Pam Annas

The Interview

An oral history interview for Radical Teacher Interviewed by Joseph Entin and Jocelyn Wills on January 17, 2023. The transcript has been lightly edited.

Jocelyn Wills: Welcome Susan.

The Interview

Joseph Entin: Okay, we’re recording now. Today is Wednesday, August 13th, 2025. I’m Joseph Entin. I’ve been on the Radical Teacher board since 1997, and I’m here with Pamela, or Pam Annas, who’s been on the board a lot longer than I have. We’re going to conduct a conversation, an interview, about Pam’s life and experience on the board.

Right before we started recording, you were telling a story about your early experience on the board. Do you want to start with that? I’m going to ask you about your early life and your family, but.

Pamela Annas: Sure. There were a lot of people at UMass Boston, where I had arrived in 1975, who were radical. We had a group called the Socialist Column, which David Hunt brought me into. He’s a history professor. And then I think it was Barry Phillips, who was on the board early on, in the seventies, when it first started. I think it started in ’75, right? So we’re in our fiftieth year.

Joseph Entin: Seventy-three, maybe? Yeah, right.

Pamela Annas: We should set off fireworks or something. Anyway, he talked me into joining the Radical Teacher board.

We were of course in print then. And it was very wearying work, because we had to do everything ourselves. We didn’t have computers we could do this on. So they asked me to proofread or copyedit the issue that was coming out next. And they gave me Adrienne Rich’s “Taking Women Students Seriously.”

Joseph Entin: Oh my gosh.

Pamela Annas: And I’m like, wow. There was something else in there too, I forget what, but it was equally a wow. And I said, oh yeah, definitely, I want to be connected with this journal. I’m going to learn tremendously. So I was pretty involved. Well, anyway, I’ll stop there.

Joseph Entin: That’s an amazing anecdote. I’d love to back us up and hear a little bit about how you ended up at UMass Boston in the late seventies at all, knowing Barry Phillips and other people who were affiliated with Radical Teacher and on the left. So I’d love to start with your early story. Tell me a little bit about where you were born, and your family, and what was happening when you first arrived on this planet.

Pamela Annas: Okay. I was born in 1946 in Lockhart, Texas. My dad had been in the military. I was part of the first wave of baby boomers. My dad was in the Navy, and he got out, and married my mom, who he had been corresponding with from the Pacific for lo these many years of the war. He was at Pearl Harbor when it went down.

They came home to Lockhart, Texas, which is where his family was, to try to figure out, like, what are we doing now. And I arrived almost exactly a year after they got married. We were there for a couple of years, and then we moved up to Iowa, because his mom and dad had broken up years before and his mother was in Iowa. We were there for a year or two. Then we went to my mother’s parents in St. Joseph, Missouri, for a year or two. And Dad was doing various kinds of things, trying to make a living.

Now, this gets me into another question, but I’m the first person in my family to go to college, okay? He was an enlisted man, and he had a hard time, like a lot of other people, finding something to do when he got out. So, long story short, in 1951 he re-enlisted in the Navy, and then did an entire career in the Navy.

So I grew up on military bases, basically. I think I was four years old when he rejoined, and we went to Imperial Beach, California, and lived in base housing, right on the ocean. There was a bunch of prefab buildings, apartments that we all lived in, and then there was this big tall screen wire fence, and on the other side of it was the Pacific Ocean. Which was so wonderful.

That was back in the time when the grunion were still running. Did you ever hear about the grunion?

Joseph Entin: No.

Pamela Annas: They’re extinct, I think, now. But they were these little, almost sardine-sized fish who at some point in the year would come in to lay their eggs on the shore. Somebody would dig a hole, somebody would lay eggs, somebody would wrap around the hole, and then they would all go out on the next wave and leave the eggs there. So everybody said, oh, the grunion are running, the grunion are running, and everybody went down with pails to catch grunion. I think I was four or five then. And then they would bring them home, and I remember, it’s an old smell memory, the smell of grunion sort of wrapped in breadcrumbs and being fried. It was absolutely amazing.

So we lived there for a year, and then Dad got transferred to Yokosuka, Japan. He went to Japan first, and they had not decided to let families in yet, so we spent that year in St. Joseph, Missouri, at my grandmother’s house, where I went to kindergarten and saw my first television set. One of my friends had a TV, and we watched Howdy Doody and all that kind of stuff.

Then my arms were like pincushions. My brother and I both got about a million shots. And then they shipped us off on this ship to Japan. So in 1951, me at age five, or going on six, and my brother, who was three years younger, and my mom got on a ship, an old-style ship, and went to Yokosuka. This is postwar Japan. There’s a picture somewhere that I’ve got of the family arriving in Japan, me holding I don’t know what, my brother holding a teddy bear.

So there we were, and I went to first grade there, and then we were transferred to Washington, D.C. We went on military air transport, which is a very bare-bones way of flying. We must have gotten there in stages, because we were in Japan and then we were on the East Coast of the U.S. I don’t remember a whole lot of second and third grade, but in third grade I learned how to play baseball. I was very much a tomboy, so I was doing sandlot baseball intensely.

