and "slave masters" as recently defeated Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum did in his best selling book.

I’m talking specifically of reproductive rights. But that attitude spills over to other areas, and that is the intent. It is about intimidation and a kind of intended (male) brutality. People often suggest that "feminism" is the problem. But the real problem here is that the world changed, and all of this is about a "way of life." Some people would say "the American way of life." Those people generally want the 1950s back. They want no busing, a heterosexual "family unit," and wives who serve their husbands and families. We know rationally that this picture is out of step with our times. But that doesn’t stop people from wanting it back.

What troubled me most when I wrote The Boundaries of Her Body… and what continues to trouble me today is that they are winning. An abortion procedure has now been outlawed by the United States Supreme Court. (I predicted that.) And last month, that same Court outlawed busing. Does that make any sense in a nation that was founded on diversity and whose Constitution speaks of equality and equal protection? Probably not. But it does get us closer to the 1950s.

2. Since Boundaries was published in 2004, Bush was reelected and Supreme Court upheld the partial-birth abortion ban, among many other things affecting women’s health and freedom. Do you see yourself ever writing a second volume?
I do (after the current one I’m working on is finished). The problem I’m having is that publishers — perhaps reflecting America, perhaps reflecting Wall Street — don’t seem to care and/or to be invested in these kinds of books anymore. Generally, publishing seems to have followed the lead of newspapers. Once upon a time, the print media and many book publishers saw themselves as public services. They had to stay in the black. But they weren’t preoccupied with profits. If it happened, wonderful. But that wasn’t the absolute goal.

But these days, most publishers — certainly the big ones — seem only to want to publish a book if they can assure themselves that it will be a bestseller. And the way they tend to do that is by courting big names, Hollywood types, or (in one case), a porn star. To get those folks, publishers promise big advances (eight million dollars in the case of Hillary Clinton). That means people like me get squeezed. Our books are often assessed as "mid-list" works that "doesn’t sell." And they may be right.

People are reading less. But we also seem to have a problem with getting young women — even educated young women — to pay attention to their history. (You would be an exception.) This actually appears to be an American problem, generally. Somewhere in recent history, we became a culture that cares more about partying and "personal rights" than preserving the collective rights that allow people to party and make mistakes and to recover from those mistakes. That is what the politics of "choice" were once about. But we don’t seem to know that anymore.

3. Boundaries focuses solely on American women and American law, yet as a volunteer for Chicago Legal Volunteers, you handled civil-rights based immigration cases. Have you handled any cases where reproductive or domestic violence issues were present?
I tend to handle cases where women have been victimized. Domestic violence may be one aspect. But women need help in almost every context. People tend to think that immigration law only involves people who entered America illegally or who have nothing to offer this country. But immigration happens to be a complex and emerging area of the law. In terms of American history, the United States is a nation of immigrants. We have always embraced the skills and talents of immigrants.

I’m comfortable defending the rights of immigrants, largely because the picture is very far removed from the suggestions we see in the media. In the last two cases I handled, for example, the women were here legally. They came in search of education, something America has always permitted. Both were victimized in America. Horribly, that victimization rendered them "so damaged" that they would likely have been murdered in "honor killings" by family members in they were sent home.

Defending women in such circumstances is in accord with The Boundaries of Her Body… But even if it weren’t, I would do it. Civil rights issues — due process, equal protection, etc. — can arise in any context, including immigration. By the way, I don’t only handle cases for Chicago Legal Volunteers. I volunteer for other agencies as well, though at the moment, I’m just working on my next book. And on occasion, I defend men too. (I’m not sexist.) But my interest is in defending women and empowering girls. We are a fabulous gender.

4. In a previous interview, you were asked what we can teach our daughters. What can we teach our sons?
I think boys — our sons — are on their way. Part of this is our new history. In this "new America" of the last 50 years, women work (more today than ever, despite media reports suggesting that women are all "staying home to raise babies"). I have two nephews, for example, who have a mom who works, a grandmother who worked (hard), and aunts who work. We all do different things and we are all at a place in our lives where we have earned a few stripes.

Thus, they understand women as educated, generally equal individuals, because they are growing up in a society where – from their perspective — women are at least equal. And I say at least equal, because little boys fall in love with women who take care of them. Life hasn’t completely reversed itself on the home front. Thus, women are still doing a lot of the things at home that make their little boys fall in love with them. And though that is not quite equal, it is a wonderful thing.

