Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Dorothy Allison now lives in northern California with her partner Alex and her son Wolf Michael. She is the author of four books: Bastard Out of Carolina, The Women Who Hate Me, poetry 1980-1990; Trash, a collection of stories that won two Lambda Literary Awards in 1989 for lesbian fiction and small press book; and the new book Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, which recently won the 1995 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Studies.

Dorothy Allison gave this impassioned speech to a gathering of booksellers from across the country at the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association held in Chicago in June of 1995.

When I was eleven years old, I wanted to die.

Now there are a lot of ways for an eleven-year-old girl to die. I could have managed it, but I did not. One reason why is simple. I walked into a bookstore and found a way to live. I traded one of my momma's John D. MacDonald mysteries for the first book I could afford -- a paperback without a cover. I took it home and read it. Reading, I began to imagine the possibility of justice. Reading gave me an idea of the worth of my own life. Books did that, writing.

I don't think writing is a small thing. I don't think books are objects of marketing. I don't think of bookstores as the place to push product. I believe in the possibility of changing the world, and I think that writers give us a way to imagine that -- the world we deeply need and want.

I keep a sign over my desk, a quote from Grace Paley. It reads, "I write for the still, small possibility of justice." Underneath it I have listed names, my reasons to write. I write to save my dead. I got a lot of dead. Not just in my family, but a nation of people disappeared, lost, not honored, not understood -- men, women, children, those who lost their lives because no one knew the full story. Books are a small gesture toward the full story.

Understand me. What I am here for is to tell you stories you may not want to hear. What I am here for is to rescue my dead. And to scare hell out of you now and then. I was raised Baptist, I know how to do that.

Now it may be true that, as George Bernard Shaw once said, we become writers because we don't have to get dressed to go to work. I think one of the reasons I began to write was because to do it I did not need to be pretty, did not even have to be interesting. All I needed was to be able to write something pretty and interesting. But the truth is that people become writers out of need. People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back. Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Angela Carter . . . my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.

I am going to write a lot of books if I live long enough. Each and every one of them is going to me about being despised and not dying. Each and every one of them is going to be a small gesture toward the possibility of justice.

Where I live, the tiny bookstore downtown just disappeared. The rent got too high and a realtor made a better offer. In the next town over the same thing is happening. We keep losing bookstores and getting more realtors -- evidence of how very hard it is to keep bookstores alive. But this is what I believe: I believe that when we lose bookstores we are losing the vital -- that bookstores are not just places where people go to drink coffee or get a bargain. People don't even go to bookstores just to get a book. Sometimes people go to bookstores to see the other people who are reading books. They go to bookstores to find what they sometimes cannot find at home.

I believe that in the absence of what I started out with in my life -- women's centers and rape crisis centers -- bookstores are community centers. That little bookstore downtown is where you go to be reassured that you are not crazy, to be reassured that the world changes, to be told hard truths and, occasionally, reassured with a little laughter.

What I need to say to you as booksellers is very simple. Don't go away. I know how difficult the work can be, but please, don't go away. And thank you. I need to say thank you. For the eleven-year-old girl that I was and the forty-six-year-old woman that I am. Because of you I am still here, here with my three-year-old who loves to be read to and my partner who is building me more bookshelves while I stand here talking to you. As a writer and a woman, I am going to live forever. You are why.