And then we got transferred to Bremerhaven, Germany, when I was in fourth grade. I’d started fourth grade in D.C., or Maryland, and then we got transferred, and all of a sudden we were on the North Sea. We went on a ship, and icebergs were floating in the harbor. We got there, I think, in February. And it was dark. It’s very dark in the northern countries. And we’re like, okay.

So I was in fourth and fifth grade in Germany, and I was a Brownie, and then a Girl Scout. And then we got transferred to Turkey. Of course Dad went on ahead, and we stayed so that we could finish school. And then we got on a train.

Joseph Entin: How old are you at this point, do you think?

Pamela Annas: I’m ten, maybe eleven. I think it’s the summer I turned eleven. My brother was then eight. And by that time I had a sister who was three. She had been born in D.C.

So we went on this amazing train ride, and I think they still have it, through Germany, through the Alps, through tunnels, into the top of Italy. And then we went straight down the spine of Italy and ended up in Naples, where we caught a plane over to Istanbul.

Joseph Entin: Holy cow.

Pamela Annas: And stayed for a week in Istanbul, while they figured out where we were going to live, because it was a new Air Force base and they didn’t have any housing for dependents. They didn’t have a school either.

So we were in Istanbul, and then we caught the ferry. Oh, it’s wonderful. If you ever get to that area, take the ferry from Istanbul across to the other side, across the Bosphorus. And we lived in a village, because there was no housing. A village called Yalova, which was right on the water.

And because there was no school, my mother homeschooled my brother Mike and me for a year. I learned a lot about education that year, and about regular schools. I learned that I could finish my work for the day in, like, an hour and a half, or two hours. And if I did that, I could go off and run around the countryside in Turkey as much as I wanted. So then it was horrible to get back to regular school, in which you just dragged along, and you dragged along.

The next year they got together three Quonset huts. You know what Quonset huts are?

Joseph Entin: Yeah.

Pamela Annas: So, three Quonset huts. One was for K through two, one was for three, four, and five, and the last one was for six, seven, and eight, and I was now in seventh grade. There were, I don’t know, four people in sixth grade, six of us in seventh grade, and one eighth grader. They brought in teachers to teach us. And there we were.

It was great. The whole entire family agreed that Turkey was the best place we had ever been. I had my own horse. I rode all around the countryside. My dad, as usual, got friendly with the native inhabitants. When we were in Japan, he had hung out with the archers, and became a champion barebow archer back when he got back to the United States. This time he hung around with the horse people. Actually they were Albanians rather than Turkish. They had a big farm at the end of the village that we were in.

Anyway, it was just great. But alas, all good things come to an end, and we had to go back to the United States. We were transferred to San Francisco, where Dad was at the Presidio. My mom is trucking along, trying to take care of all of us, and I’m the oldest child, so I’m doing a lot of the taking care of, also. We were there for a couple of years. And then we got transferred to Monterey. I’m amazed you’re still awake.

Joseph Entin: Oh, this is an incredible story, about living all over the world as somebody who was born in Texas. It’s amazing.

Pamela Annas: So we went to Monterey, to the Army Language School, where Dad was learning Russian. We were there for a year while he learned Russian. He already had Japanese, not writing it but speaking it, and he already had Turkish, same thing. He picked up languages.

So he picked up Russian. And I should say, nobody cares now, and I didn’t know this at the time, but basically what he was doing was he was a listener. We always got stationed out on the periphery. In Japan, on the North Sea, in Turkey. And he was sometimes in submarines, he was sometimes in airplanes, and a lot of the time he was just sitting next to communication devices, listening to what he was supposed to listen to, whatever that was. Probably the Russians. So this is the Cold War.

Oh, and by the way, we were in Japan the first time during the Korean War. And I can remember air raid sirens in the middle of the night, and Mom bundling all of us up and taking us down to some underground place where we had to stay the entire night. This happened two or three times.

So he did that, and then we got transferred back to Japan, and we were there for two years in Yokohama, where I went to Niles C. Kinnick High School. It was a military dependents’ school, and I graduated from high school there. There were seventy-two people in the graduating class.

And then this is just one more thing and then I’m out of there. There was no sense, ever, even though I was a straight-A student and walked off with many of the prizes that were available at graduation, there was never any sense that I was going to go to college. They were hoping maybe that my brother, who was three years younger, might, if he kept his grades up, go to college. In fact, they told him if he got a B average this one semester they would give him a trail bike.

So I come home one day, and there’s this covering in the living room, and underneath it is a gorgeous little trail bike. I mean, like a Honda 50cc. And I said to my dad, I’ve been getting A’s for years, and nobody has given me anything. And he said, well, we don’t need to with you. You just do it. And I’m like, okay, there’s something wrong here.

We’re now in 1964. And Betty Friedan had written the.

Joseph Entin: The Feminine Mystique, 1963.

Pamela Annas: 1963.

Joseph Entin: But she’s writing for the suburban housewife. You were a sort of working-class military kid, in a completely different world.