It may be true that some of these boys will grow up to be "macho men." But I think the world is changing and I believe boys are changing with it. I think the last eight years have been tough on women. But I don’t think that is reflective of America. But maybe I’m just being hopeful, probably because I love the people my nephews are becoming. And I think they are pretty typical. They not only respect women. They adore women. They are thankful that we teach them things and that we help them. And that, I think, is how it is supposed to be: Respectful.

5. Boundaries is an extensive legal history meant to inform women of the facts. Instead of lawyer to client or author to reader, what would you tell your readers woman-to-woman?
Probably a joke. The Boundaries of Her Body…, is a serious book. I am a pretty serious person. But I’m also a goof. So, every once in a while, you might find a snide remark or a joke in The Boundaries… When I lecture, I tend to make lots of jokes. I think humor is important. But as to the question of what I would say woman-to-woman, it would probably depend upon the crowd.

Older women tend to want information. Young women tend to want guidance. If there is a universal bit of information I might offer to all women it is that we need to be more proactive and to organize! There is a "war" going on. Young women can and should use the internet to inform their "sisters" of issues and problems and events coming up. Older women should too. But they can also use their contacts in the world to boycott anti-woman corporations and to lobby legislators. We can change the world. We are changing the world. The problem is that others want very much to change it back.

Jennifer Leblanc

Some geese coursed through Columbia Heights as I lay, cheek down like a restrained patient on my little bed. The dogs, giddy at wilderness come true, barked well past their visit.

And so, after a trip to see my brother in Wyoming, I’m moving to Downeast, Maine, to my family’s century-old cabin on a lake in the truest woods I know. If I bathe, it will be on a rock and with fish. If I’m awake after dark, I will have a small flame to carry. If I touch anything, I’ll be tracing private property, not rented space, but land so dense and personal you can only rise up from it.

In weeding a garden, if you wait too long, you’re liable to have so much work to do that your momentum bowls over the actual flowers. Some flowers root so closely to weeds that you can’t take one without the other. Morning glory, blades of grass, dandelions aside, in Maine I’ll be in soil years worked over. I’ll have no garden there, but tall, hard pines with root systems meant for sitting and writing in. I’ll net the beginnings of a book, that ancient dream — I am an old fighting dog eating through chain link as if the soft bones of wild game.

All week, I’ve been having salads with lead-laced romaine I sawed out of my garden with a bread knife (the soil lab came back roughly amenable to eating). While the zinnias bore flowers like bright, frozen, textured spit fanned out at the tips of their stems, and while one cherry tomato swells out, a bunch of tightly rounded veins at the end of a vine in a cover of leaves, these benchmarks demonstrate nothing but a late blooming spring. 

Though I am going to miss the zucchini and tomato harvest, though I would have been proud to eat them, I have been given the chance to grow something heirloom, to write a book about the land’s history and my own. I have to leave the fledgling garden behind, ferret out of the dirt yard, and pioneer past roofscapes towards the simple beginning of things.

Carolyn Petri

This is my favorite part of the ride. I’m taking the Q train home from the city.

We start a slow incline out of the tunnel from Canal Street to cross the Manhattan Bridge to the Brooklyn side. The tracks carry us over Chinatown. From here, without the putrid smells and incessant horn honking, it looks inviting. The red signs with gold Chinese lettering decorate every storefront. Vendors spill out onto the narrow, winding streets, hawking their cheap kitsch for tourists. Fresh laundry blows on a line leading from an open window.

Then the East River is below and the downtown city skyscrapers come into view. The sun is setting on the other side of the Hudson River casting a cotton candy glow around the skyline. I always try to spot the Trinity Church spire. It’s not easy to find. Long overtaken by steel and glass around it, it was once the tallest building in New York. If I look down, I can see the Fulton Fish Market. After almost 200 years of operation from the Lower East Side, the fish mongers have moved to a new facility in the Bronx. The trains usually slow to a crawl about halfway over the bridge, and today is no exception. A biker on the path next to the train is keeping pace.

It gives me time to check out the venerable Brooklyn Bridge just to the south. The lights trimming the tension wires are twinkling in the dusk. Its stone-and-mortar construction makes it unique among all the bridges connecting to Manhattan, but I think New Yorkers are so fond of it because it was first.

Brooklyn comes into view with comparatively low buildings, just a little higher than the train windows. As we begin the descent into the tunnel, I can see Fulton’s Landing, a now grassy spot where General George Washington, outmanned and outgunned by the British pressing down from the hill above in the Battle of Brooklyn, stole away in the middle of the night avoiding capture and kept the Americans’ hopes for independence alive. There is a small playground painted in primary colors next to the landing area and a boy is being pushed on a swing by his mother.

New construction rises next to old graffitied buildings. A clock tower is on top of one of the many loft buildings that are being converted from warehouses and factories as people rediscover the neighborhood of DUMBO. It’s 4:30. We slide into the tunnel and I’m almost home.

Jacquelin Cangro

My days begin: coffee, water garden, breakfast, write. I can never get these straight. I look out the window at the dry, yellow parsley and put down some toast. I drink enough coffee to sink a ship. Eventually, I pull watering buckets out from the coat closet.

The diminishing hopefulness of my vegetables fits with my prevailing view of the world: pitch stories, prep soil; write and sow; suffer the results. My plants are standing, but in a questionable bed. After the various keys, pieces of glass, flattened cans and sheets of plastic I pulled out in the beginning, I can almost count on a poisoned harvest. I currently have a thick row of romaine that I water every day and cannot conscionably eat. I have begun four articles and have spoken to zero editors. Writing to freelance before pitching the story might as well be growing food before testing its soil for lead and arsenic.

Last night at close to midnight, I cooked tofu with garlic, thyme and paprika. Earlier in the day I made my own ice cream, roasted potatoes with fresh rosemary, baked a dozen banana muffins, mixed cole slaw and sautéed apples in cinnamon, sugar and butter. While I perceive writing success, and while my lettuce gleams and looks crisp, my culinary feats (like my freelance delusions) are still an alloy of others’ work and my dreams. As I eat, I think about Nabokov: "The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."

The other day I shipped off a soil sample to an agricultural analysis center in Richmond. And I met a fellow freelancer: "If I know my story’s air tight, I just write it. If not, I pitch."  My city soil and journalistic naïveté warrant heavier pitching, prepping, less cooking, less resting on the laurels of my hopes.

My days begin with these lessons from my garden. Without them, how would I learn to write? I am reading The Art of Truth, an anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction. The first section consists of excerpts from seven writers’ journals, and most of them end up in the natural world:

May Sarton, wrote mostly on her lesbian experience, but logs her back yard in Journal of a Solitude:

After another week of lecturing, home at last to melting snow! There are tiny bunches of snowdrops out by the granite front steps, and a few crocuses blooming between the spruce boughs…I saw a huge woodchuck out by the barn. Has he already eaten the first tender shoots of hollyhock? Last year he devoured them all.

I like this, even though it is tedious and personal. Right now, I am looking at kinked up daisies in a jar on my kitchen table. Cut flowers, quotations from journals from lives of writers. I do my best to feed them, but out of context almost everything dies.

Gretel Ehrlich, Wyoming rancher, writes herself a mineral in From the Journals:

If the bicameral mind is two very different things, then the heart is also-like the towering split rock through which a creek patiently drives…Walking there today, on my birthday, I see that a huge chunk of ice has dropped out of the middle of the frozen cascade, leaving black, wet rock exposed. And so it is with me.

Interrogating the natural world seems as necessary as living itself. These writers are severely connected to the weather, animals, trees. George Dennison wrote about the education of poor children , but in his journal, Temple, he kept a litany of weather patterns:

The winter began early…Spring began early…Temple Stream floods almost every year, often during the winter thaws…There are fat buds on all the trees (they began as little swellings in the depths of the winter), and the poplars, some of them, already have tiny leaves.

Even John Cheever (more alcoholic than naturalist) who kept diligent (presumptuous?) track of his life by typewriter, winds up by the garden:

I sit on the terrace, watching the clouds pass over, watching the night fall. What is the charm of these vaporous forms, why do they remind me of love and serenity? But look, look. There is no glass in his hand. Is it under the chair? Nope. Is it hidden in the flower bed? No, no. There is, for the moment, no glass within his reach.

Watching. I do that. I look out the window. Today is sunny. There are birds. Two days ago, I got caught in a rain storm on my bicycle, eyes half shut like an infant all the way home. A friend of mine working in law said, "Storm? What storm? Is it over?"

In my bathrobe, with just a bit of misfortune (clothes in the drier), I embraced my position and typed back, "Not yet." I would tell him when the weather cleared, when he could head home, and wondered, looking at the punished romaine outside my front window, if this natural world or my writing of it would ever conjure that ever-distant bed of accomplishment.

Carolyn Petri