Kryn Freehling-Burton Oral History Interview, February 25, 2021

HARRY WINSPER: Alright, perfect. First off, I just need to do a formal introduction. My name is Harry Winsper, and today I'm interviewing Professor Kryn Freehling-Burton, and it is the-what's the date today? It is Thursday, February 25, 2021. We're doing this over Zoom because of Covid-19. Very, very different than usual. What I'm going to start off with, so I just need to read you some verbal consent for this interview. This interview is being video recorded as a component of classwork assigned for the course, "The Hidden History of Women at Oregon State University." Once completed the interview will be deposited into the permanent historical record at the OSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center. The interview will also be described with a biographical sketch, an interview abstract, and detailed index and made freely available to the public through a dedicated web portal. During the 00:01:00Covid-19 era we are asking narrators to provide verbal consent rather than signing paper permission forms. Do you agree to allow this interview to be preserved, described, and made freely available as indicated?

KRYN FREEHLING-BURTON: I do. Yes.

HW: Thank you very much. Without further ado, the first question's going to be general. I just want to start off: could you provide a detailed account of your childhood-the best memories; some challenges that you faced growing up; and just basically your life in general up until your college years? Anything you feel is important to you?

KFB: Oh, my goodness. Alright, I was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, and have one brother who was a year and a half younger than me and my dad started college when I was two. He went to night school and graduated when I was eight. I 00:02:00remembered, I think that was one of my most, it was a really important moment. I didn't realize at the time, but later reflecting back it was really an important...I saw my dad studying all the time. He was always reading for classes and in the attic he had a desk setup. He's left-handed, so he had these, I thought they were fancy, they were just regular notebooks, but the spiral's on the other side so it wouldn't interfere. He went to the University of Pittsburgh, which is a pretty impressive campus and the cathedral, they call it the "cathedral of learning." It wasn't a religious institution, but it looked like a cathedral inside. It had the big arches and everything. It was very fancy and it felt hugely important. He was a lineman, which makes storms very 00:03:00interesting for me, because when I was growing up he climbed poles. He fixed electric lines until he graduated from high school. Then he moved into management. I watched my family, like I experienced moving out of the working class into the middle class while I was conscious of those changes. This is a fun memory. They would rotate on and off duty, so I guess it happened with snowstorms, too, but I really remember summer thundershowers and lightning. We would go out. I was never afraid of storms growing up because he took us out on the porch. We'd watch the storm until he got called to go and fix some lines 00:04:00that came down by the storm. Then watching the bucket truck that fixed the line outside our house last week was interesting. It seemed fancy. This is so different than the bucket truck, like we used to go out. They were laying a whole bunch of new lines like over a mountain, not like our mountains, but Pennsylvania mountains and this would have been in the mid '70s. We could just go out on the site. My dad would take my brother-I wasn't interested-but I remember watching my brother go up in the bucket truck. They would never allow that stuff today, but you know. In 1975 you could do all kinds of things I suppose. It was probably later than that. Anyway, that had a huge impact.

I just always knew I was going to go to college. I knew that that was-I loved to read. My mom has this real fun picture of my dad reading on the sofa and he had 00:05:00reading glasses and I thought that was the coolest thing. I'm laying on the couch next to him and I have little plastic sunglasses on because I wanted to have reading glasses, too. I must have been like four or something. I love to read. That was my-lots of, I don't know, childhood stuff. I was close to my grandma, my dad's mom. Would spend weekends-she was old. My dad was 10th of 12 kids. She had great grandchildren my age. My grandad died when I was very little. I would go spend weekends with her. She lived on a farm. She wasn't working anymore, but those were good connections. But I regret, she died when I 00:06:00was 14, and I just like every, I don't know, every month I think of questions I wish I had asked her, or things that she told me that I wish I remembered. She went to nursing school and that would have been in the '30s, late '20s, early '30s. I remember knowing that and I remember the building and she was like, oh the nursing school was up on a hill in the town I grew up in. But that's all I remember. I don't remember any details. I think she practiced just for a little bit and got married and started having kids. So, she was old. My mom was second oldest of six kids, well, I guess seven. My grandad had a son from a previous 00:07:00marriage. But he was twice as old as my grandma. My grandma was, my mom's mom, she was like regular grandparent age. But my grandpap was, he was as old as my dad's parents. They were like 65, 70? My grandma Freehling died when she was 74.

Anyway, even though Grandma Scott [phonetic] was younger, like she was kind of like regular aged, she always seemed older. I thought grandparents were like these super old people [laughs]. I was always like so fascinated. My friends would do things with their grandparents. When I was in junior and senior high, I actually knew one of my friend's grandparents-oh, I knew a couple sets of grandparents of friends-and they were all so young. They would do things. They'd go hiking and camping. I'm like, my grandparents couldn't. They were all, at that point they were all gone, all but my grandma. My grandma died much, much 00:08:00later. What year was that? It was 1999 I think she died. Anyway, that's my childhood. We used to go summers we would spend one week every summer on the outer banks of North Carolina. My parents would rent a cottage and we'd stay in a cottage and play at the ocean. That was really fun. I remember my mom saying later that thinking about money and taxes and like how all that stuff happens, but she said we would do that, we would do that trip and they saved for it, but they would pay for the cottage out of their tax return. Then like many years later, she was like I didn't realize I was letting all that money go to taxes 00:09:00all year and the government was using it and later she was like I could have just, we could have more money coming in paycheck every week, but anyway. I'm like, no that gave you, it was like a built-in way for us to have this great holiday week back in the days before, I don't even think one of the cars had seat belts in the backseat. We'd get up super early in the morning, like at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and start driving. It was like, I remember it being really long. Could it really have been? It would not have been a 12-hour drive. Maybe it was like an eight-hour drive.

Anyway, and then we moved when I was ten and I was devastated. I missed all my friends and the house that we had lived in. Things were really bad between my 00:10:00mom and dad. My dad, when he was hired as a manager moved to the West Penn Power Company Headquarters just south of Pittsburg and moved to Greensburg without us and lived down there and didn't move us down there for a year. Although we finally went and things were, you know, and of course looking back, and my mom and I talked about that time. She tried to, she kept a lot of the stuff from us. I knew, she told me more than she told my brother, but things, yeah-so anyway, we lived there for almost four years and then my mom finally left. I was very glad. It was much better for her to not be with my dad. They separated once in 00:11:00there and then my dad got another job in New York in like upstate, rural New York. He was managing a rural electric co-op. For my whole seventh grade year we would drive to New York, and this was the worst. I hated it up there, because I didn't know anybody. All my friends were back home and my dad was renting this studio apartment, so then there were like four of us for a weekend just in this little tiny apartment with no privacy and we didn't know anybody. But the library in town was very cool. It was this teeny, tiny, tiny town. We did that for my seventh grade year. Then the other weekends we kind of did this, my dad 00:12:00would come home for one weekend. We would go there for one weekend. My grandma, his mom, was dying and was not well, needed and had in-home care for a long time, a lot of months before she eventually died. But my mom and her were really close. She and a couple of my dad's sisters would take turns staying with my grandma on the weekends when the nurse had, because the nurse had the weekends off. We would spend one weekend at my grandma's, or near my grandma's. I would usually stay with other friends. I was just really, I remember being very resentful I couldn't spend time with my friends! It was like seventh grade, but I'm like I want to be with my friends on the weekends. It was better when they were, it was just so tense between them. She basically gave my dad an ultimatum. 00:13:00We stayed during the week up there and then we would come back to Pennsylvania for her to take care of my grandma. She told my dad, she said when your mother dies you have to move us to New York, like move us, or I'm moving to California with the kids. Her sister, one of her sisters, lived in Redlands, California. He did not move us to New York and my grandma died at the beginning of September, and the next week we drove across the country to California. It's the bravest thing my mom ever did. It was really, I mean it was really hard but it was also really, but it was right at the beginning of my eighth grade year. It was a good 00:14:00time for a transition. My brother had a hard time and always really wanted my parents to get back together. I loved California. I got this great group of friends. That was pretty brave and courageous. I remember we were in this little tiny, red-it was a Colt. I don't remember what make that was but the model was a Colt. It was a little hatchback and it was red. It had no air-conditioning and we're driving across the country in the south the beginning of September. It was unbearably hot. It was so hot, but it was interesting times.