Pamela Annas: That’s what I was. A Navy brat, as they called us. So you have to know that history about me to even begin to understand the way I look at things, which is very much not falling into the more conventional lines.

Joseph Entin: Say more about that, because it’s such an incredible story about your family, and about travel, and about the U.S. military machine in the Cold War. But how did that shape you as a young person?

Pamela Annas: I have poems about this. What it means, and my brother feels the same way, is that you make friends, and you’re going to be with them for a year and a half or two years, and then you’re transferred somewhere, or they are, and you will never see them again in this life. Okay?

So yes, you’re seeing all kinds of different countries and everything, but aside from the family itself you don’t have any stable affectional environment. I mean, you have the military. The military takes care of you very, very well if you’re in the military or a dependent. But your friends, you just never get very close to anybody. Not really close, because your arc will be broken.

So I think that’s a big loss, actually. I know so many people who are still friends with the people they went to kindergarten with, for goodness sake. I can’t even imagine that. It’s very easy to pick up and go to the next place. And it’s very easy, once you’ve gotten to the next place, to completely forget about the last place. So, I don’t know, it’s a life. There are good points and bad points about it, but it does have that effect.

Joseph Entin: Were you pretty close to your parents?

Pamela Annas: You would have to be, yes. And my dad was pretty much a military guy in the 1950s and early sixties, so whatever you imagine about that is probably true. And my mom was from a working-class family. Her dad was a railroad man. Did fifty years on the railroad in the Midwest.

Joseph Entin: How did your parents meet?

Pamela Annas: That’s a good question. They met in San Diego in, like, 1940 or ’41. San Diego was a shipping-off point for the Navy, and my mom had gone out there. She had gotten out of high school, done a year of secretarial school, and then she went off to San Diego to work for the war. That’s where they met.

And they got married. And then my mother said, you know what, this was a mistake. She knew him for about three weeks. They went off and got married, and they got back, and he said, I have to go check in to the base, and then I’ll come back. And when he came back, she said, I’ve changed my mind. And he went off on his ship and was gone for years. They wrote letters back and forth, and as soon as the war was over he came back to St. Joe, Missouri, and gathered her up, and they got married, and here I am.

Joseph Entin: That’s incredible. So your parents didn’t imagine that there was any reason why you would go to college, and you had done really well in school. What did you see in school? Because obviously your parents were not pressuring you to perform in any kind of way. What did you see in school, and how did you end up going to college?

Pamela Annas: I always loved to read. I would be sent to bed and then I would read with a flashlight under the bedcovers. I think it was to escape. I escaped into school, basically. I was the person who was always having to take care of the little ones, do you know what I mean, mama’s helper. That was not a thing that I wanted to grow up and do.

So after a year in Misawa, I got married to somebody who was getting out of the military and going back. At the time I thought I loved him, but it was probably the reason a lot of eighteen-year-olds get married, to get away from home. So we did go back, to Poughkeepsie, New York, because he was from Pleasant Valley, right near Poughkeepsie. And we went to Dutchess Community College for a year.

Joseph Entin: You were both in community college at the same time?

Pamela Annas: Yeah, but he had already done a freshman year before he went off to the military, so he was in his sophomore year and I was a freshman.

And I had the highest grade point average in the school. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but it was like, I was in heaven. Not because I had the highest average, but because I could read books all day long and write about them and talk about them. It’s great. I was so happy.

Joseph Entin: Do you remember what you were reading, or classes you took, or professors?

Pamela Annas: I had some good professors. I remember the history professor. It was world history, a big lecture class, but he had a way of evoking the period. I remember he was talking about the Egyptians, and about the Egyptian gods, and he said, so when you leave class today and you walk outside into the sunshine, look up and think, your god is looking at you. And it’s like, oh. He made everything come alive. And I thought, well, maybe I’ll be a history major. So the next year I took a U.S. history course, and it was dull as dust. And I said, oh, well, it was just the teacher. It wasn’t the subject.

So we stayed there for a year, and then we transferred to SUNY Buffalo, because we didn’t have any money. And I was working, oh, this is funny and ironic. While I was going to Dutchess Community College, I was working thirty hours a week at the reception desk at Vassar College.

Joseph Entin: Oh, wow.

Pamela Annas: Do you remember that Saturday Night Live person who played the telephone operator, who put the plugs in and stuff like that? What was her name? I forget. But anyway, that’s part of what I did. We’re now talking about 1965. And I sort of took my turn at the reception desk, which was full of young guys from Yale who kept trying to ask me out. And the sixty-year-old matron who was running this office would say to them, this is a married woman you are talking to.

So after a year of that, we went up to Buffalo. And I did three years at SUNY Buffalo, and the teaching was really quite good. By then I think I had decided on an English degree. I had a great freshman English teacher at Dutchess Community College who told me that there was such a thing as myth criticism. And I’m like, really? Really?

