SOURCE: An interview in This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, eds., University of New Mexico Press, 1990, pp. 95-107.

Eysturoy specializes in American Studies. In the following interview which took place in March, 1987, after a poetry reading held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Allen discusses the impact of the American Southwest on her work, her literary beginnings and aims, her cultural identity, the writing process, and feminist issues.

[Eysturoy]: You were born and raised here [in Albuquerque.] How has that influenced you and your work?

[Allen]: My work is all tangled up with landscape around here. But landscape for me does not mean "the landscape"; it does not mean something that great dramas are enacted upon. Maybe that's because so much of the drama in the Southwest is the land, not the people. We are, to me, the background...