Eighth and ninth grade I was at junior high and then in my senior high school years were pretty good. Then I went to college and that was the next stage. When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to learn to talk to dolphins. I was going to be the one who figured it out. I also had an interest in archeology. I remember we visited the-the year before we moved to California, we came out and visited my aunt and her family. While we were out here we visited Scripps Institute at San Diego. I was like oh, my gosh. This is what I want to do. Then somewhere in there I realized just how much math was involved 00:16:00[laughs] in marine biology. I was like, maybe not [laughs]. I mean, I could have done it but you know. My mom did not go to college. She took a couple of classes at the community college mostly just because my dad really wanted her to. I think part of their-they weren't good for each other necessarily anyway, but he also really wanted her to do that. She ended up going to business school. My sixth and seventh grade years she was doing business school back in the days where she learned shorthand and was practicing all that on those steno pads. She hated it. She just didn't want any part of that, but my dad wanted her to want that kind of stuff. It set her up then so she had a business. It wasn't 00:17:00called-it was a secretarial school basically. But it set her up. She was able to get a job as an executive assistant in California and took care of us until she met my stepdad and then they got married and she quit because she wanted to be a housewife. She didn't want to work. We had a treehouse. My dad built us a treehouse. It wasn't in a tree it was like next to the tree. It was on these big stilts. There was a rope, like a knotted rope, that you had to climb to get up in it. There was no other way to get in it. What else about childhood? I remember gardening. Gardening is very important to me now but that started-my 00:18:00dad's family were farmers. My mom's family did a lot of backyard garden, vegetables and they had chickens and stuff, but it wasn't a farm. It was just what everybody did if you were super poor. I remember the times on the farm were so, even though it wasn't a working farm by the time I was born, and all the land was leased. They were just leasing the land so that farmers around-so there was corn growing everywhere. I remember playing in the cornfields. That was very fun. My dad and I planted a flower garden every year. We didn't grow vegetables until we moved to Greensburg. We had a much bigger lot, much more land and there was an existing vegetable garden that had some perennials. There was asparagus. It was the first time I ever had asparagus was when we moved there because it comes back every year and horseradish. I love both of them. Then it was this 00:19:00huge garden that was already plotted out. My dad grew up working on the farm, so we grew all kinds of stuff. We grew pumpkins and tomatoes, and green beans. Those are the things I remember. Strawberries. I remember there were a bunch of fruit trees in that yard, too. Now I garden a lot and I just planted peas this weekend. Very excited. Winter is over. I mean, it might snow again. It snowed on March 13th last year. Do you remember at the end of-it was at the end of week ten right when the stuff was shutting down.

HW: Yes, that was right before we got sent home. I forgot about that.

KFB: Yeah, my youngest was at Cascades campus, and I had just gotten back from Ireland. Because you were in that 223 class last winter, right, with Mateo 00:20:00[phonetic]? I was gone for like that week before and then I was back for Tuesday and then I was like we have to cancel class I don't want to have to come back down.

HW: Oh, yeah, I had completely forgotten about that. You'd been gone for that-

KFB: Yeah, I was gone for that whole week before.

HW: Yeah, that's pretty much all the detail that I need. That was good for that question. That was leading to the next one, but you already said, I was going to ask-have you always been interested in teaching? Which is what you are now, but obviously you said you wanted to be a marine biologist at first. My next question was about your college years and the major that you took and some memorable experiences from college. So if you could touch on that?

