Across multiple books, Margaret Randall, the poet, essayist, and activist, has documented the lives of women and feminism around the globe, especially through major political uprisings and social shifts.[1] In her new book, Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations, Randall returns to this subject through the lens of her personal relationships with several individuals important to her life, with whom she has had extensive written correspondence. Together, these conversations provide a portrait of not only second-wave feminism but other leftist movements in the twentieth century, and explore a range of topics including the creative process, the relationship between art and politics, the role of publishing for social change, and many others.
In addition to her contributions to women’s studies, Randall has a personal relationship with Frontiers: she served on the Editorial Board while the journal was housed at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s. We had the opportunity to interview Randall about the release of this new book to expand on its content and what it offers current feminist scholarship, discourse, and activism.
What are the key takeaways from the book for feminist and gender studies? What does the concept of “outrider” offer specifically?
MR: I define outriders as those who have faced some important obstacle in life, have pushed through that obstacle and continued to pursue their passions. Their creativity is hard-won, resilient. This can be true of a man or a person of any gender, as my book also shows, but I believe it is innate to women. In most of the world and throughout time, simply being born a woman has been an obstacle we must push through. In LETTERS FROM THE EDGE: OUTRIDER CONVERSATIONS, I believe feminists will find brilliant examples of feminist discourse and activism, particularly in the letters of Laurette Sejourné and Susan Sherman. Sejourné came to Mexico as a refugee from European fascism at mid twentieth century, trained as an anthropologist, was powerfully attracted to some of the country’s ancient cultures, and interpreted those cultures in ways that the male anthropological establishment couldn’t understand. The establishment ostracized her—as a foreigner, as a woman and, I would argue, as a feminist. Yet in time she was vindicated, and her analysis was proven to be ground-breaking Susan Sherman is a brilliant poet whose work has never received the acclaim it deserves. Coming out as a lesbian a decade before there was a lesbian community to receive her, and involving herself in anti-imperialist politics, left her both misunderstood by the male poets of the era and by the lesbians who might have embraced her. Susan is also a philosopher, though I am one of the few who call her that. Her story is illuminating, and it is also a warning. Our correspondence in the book traces important moments in the US feminist movement, in many of which she participated. LETTERS FROM THE EDGE also has a companion volume, MORE LETTERS FROM THE EDGE, to be released by New Village Press in September 2025. The first chapter in that second book is my correspondence with the painter Jane Norling. Our letters are also rich in descriptions of the problems and frustrations all women face, especially if we want to have children and also pursue a creative dream.
As you mentioned, one reason Sejourné became an outrider is because of the discrimination she experienced with the patriarchal and xenophobic academic system in Mexico. How did her approach disrupt the status quo?
MR: Laurette was born in Italy. Her father was a fascist admirer of Mussolini. As a young woman, she moved to Paris and changed her name in order to distance herself from her family of origin. She knew and worked with Andre Bretón and others of his group, learned filmmaking and edited some of the great films of that era. So, early on she gravitated toward cutting edge ideas, new concepts in art and in thought in general. When she came to Mexico and reinvented herself as an anthropologist, she brought this courage and determination with her. She was able to approach the Mesoamerican cultures from the inside, placing herself there, imagining their world views and customs as someone who felt, rather than simply observed, them. Her ability to use her imagination along with her intellect put her at odds with the male anthropological establishment of the time which, as you say, was highly patriarchal. Although I never heard her describe herself as a feminist, I believe her approach to life and to her work qualified her as one.
The book provides different snapshots of the women’s liberation movement, including several of its conflicts, struggles, and exclusions, particularly in the chapter about Susan Sherman. What new insight to this movement and its history did you gain by returning to it while writing this book?
MR: One of the things that revisiting this correspondence did was to make me think about issue-centered struggles as opposed to the overall struggle for peace and human wellbeing. Rereading some of those letters and remembering those times, it was clear to me that emphasizing particular issues was important back then. For example, I understood why women had to break with male organizations to form our own. I understood the need for consciousness-raising groups and even a certain degree of separatism in that period. I also saw the pitfalls in taking that too far and saw our sectarianism as a major source of division and, ultimately, our failure to prevail. The situation of neo-fascism we have today is one of the products of that failure, our inability to create the world of inclusion and equality we so desperately need. Re-reading and thinking about the letters in the book brought me back to all that and made me wonder how future generations may be able to build on our accomplishments while avoiding our errors. A terrible example is our loss of women’s reproductive rights. My generation fought long and hard for Roe and never imagined we would lose that basic human right to rightwing fanatics.
The book documents your time in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba. What did you learn about feminism and the struggle for gender justice from your time in Latin America and with Latin American women?
MR: I learned a great deal. And I’m still learning. US Americans in general—women as well as men and those of other genders—tend to think we know it all. That we are the most advanced, the most sophisticated in our approach to social problems. Living in Latin America enabled me to stick a pin in that arrogant balloon. I learned a profound resect for other peoples, their histories and cultures. The ways in which we may see the same issue can be revealing. Take control of natality, for example. While women in the United States were fighting for access to birth control and abortion, women in the developing world were fighting against mass sterilization. I learned that a single issue could be experienced from different, often opposing, angles. And this is only one of many examples.
Can you expand on how your role as a mother impacted the events that happened in the book, your political work, and/or your relationships with the different outrider figures?
MR: I was born in 1936 and so came up during McCarthyism, a particularly restrictive period in recent US history. I was a little too young for McCarthy’s reach to affect me directly, but its chill was certainly present as I moved from being a girl to womanhood. In a country emerging from a world war, I was also subject to the degrading attitudes toward women that existed then: enticements for women to retreat into the domestic arena, obtain our primary satisfaction from making a home for husband and children. Despite all this, I believed I could have it all. I bought the wife/mother equation but also wanted to write from a very early age. Perhaps something in my nature convinced me I could do both. I was unmarried when I had my first child in New York City in 1960. Affordable daycare didn’t exist. I was on my own as far as earning a living for myself and my son. When he was ten months old, I moved with him to Mexico, where I believed life for a single mother would be easier. And I eventually married and had three more children. But I always experienced a tension between motherhood, my creative life, and activism. In 1969, the second wave of feminism changed the way I understood myself and my relationship to the larger society. But I was also beginning to be involved in movements for social change. Women with children who take part in revolution almost always face a dilemma: their activist demands compete with their roles as mothers. This was true for me. Three of my four children grew up feeling that I abandoned them in favor of “working for all the world’s children.” We have struggled through these issues, but it hasn’t been easy. There is a robust literature written by the daughters of women who have been engaged in the struggles to make a better world: books by such as Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker’s daughter) to the daughters of South African freedom fighters, Chileans engaged in the armed struggle movements of the 1970s and’80s, and the daughters of Filippino insurgents. I have written about my own experience with this in my memoir, I NEVER LEFT HOME: POET, FEMINIST, REVOLUTIONARY.
What do you see as the feminist aspects of the epistolary genre, especially as a form of recording and telling history?
MR: I don’t see the epistolary genre as feminist per se. That is, all genders engage in the genre. I do, however, identify letter writing as one of those so-called “lesser” literary genres (personal correspondence, diaries, recipes, etc.) in which women have traditionally taken refuge and also excelled. As such, the genre has attracted feminist women. Women throughout history have tended to tell the stories of our lives in freer, more immediate ways, than men. We are attuned to life’s minutia, the details in which the raw truth is often found. Rather than limiting ourselves to the “grand ideas,” we often explore aspects of living overlooked by those in the male-centered canon. For this reason, our subject matter may also be more inclusive. And because we have not been listened to, we often confide our fears, desires, resentments, experiences in general, in letters. I also believe that women are more in touch with our feelings, so don’t limit our observations to ideas but are able to combine thought and feeling in more holistic ways. All these are integral to feminism.
El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn was a bilingual quarterly that you cofounded and edited in Mexico City in the 1960s. This literary magazine plays a major role in the book, often serving as the source of connection with various outriders who contributed in different ways – such as content, funding, and morale. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies also began as a grassroots publication in 1975, and we saw several similarities in Frontiers’ history with your editorial work that you describe in the book. From your experience, what is the role of publishing for collective movements and efforts for social and political change?
MR: Thanks for reminding me that Frontiers began in 1975. That means it is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, an extraordinary accomplishment for a grassroots magazine and I want to express my congratulations. Did you know that I was a part of that history? When Frontiers was at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s, the feminist anthropologist Louise Lamphere was its editor, and she hired me as managing editor. I remember that we published some important feminist texts, among them one by Ruth Benedict and others that shed light on some of the extraordinary women who helped to open up the West. We had a board made up of women from the community as well as on campus. Louise did most of the editing of the scholarly contributions while I tended to the literary ones: poetry and short stories, mostly, but we wanted all the women on our board to read all the submissions we were considering.
Today grassroots publishing takes on increased importance as corporate and social media become less and less reliable, disseminating lies and subverting our perception of reality. People’s publishing generally responds to specific community needs. El Corno Emplumado, the bilingual literary quarterly I co-founded and edited out of Mexico City in the 1960s, responded to the need for good translation that would make it possible for poetry-lovers in the North to read the great Latin American writers and those in the South to read our great writers north of the boarder. In LETTERS FROM THE EDGE, Susan Sherman talks about hr important magazine, I.Kon, thatstarted out in the 1960s as a place where US readers could find the most exciting examples of writing by the innovative creative minds of that decade. Later, in the 1980s, I.Kon had a second series, dedicated to women’s work. This feminist run featured such trail blazers as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. But Susan never excluded men when it was important not to. I.Kon’s second series featured women’s work exclusively except for the issue dedicated to the struggle against South African apartheid; that issue included some work by male writers. The role of grassroots independent publishing has always been to create a forum for thought and action that reflects our interests and meets our needs.
Find a copy of Letters from the Edge, New Village Press, here.
[1] Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (1981), Cuban Women Now: Interviews with Cuban Women (1974), Our Voices, Our Lives: Stories of Women from Central America and the Caribbean (2002), and Gathering Rage: The Failure of 20th Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda (1999).
Biography
Poet, photographer, translator, and social activist MARGARET RANDALL was born in New York City and grew up in New Mexico. Taking active part in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and then living in Cuba for eleven years and Nicaragua for four, Randall returned to the United States in 1984, only to face deportation when the government declared her writings “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many, she won her case in 1989. Randall is the author of more than two hundred books, most recently I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary; Artists in My Life; Wild Card (poems); and Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations (based on correspondence from longtime friends). She’s received the Poet of Two Hemispheres award from Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Ecuador, AWP’s George Garrett Award, Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico, among other recognitions.