Oh, and one more thing. My sophomore year there, we brought my brother out. My parents had gone on, and my brother was now going into his senior year in high school, and he was on Adak, Alaska, which is a little island out in the Aleutian chain, where Dad was no doubt listening. It’s probably the closest to Russia we can get from the west side of the United States. So I called my folks and I said, look, you don’t want Mike going to a non-accredited high school, he’s going to have trouble getting into college. Why don’t you send him to me? So they did. They sent Mike to me, and he lived with us for the next year and did his senior year of high school in Buffalo. And then I think he wanted to go on to the University of Texas the next year.

Joseph Entin: So let me just ask, this is around 1968, right?

Pamela Annas: When I graduated from Buffalo it was 1969.

Joseph Entin: Do you have memories of that particular moment, being on a college campus? Certainly there was a lot of protest, a lot of activism around the country. But also you were married and working, and I don’t know how you experienced that.

Pamela Annas: I was taking seventeen credits a semester, and again I was working thirty hours a week, this time at a trucking company, typing up loading manifests. And my husband was also going to school full-time and working. He’d been trained as a nurse in the Army, so he was able to find a hospital he could work in all weekend. So I was working every evening, he was working every weekend. We were working our way through school, basically. That’s what we did.

And then, at the end of that, we broke up, because he wanted me not to go on to graduate school but to just finally settle down and start producing babies. He was also Catholic, so he had his priest come over and talk to me about this. But I was pretty adamant. I knew what I wanted to do.

So I applied to graduate schools, and I should have gone to Berkeley. I got into Berkeley, but they didn’t have any money for me the first year. And this is where class comes into it again. I had to go where there was some money waiting, because I had no backup. My parents had no money. So I didn’t go to Berkeley, and I didn’t go to UT, because I didn’t want to be near my family again. And I went to Indiana University at Bloomington, because they offered me a full fellowship for the first year.

Joseph Entin: And this was to get your PhD in English literature?

Pamela Annas: Yeah, because this was a period, I think it was just a short period, where they really wanted you not to stop for an MA in the middle of it. They wanted you to just go from BA to PhD in four or five years.

Joseph Entin: So you moved to Bloomington. Your brother had gone elsewhere at that point. Were you single?

Pamela Annas: Yes, we got the marriage annulled. I was single, but I didn’t have much time for socializing. I worked really hard.

Actually, I met, did I meet Dick Ohmann then? He came to give a talk or something like that. Anyway, it was a decent apartment. Berkeley would have been more fun, I think. Where did you go to school?

Joseph Entin: BA or PhD?

Pamela Annas: Graduate school.

Joseph Entin: Yale, in New Haven.

Pamela Annas: You know, I tried to get into Yale, but they said, we can’t let you in because you don’t have either Greek or Latin. I’m like, what?

Joseph Entin: Be glad you didn’t go to Yale. My longtime office mate and fellow Radical Teacher board member James Davis, who is at the PSC, got his PhD at Indiana.

Pamela Annas: Oh, did he? When?

Joseph Entin: Between 1993 and 1999, something like that.

Pamela Annas: Oh, okay. I was long gone. I didn’t know that.

Joseph Entin: So what was that like, your years in Indiana?

Pamela Annas: I was a hippie. I have to tell you this. I had long chestnut hair down almost to my waist, and I would float around campus in a long multicolored skirt with a bag of books. I worked really hard.

I couldn’t live in the dorms, because I brought my Siamese cat with me, and she was my best friend, maybe my only friend. So I had to get a little studio apartment. That’s where I lived.

Joseph Entin: I assume that the faculty in the department were primarily white men at that point?

Pamela Annas: That is correct. I’m trying to remember if there was anybody who was not white, and it doesn’t come to mind. There was one woman, no, two women on the faculty. Martha Vicinus.

Joseph Entin: She’s on the board, you know.

Pamela Annas: Victorian lit, that was her field. She was basically my mentor. I didn’t trust any of the men to be my mentor.

Joseph Entin: Was Susan Gubar there?

Pamela Annas: No, she came a year or two after I left. She would have been great. But Martha was great. And there was another Mary somebody or other, who I think was a medievalist, and she was older. But those were the only two women full-time faculty.

Joseph Entin: I guess the magazine hadn’t been started yet, but was Martha part of the Radical Caucus?

Pamela Annas: Oh, I’m sure she was part of the Radical Caucus, yeah. And she’s written for RT, and she was on the board for a number of years.

Joseph Entin: I think she may still be. What was it like to have her as a mentor?

Pamela Annas: It was great. She invited me in.

One of the things, and let me tell you something. I was of course teaching freshman English, mostly. The TAs there were teaching three sections of freshman English a year.

Joseph Entin: Oh.

Pamela Annas: A year, not in a semester. A year. While the full-time faculty were teaching four courses a year. And we got $2,700 a year. That was our pay. Of course, that didn’t mean so little back then. You could just barely make it, and you had to find a summer job, because there were two months you weren’t getting any paycheck. So, I’m sorry, money keeps coming up, but it is an issue.

Joseph Entin: It’s important. I recently read a book by Lennard Davis that he just published, about poverty and literature. And one of the questions he asks is, why is nobody in literary studies interested in poverty? And he says, well, one factor may be that when you look at the backgrounds of people who study literature in the United States, they’re overwhelmingly middle and upper-class people. So there were very few working-class people coming through the academy, especially when you were doing it.

Pamela Annas: Right. And that gets into social issues, of course, because, just in terms of what you just said, people were always talking above my head. And they didn’t mean to be. But I didn’t know. I guess their parents read T. S. Eliot to them when they were babies or something. I don’t know. But I’d never heard of T. S. Eliot. And I’d never seen a play.

Indiana had its own opera house. They brought in Waiting for Godot and other modern plays to be put on on their stage. So I had a whole cultural, the kind of culture that middle, upper-middle-class to rich kids just kind of get in the house, I finally had that, and I was in my early twenties. So it was interesting.

Joseph Entin: Do you remember what teaching was like? Your first experiences teaching, as a TA?

Pamela Annas: Well, okay, my first teaching experience was actually when I was in Yokohama the second time, and I was fifteen or sixteen years old. A knock on the door comes one day. We were not on the base, we were in a housing development that was off the base. Knock on the door comes, I open the door, and there’s three thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Japanese girls at the door saying, we would like to learn English, will you teach us? And I thought for a minute, and I said, sure. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

So they came for regular lessons once a week, and we’d talk, and whatever it was I could do. A couple of them got bored after a while, but one of them stayed with it, and when I was at Buffalo I was able to bring her over for a semester abroad, because she was now in college. And we were friends. She went on to go to graduate school and become a teacher in Japan, and periodically she’d make a swing to visit her friends in the U.S., and we’d get together, Michiko and I.

Joseph Entin: It’s so interesting, because you were saying that part of what was challenging about this peripatetic life was that it was hard to maintain relationships. But that’s an incredible story about staying in touch with somebody over time.

Pamela Annas: Right. So, where were we?

Joseph Entin: I was asking about teaching, your experiences of teaching, and what it was like to be a young woman teaching comp at Indiana.

Pamela Annas: Well, it was kind of ridiculous. They were, like, three years younger than me. I was twenty-one when they threw a freshman class at me. We just muddled along.

And this is Indiana University. Indiana University is kind of like Austin, Texas, in that Austin is not really Texas and Bloomington is not really Indiana. It’s a totally different vibe. So all the parents were anxious about sending their kids to this den of iniquity.

I had decided it would be interesting and good for my freshman students if they wrote a couple of journal pages every week and turned them in. Oh my god. Every one of them was writing the same journal. All these blonde, ponytailed white girls, these little girls, were writing about their parents being afraid for them, and writing about how they had to be careful. And they had to censor it somewhat, because they were giving it to their teacher. And I thought to myself, oh my god, groupthink. It was extremely boring to read.

But every once in a while some interesting person would come into my class. There was this guy who was such a refreshing addition to the classroom. First of all, he was Black. Secondly, he was about thirty years old, and he was there because of an air controllers’ strike. They were on strike, so he thought he might as well take a class. And I was so relieved and delighted that he was there. It made me realize what kind of student I wanted to work with.

And so I think that’s what was in my head when I got to UMass Boston for an interview. And particularly when I got here, and taught for a year, and realized who I was working with, and how priceless that was, and how much they needed people who wouldn’t condescend to them, who would be with them where they were. Because most of the people who came to UMass Boston at the time I got there were the first in their family to go to college. Somewhat later, years later, it got to be more middle class, and now they even have freshman dorms. We were a commuter school.

Joseph Entin: So, let me ask you another kind of related question. We’ve been talking about these issues of class. But how and when did you become a radical? It’s one thing to experience various forms of alienation or disaffection or dissonance in the course of one’s education, passing through this big educational machine. But at some point you started to think of yourself as a radical, as a serious dissident. How did that happen?

Pamela Annas: I don’t remember one big burst of anything. I felt like I was rebelling in all different sorts of little directions. Let me think.

Well, feminism happened. It was 1969, ’70, and I was at Indiana University. Maybe nothing happened that first year, but the next year, what do you call, what did we used to call them, these little groups of women who got together?

Joseph Entin: Consciousness raising?

Pamela Annas: Yeah, consciousness-raising groups. So those things started, and I was immediately involved with that, and found a couple of nice mentors, white-haired ladies like I am now, faculty wives who also taught but could never teach full-time because they were faculty wives. And so they were busy mentoring those of us who were available to be mentored.

I remember a wonderful discussion about class, and about the town-gown issue, because the people who came in to talk to us about class were not people who were going to the university. We had this great conversation in the group.

And I got more and more involved with that, and then I had an opportunity, maybe the third year I was there, to create a course. I wouldn’t get paid for it, of course. And the students would get credit for it, I think, but they couldn’t count it toward the degree. Some kind of limitations, like handing out a carrot with one hand and flailing with the other. But anyway.

So I decided that I wanted to do a course on contemporary women poets. I can’t remember if that first time I did just a bunch of different writers. Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan I think. Actually, that must have been one I did later. I did versions of this course all along. I think that first time I just did six or seven. Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, I can’t remember who else. The course was completely full, and the students loved it.

And Martha was being kind of a mentor in this. She had asked me the semester before to come into her class and give a talk on Sylvia Plath, because it was beginning to look like Plath was somebody I might be writing a dissertation on. Which, as it happened, I did.

So I think feminism came along at the precise, important time when I was looking for something to anchor my radicalism to. I think that’s basically true. I was around too late for the civil rights movement. I wasn’t even in the country when the civil rights movement was happening. I was a teenager off in some other country.

Joseph Entin: Was the anti-war movement part of your experience, or less so?

Pamela Annas: Oh, yeah, very much. And I had a complicated relationship with it, as you might imagine, growing up on military bases. I don’t think war is a good thing, but I know there are times when you have to defend people. That’s just the culture I grew up in.

So yes, I was involved. It’s funny how many marches I did. I remember going to New York for a protest and seeing the AIDS quilt spread out. Many, many protests.

And then when Chris came along, he could barely toddle before he was being taken to more protests. Remember when, what was it, Camp, the president who was in Texas, not Lyndon B. Johnson, but.

Joseph Entin: Bush?

Pamela Annas: Yes, Bush. The second one. He had a ranch in Texas, and during the.

Joseph Entin: Iraq war?

Pamela Annas: The Iraq War, yeah. Chris and I were going to a lot of protests then. He was in middle school, and he was one of the editors and writers for their school newspaper. So we happened to be down in Texas visiting the family, and I said, hey, that place, Fort whatever it is, the Bushes’ camp, it’s only about three or four hours away. Let’s borrow a car. Because they had a whole protest setup there. They were barricading the gates, and the people who had set it up had lots of little crosses to indicate how many Afghanis were dead and how many U.S. people were dead. It was a very well-run encampment, as it were.

So we went down there and spent the day. And Chris went around interviewing everybody, as the reporter that he was. And then he wrote a couple of really good articles about it.

Joseph Entin: That’s great. So, you had some interviews, and you ended up at UMass Boston.

Pamela Annas: Linda Dittmar was on the interviewing committee. And Mary Anne Ferguson, if you know her.

Joseph Entin: I don’t know her.

Pamela Annas: She edited Images of Women in Literature. She was at the very beginning of the teaching-women’s-literature movement. She was older. I would call her a mentor of mine, also.

Joseph Entin: So you had studied with Martha Vicinus, who later became connected with Radical Teacher, and then you met Linda Dittmar, and it sounds like some other people. You came to Radical Teacher through UMass.

Pamela Annas: Well, I think it was Barry Phillips, who was on the board at the time and was a part-time faculty member in the English department. I think he was the one urging me to join the board. So I said, I’ll check it out. Not that I have any time, but I’ll check it out. Here I am, forty-six years later, still on the board.

Joseph Entin: That’s incredible. So do the math for me. When did you first join the board?

Pamela Annas: 1979. Sort of the end of 1979.

Joseph Entin: Do you have memories of those early board meetings you went to, or things about the magazine? Were the meetings in Middletown?

Pamela Annas: They were at Middletown, yes. That was when we had about an equal number of people in Boston and in New York, and then a few outliers who had moved to other places and still did stuff.

Joseph Entin: Right, and Dick was in Middletown.

Pamela Annas: Dick was in Middletown, and he had the use of the faculty lounge whenever he wanted it. So every six weeks, those of us in Boston, usually a carful, with Saul driving ninety miles an hour, and me, and Louis. And who else? There were usually four or five of us in the car. Linda wasn’t on the board then.

Joseph Entin: Was Frinde?

Pamela Annas: I can’t remember when Frinde came on. Frinde came on before Linda did. Linda had written for RT before, but I remember when she finally asked me about joining the board, and I said, you should.

I can’t remember who the other people were. Some of them have dropped off the board since. But we would drive down from here, it took, like, two and a half hours, and then people would drive in from New York. And we would meet, and we would have lunch, and then we would have a four-hour or five-hour meeting, and then we would get in our cars and drive back. And we kept on doing that until the Middletown place was no longer available, and until fewer and fewer people were in Boston.

Joseph Entin: Right. Sophie and I joined the board when we were living in New Haven, and then we would drive down from Boston, and then we would drive up from New York. But I can’t remember every six weeks. I’m not sure we were meeting every six weeks.

Pamela Annas: I think it was.

Joseph Entin: That’s amazing.

Pamela Annas: And now, I don’t know when we started meeting every three months.

Joseph Entin: I can’t remember either. And of course, since the pandemic we’re on Zoom, which is great, because we can have people from all over, but it’s different from those days of, I remember, all the snacks and stuff that Dick would get, all the food, and hanging around in the building in Middletown.

Do you remember issues that you worked on, or other things you did for and with the magazine that were important to you?

