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Author says stories help explain us Allison speaks Thursday at Craterian By BILL VARBLE Dorothy Allison has a theory about the importance of stories. Reading from her novels "Bastard Out of Carolina" and "Cavedweller" on speaking tours, she talks about it. "I think we make up stories to explain our lives to ourselves, and then tell them to other people," she says in a phone interview from her home in San Francisco. Allison speaks at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater in Medford. It's the third in this season's New Chautauqua Lecture Series. Tickets are $15 ($8.50 students). Call 779-3000. Allison's first novel, "Bastard Out of Carolina," defied the odds to become that rare phenomenon, a literary best seller. It got raves in the New York Times Book Review, received a National Book Award nomination and became a made-for-TV movie. All this in Allison's early 40s, after she'd published a book of poems and a book of stories. "I think I was lucky in that the book's cover (a Dorothea Lang photo) caught attention," Allison says, with a hint of her South Carolina roots around the vowels. "That, and I spent six weeks going to book stores all over the country promoting the book and sleeping on friends' floors." She has mixed feelings about book tours to this day. "I love talking to readers," she says. "I hate travel. You have to accept that hotel culture, you can't do anything else." Allison's second novel, "Cavedweller" (published last year and due in paperback in May) is about a mother and three daughters. A young woman named Delia goes off on a rock 'n' roll tour bus and comes home after 10 years of the rock lifestyle to re-make her kids and her relationship with them. "I wanted to write about redemption," Allison says. "How people make amends and fix their lives. I know you can't fix that kind of thing, but you can do an enormous amount of repair work." Allison, 49, lives in a working class San Francisco neighborhood with her 6-year-old son and her dogs. She is also the author of, "Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature," a book of essays; "The Women Who Hate Me," a book of poems; and "Trash," a book of short stories. She has been an editor of "Conditions and Quest: A Feminist Quarterly." She has taught classes in literature, radical anthropology and feminist theory at colleges around the country. She was at Stanford the other day conducting a workshop in literature and feminism called, "Have We Made a Feminist World?" The answer, in Palo Alto, at least, seems to be, no. "They think they're through the gate," she says. "Only four of 20 young women defined themselves as feminists. I think it's because they had strong mothers who expected them to be strong. I try to make them think and relate their lives to literature." Allison says it took years to shape her stories into "Bastard." "I had to sit down and open my veins year after year," she says. She liked the movie version. "I thought Anjelica (Huston, who directed) did a good job. It's a very upsetting movie." Allison plays music when she writes. For "Bastard," it was Ruth Brown and the Carter family. For "Cavedweller," it was Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Fleetwood Mac. She'd like to write a novel about a Janis Joplin-like rock star. The woman in "Cavedweller" invents a story of herself walking away from a rock 'n' roll world, denying herself happiness and love and music. In Allison's stories, things are seldom simple. In her life, too. "Women would tell girls in my family to be a strong woman you had to be mouthy and have a sense of humor," she says. "Buried in that is another story. These strong women always fell in love with violent and abusive men who would destroy them ... I wonder why we tell ourselves those kinds of stories." "You have to love stories. Life is full of them. We love even the terrible stories." She regrets that she can't sing. "You have things you can be good at," she says with a laugh. "I can write a paragraph that'll break your heart. I can tell a story you'll believe. That and someone who loves you is about all you need." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA