Page 18 RAIN January 1982 co-op or maybe an energy co-op. But the reality was the people in the building weren't ready for that. They had faced a housing crisis and that's why they were gungho to do a housing co-op. But they weren't facing a food crisis. The price of food was going up, but it wasn't so severe that they were up against the wall. The local grocery store hadn't closed. . . . [Still] we had people who were socially backward and they flowered! They became very active. RAIN: So even though they weren't ready to consider a food co-op, their new spirit did manifest itself in other activities they took on in the community? Stokes: Yes. Probably this leads to the conclusion that I draw from the activities I talk about in the book: even if you can't show a direct one-on-one relationship where one activity builds to the next and all-of-a-sudden you have a self-reliant local community, people are being trained in citizenship, and this is the main value of the types of self-reliance projects now being engaged in the United States and around the world. People are learning how to organize meetings, how to assert themselves, how to use power, how to identify and solve problems. Those are skills which are terribly useful in crisis situations. As society itself moves toward an economy that is increasingly unsustainable and unstable, an environmental situation that is increasingly dangerous, and a situation where the resource base is being undermined dramatically, we need citizens who are trained in the skills of crisis management. Even if that community garden we organize doesn't do a whole lot to solve food problems, people have learned some skills, and these people are going to be around to react to the next major crisis which happens in their community or in the country at large. I think as we face those crises, the tendency is going to be to move towards centralized responses—highly authoritarian. They may be corporate state responses, they may be socialist state responses, but in either case they are centralized responses—and that's undemocratic by its very nature. We need alternatives. We need people to say "No, we can handle this ourselves," and in fact repulse attempts by the centralized authority to impose a response on the community. That's the most important result of all these self-reliance activities going on: that people learn the rules of citizenship so that we can insure that we're a democracy not only in name, but in fact.DO ACCESS WRITING Writers in Residence: American Authors at Home, by Glynne Robinson Betts, 1981,159 pp., $16.95 hardcover, from: Viking Press 625 Madison New York, NY 10022 There is more than the "just-so" arrangement of desk and window in this tour of the homes of a sampling of American writers. There is the bell clear ringing of daily rituals that led the authors in and out of some of our favorite works of literature. Up before dawn; tucked away in her odd little "shanty" in the woods, Edna St. Vincent Millay penned poems when she couldn't sleep. Walker Percy (Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, etc.) leaves home in the morning to sit typing in the unkempt kitchen of the studio he rents. Glynn Robinson Betts never really delineates the relationship between the workplace and the work but her photographs indicate the writers through their rooms. No easy task when the rooms are more often than not in the stiff and silent sanctuaries of museums. But all the richness of the pictures and the accompanying evocative quotes didn't content me half as much as the exoneration I found in what Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in his excellent introduction calls "an absolute cornucopia of discomfort and clutter." The photo of Ray Bradbury grinning over the mountain of doodads on his desk cheered me. Maxine Kumin's attic study with industrious heaps of mail and other paraphernalia filled me with relief. I've never figured out how anyone can really work amid clutter, but I've also never gotten around to eliminating my own, so I felt vindicated by the apparent disorder from which others have fashioned their works of art. But Writers in Residence arouses more curiosity that it satisfies. I wanted more in- - sights, more dialogue between place and person, more intimacy. Maybe I'm just greedy, or intrusive, but I closed the book with my appetite more whetted than sated. —CC
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