A lot has changed in the world since 1968 when Alice Walker, then a recent college graduate was elevated to published author. Her debut collection of poetry, "Once," marked her entry into a career that would span decades culminating in her most well-known work, 1983's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Color Purple."
As Walker evolved as a writer, activist and woman, the country was undergoing a transition of its own from one divided by racism to the election of its first black president. Somehow, Walker always seemed a step ahead. Her journey is the subject of a new book, the aptly titled "The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker," (The New Press, $25.95), which chronicles Walker's life through conversations and interviews from 1973 to 2009.
For Walker, a native of Eatonton, Ga., the book isn't so much a reflection on the past, but a way to offer readers a part of her work that has never before been collected.
"My work has gone so much farther than I ever dreamed it would from growing up as a child in the back country of Georgia. It has been very rewarding to realize something that Howard Thurman said really well – if you go deeply enough in your own being, you come up in everybody else – which is to say, we are all very much alike," said Walker by phone from her home in northern California.
Walker insisted that the book, which begins with a 1973 interview with John O'Brien and ends with a 2009 conversation with the book's editor, Emory University professor Rudolph P. Byrd, include only those interviews which explored questions related to her art and her activism, rather than those done for publicity purposes. Much of the material came from the archives of her work housed at Emory since 2008. The result is a look at Alice Walker, the thinker, who pondered questions of spirituality, animal rights, and the environment long before such topics were en vogue.
Anyone familiar with the details of Walker's early life will recognize stories of how an early accident with siblings and subsequent cover-up formed the writer's self-described addiction to truth, a condition which had an impact on both her work and personal life. The book also covers Walker's views on black women writers and animals, views which she enthusiastically discusses today.
"I think what [black women writers] have proved in a way is that you just keep on doing your work. You have faith that what you are offering is worth offering and there are people out there who can use the medicine you bring," said Walker.
As for animal rights, which Walker discussed at length in a 1988 interview with Ellen Bring, she is still struggling.
"I would like very much to never eat an animal. But I find that sometimes I do and I really have to deal with that," she said. She even started a blog on which she discusses some of these issues.
"I love having a blog," Walker said. "I say in the book that I hated the thought, the word made me think of snot. But I love it. It is very useful to be able to connect with an audience wherever I am and whenever I feel like it."
Though he has known her for many years, even Byrd was surprised by some of the things revealed in the conversations with Walker, which also include a 1998 interview with Ms. magazine, a chat with former mentor, the late Howard Zinn, and a 2006 conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! In some ways, it is challenge to present a fresh view of Walker, not because the material doesn't exist, Byrd said, but because it is difficult for any cultural icon to ever fully be known.
"When you occupy such a large space in the national imagination, it is hard to be perceived as an individual; that was lost to her a long time ago," Byrd said. "What I am hoping this volume will do is advance that prospect of understanding Alice Walker the artist, elder and great thinker of our time."
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