Pamela Annas: I was living in a feminist commune at the time, in Harvard Square, in an old Victorian house. There were lots of different people there, but some of them were members of this feminist folk rock band called the New Harmony Sisterhood Band. They were living there. So I decided to do an interview article with the members of the New Harmony Sisterhood Band about carrying the word through feminist music. I can’t find the magazine now, maybe I don’t have that issue anymore. But that was one of the first things that I did for the magazine.

Joseph Entin: That’s really great. I definitely think about you as a pioneer of working-class studies, writing about working-class writers and teaching working-class students. When I think about your career, and the ways in which you’ve really been a path-breaking thinker and teacher, those are some of the things that come to mind for me.

Do you want to say a little bit about that? I mean, working-class studies, there were very few people who thought about that as a possible field, as a topic. I think you were really early, and brave, in your awareness and your effort to bring questions of class to literary studies. What was that like? What do you think about that part of your career, in terms of your writing and your teaching?

Pamela Annas: I’m trying to remember when I started working-class studies. As soon as I got a chance to pick my classes, which didn’t take very long. Maybe it was in the early eighties.

I’ll get back to working-class studies in a minute, but the first thing that happened, which made it a little later that I got to working-class studies, was that I got a Mina Shaughnessy Fellowship for one year, to develop a course on feminist writing. So I spent that year basically doing that and getting the course launched, and it became cross-listed in the English department and women’s studies. And it went on for, I don’t know, decades, maybe. I trained a lot of women to write, and I did an article on that course, if you’re interested, called “Style as Politics,” in College English. I think I got the fellowship in ’81, ’82, and then I taught the course two or three times, and then I wrote the article, and it came out in 1985.

Shortly after that I really got into working-class studies. I was sort of doing it alongside, but then it became my main focus. I don’t know what to say about it, except that the need was so clear. Here were all these people sitting in my classrooms, looking at me, wanting to get an education, but that education was going to have nothing to do with them, really. They were going to learn this stuff so that they could go through the middle-class world and make something of themselves, or make some money in any case. And I thought that the experience of literature, and I, would be better served if they were given something that they could relate to personally. Because the desire for an education comes up so many times in working-class writing.

And that was what these kids had. They were working full-time and coming to school, and some of them had little kids, and they were in their mid-twenties or late twenties or early thirties, a lot of them. You just had to give them credit for wanting it so bad. So shouldn’t it be something that’s about them, too?

So I started searching around, and I found some wonderful books that I taught over and over again.

Joseph Entin: Tell us for the record. What are some of your favorites?

Pamela Annas: I can’t remember now. I could go into my bookcase. The Dollmaker.

Joseph Entin: Oh my gosh, Harriette Arnow, yeah.

Pamela Annas: That’s one of the things about getting over seventy, is that what goes are names. I’ll warn you about this now. What goes are names first. So, Bread, Bread something.

Joseph Entin: Bread Givers?

Pamela Annas: Yes. I taught that a lot. I loved that book.

Joseph Entin: Did you ever teach Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl? It’s a novel that I teach every year.

Pamela Annas: Yes. Really? Meridel Le Sueur, she came to UMass once. It was such an honor to meet her. And in the course of signing things she broke her glasses frame, and she just kept holding onto it. And I said, do you want me to get some Scotch tape, duct tape or something, and put it together? And we did finally get some duct tape and put it together.

And who else? Specifically working class. God, there’s so many. Hang on a minute. Native Son, of course. No, I’ve just walked into the other room and walked back and I can’t recall.

Joseph Entin: It’s not a quiz.

Pamela Annas: I’ll send you a syllabus.

Joseph Entin: I’d love to see a syllabus. That would be really amazing.

Pamela Annas: And then later on, these poetry collections, Tom Wayman’s poetry collections. Working-class poetry.

Joseph Entin: Oh, no, I don’t know them.

I was going to ask you about becoming the poetry editor of Radical Teacher, because there never was a poetry editor until you decided we needed to have one. You’ve been doing it for a good long while now, and it’s an incredibly successful element of the magazine.

Pamela Annas: And I’m so happy to have Aliyah involved also.

We had done poems before, way back, occasionally, just occasionally. And then, you remember the Occupy movement? Which I got involved with in the Boston area. We did an issue on Occupy, and I researched all the poems that I could find that were written by occupiers, about the Occupy movement and about their experiences. I must have read a thousand poems. And I put together about a dozen poems that I picked out, and put them in the magazine and did an article about the poetry. That was the point at which I thought, this magazine needs more poetry.

Joseph Entin: It’s really changed the magazine, and you’ve cultivated it so well. It’s really amazing that you continue this steady stream of really terrific poems.

Pamela Annas: Yeah, and we’re lucky in a way, because regular poetry magazines get, like, a thousand poems a month. We’re a niche. Radicalism is a niche. But even so, Aliyah and I have to look at a poem and say, it’s not a bad poem, it’s not radical at all. Or, it’s really radical, and it’s not a good poem. And we’re not getting into, and I never want to get into, I mean, I might make a suggestion about a word, or a comma, but I don’t want to get into helping people revise their poems. No way.

Joseph Entin: I can understand that.

