QUICK PL Refer to Explorations in Literature for a complete version of this interview.

In "Interview with Simon Ortiz," Ortiz argues that, though he may write differently than authors and poets who came before him, he writes "about the same things that Robert Browning or Shelley or Shakespeare did."

Which evidence from the text supports this position?

"I will try to write everything down. I try to urge myself to sit down and write conversations and dialogues that I have with people. I try to remember what people said. I try to put them in a context later when I’m writing."

"My point in the book was to indeed have Indian people understood as people, like anybody else. We have daily struggles: we argue among ourselves; we get divorced; we need jobs; we try to go to school. We have happy times and sad times."

"In my next book, A Good Journey, which was reissued recently, I utilized the oral tradition. My first major books were more in keeping with what I knew from the Acoma tradition, living in this experience called America."

"I was concentrating on the immediate, yet referring to the Pueblo revolt of 1680; that struggle then is very similar to our struggle now. It is much more pointed politically because the 1970s and 1980s were very much a time of political struggle."