Pamela Annas: So I’m very happy to have found, for example, I don’t know that Radical Teacher discovered Matthew Henry, but we were early to publish him. He was perfect. He is the perfect radical teacher poet.

Joseph Entin: And he’s now.

Pamela Annas: Doing so well. He’s an editor of a poetry magazine somewhere, he’s had two books come out. I feel like he’s one of our success stories. Not that we made this. I mean, we helped.

Joseph Entin: And speaking of success stories. Michele Fazio, was she a student of yours?

Pamela Annas: Yes. Oh my god. I had many wonderful students, and Michele was on the top tier of those wonderful students. She is working class, and Italian background, and went into working-class studies. Actually, she’s made it kind of the center of her work, which is fabulous.

Joseph Entin: And she’s on the Radical Teacher editorial board.

Pamela Annas: Yeah, and I was coaxing her, and Linda was coaxing her too, for two or three years before she could see her way clear. And once she got involved with the board, I realized what that meant, because once she gets involved with something she’s totally going to put a lot of energy into it.

Joseph Entin: She’s all in. That’s true. We’re so lucky to have her.

This has been incredible, and I’m so grateful to have heard all these stories. Is there anything else you want to say about your experience on the board, your life as a radical teacher? Obviously this interview could go on.

Pamela Annas: It could. Twenty-four hours. And this has been much more fun than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be, like, answering questions.

Joseph Entin: You have incredible story recall, I must say.

Pamela Annas: Well, one of the things I want to say, and I remembered it when you said the memorable, how has RT changed over time, and are there any memorable moments you wish to share.

What instantly came to mind was that we were beginning to feel stagnated. I can’t tell you what year this was, but we were sitting in the yard at Dick’s, bemoaning the fact that we were all aging and we were not getting new people, and this is going to be a crisis, and we keep trying to get new people, but then we bring somebody in and then they don’t stay.

And then the meeting decided, I mean, we all just sort of decided this at the same moment, we need to bring in cohorts of people. We need to bring in several people from an age group at a time. And then they will have a group, and they won’t feel isolated amid all these intimidating older people. So that’s what we did. And we changed our recruitment policy, and it’s been totally a success, I think.

Joseph Entin: I think I was in that first cohort, Sophie and I, and Jeff Melnick, and Rachel Rubin, and a whole bunch of people. Many of whom are not really active on the board or not on the board at this point, but a bunch of us have stayed. Sophie and I have been on the board for over a quarter century. Probably twenty-eight years.

Pamela Annas: Really? Wow. That’s great.

Joseph Entin: Thanks to you guys. So I love that story. And the board continues to find amazing people. Aliyah is an incredible example.

Pamela Annas: She is, yeah.

Joseph Entin: And Michele. We’re so fortunate to have her on board.

Pamela Annas: So I feel, and I think most of us do, that the magazine is going to go on. I mean, who knows? Maybe. We haven’t got an office that can be burned and wrecked, so. But I think it’s got an incredible legacy, and of course this work that you’re doing here is going to help. Because everybody must be saying different things that altogether lead to some kind of strategy to keep this going.

Joseph Entin: That is an interesting question. All these stories, because everybody has come to the board in a different way, that’s also striking to me, having heard the stories that I’ve heard so far.

I think when I think about the board, part of the reason I think it survives is its refusal of sectarianism.

Pamela Annas: Yes.

Joseph Entin: And its spirit of open and welcoming comradeship. That kind of spirit is what I think allows the magazine to keep going, because left politics can be very contentious. We’ve managed to bring people onto the board who came to their radicalism in their own unique, individual, independent way, as you did, starting with this incredible story about growing up in the military, and the way that shaped you, and then being in Indiana and finding feminism. That has brought people to the board in a way where they’re open, and really curious, and not dogmatic. I think that has been a really key aspect.

Pamela Annas: I think it is, too. And we have a pretty good kind of filtering. People recommend people, either because they’ve seen their writing or because they’ve worked with them. Or we let people try out.

Joseph Entin: By being a guest editor.

Pamela Annas: Whatever. And then there’s the interview. I remember being at an interview, in fact it was at Saul’s house, and there were four or five of us there interviewing this guy, and it just, he had seemed wonderful, but there was a kind of, I don’t want to say emptiness, but there was a kind of hollowness underneath what seemed to be the bustling political energy. And we all talked about it, and we said, no, we don’t think so.

Joseph Entin: Not the right fit.

Pamela Annas: Yeah.

Joseph Entin: I was in an interview like that one time, too. And I think it sort of became clear to everybody, including the person we were interviewing.

Pamela Annas: Yes.

Joseph Entin: Well, Pam, thank you so much.

Pamela Annas: Thank you.

Joseph Entin: Thank you for these stories, and I would love to hear more. And you’re going to be here, right, at the board meeting?

Pamela Annas: Okay, so here’s a problem.

Joseph Entin: Hang on. I’m going to say thank you, thank you for this interview, and thank you for everything you’ve done for the board, and then I’m going to stop this recording, and we can talk for a second about the meeting.