KFB: This is where it gets fun [laughs]. I didn't know what I wanted to do. When 00:21:00I was in high school I wasn't sure I really liked, of course literature and my English classes I loved writing. I wrote a lot. I was probably thinking about that kind of stuff, but my senior year for our government and economics class my teacher was phenomenal. She was so, so good. The most engaged teacher I had until probably grad school. The most hands-on. Very active, engaged learning kinds of experiences. But, I met a guy [laughs], and so I ended up not going. This is something that I regret. I ended up not applying to all the colleges I wanted to apply to and that my friends were applying to because I decided I was 00:22:00going to follow this guy to the college he was going to. We should never do that. Especially when you're 18. That's too young to be following people around. But, I did. Got married-ridiculous decision-right as I was starting college. I didn't ever have a typical college-like I didn't live in the dorms, which I also regret. I'm sad I didn't have that experience. It was ridiculous. It was a silly decision for lots of reasons. We never should have-we had a good six months and then we should have broken up and moved on. We just didn't. Things fell apart at the end of my freshman year and he left and then it was tumultuous for a few 00:23:00months. I contemplated transferring and a lot of times I wish I would have just transferred and started over, but I'm more glad I didn't. Even though he was finishing. He was a senior, so he was finishing anyway and I didn't necessarily have friends because he was pretty-this is when you know relationships are wrong when they keep you from friends and don't want you to have a life outside of them. That's a danger sign. I didn't necessarily have friends but it was a very, very small college and pretty tight-knit and I had always been interested in theater. I actually auditioned for The Sound of Music when I was ten. It was a little community show. I didn't get in and I was sad but this was my favorite, favorite movie. I went to a couple drama club meetings in high school, but my 00:24:00high school was enormous. My graduating class was bigger than the entire college the whole time I was in college. It was a very small, small college. Even the drama department in high school was just very big. Even though I had a couple friends who were involved, I don't know in tenth grade, because it was just 10, 11, and 12-years, I don't know it was just enormous and I wasn't brave enough or anything to like audition. I don't know how to navigate the backstage tech stuff. Anyway, I didn't stick around long enough to. But I always wanted to, and so I'm at this really tiny college that had a really strong theater program, a strong theater department, but a very small theater department.

After Rich [phonetic] left and I was like okay, I'm going to do all the things 00:25:00that I want to do. I had the theater director, I had her for speech class my spring semester of my freshman year. I just went in, like I took a chance, after the fall term started I was by myself and I was starting to make friends. There was another young woman who met this guy at college and then they secretly got married, they ran off and got married and didn't tell anybody. It didn't last. Somebody that we both knew connected us, was like, "Oh, Kryn you need to meet Shannon and Shannon you need to meet Kryn." We ended up being roommates then for a couple of years because we had a similar experience and neither one of us wanted to live in the dorms, so we were able to-we actually lived in what they called at the time (they call it family housing now), but at the time it was "married housing." They made an exception for Shannon and I to rent one of the 00:26:00apartments as roommates. That was good and then I went into Melody's office, the theater director, and I said: "I would love to be involved somehow." They had already, I take it back. Before I did that I went to auditions. I remember being, I went to auditions and I was too scared to audition. I sat kind of like as far back as you could be and still be in front of the director, but I just didn't have the courage to get up and do it. I wish I would have. I wouldn't have gotten cast because I had no experience or anything, but I went and I watched that whole audition because I was an open audition. It was for The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. I had seen all the shows. We went to all the shows. 00:27:00Even when I was in high school I had gone, because Rich was a student and knew all the people involved. Anyway, partway through fall term I'm like, okay I have to get involved. I need to put myself in situations beyond class where I can just meet people and make friends. I did. I went into Melody's office and I said, "What can I do? Do you need anything for the show?" She said, "I do! I need an Assistant Stage Manager." Somebody to be in the light and sound booth but not running. Someone to work with the stage manager who wanted to be backstage, not in the booth. My first meeting was 30 years ago on October 25th. Now I'm celebrating all these anniversaries. 30 years ago, just this year, I went to my first theater meeting. It was the first night of tech rehearsal. I met all these people. Some people I already knew, like I was in classes with 00:28:00some of them. We're still very good friends today. I was just texting with one of them last night. We were checking in and great, great. In that sense, if I had transferred to UCR, I never would have-their theater department is huge. I never would have-I might have taken some classes. I think I probably would have taken some costume design classes or something. Then it was just small enough.

Melody and I ended up being really good friends. When her baby was born, I spent...he was born my senior year in college and I was there. I wasn't there when he was born, but she ended up having a cesarean and so I went to be with her at the hospital because she couldn't, she wasn't supposed to pick the baby 00:29:00up or anything since she just had surgery. I went and got to be there with little Byron [phonetic]. Then she was with me when my babies were born. She was there for all of them-well, she missed Sophia's [phonetic]. Sophia was born too fast [laughs]. Melody got there five minutes late [laughs]. She missed her birth by just a few minutes. That was good. Then I met Eric, my partner now. We also got married too fast, but it was a Christian college, so if we wanted to be together we had to-well, we didn't have to but the pressures were strong. In that sense, I'm always like, well it's good that I stayed because I made all these friends, a community that's part of me still and I met him. He's amazing 00:30:00and was willing to go on this wild feminist journey. I mean, so many-there are people from my college days that I cannot have anything to do with because they're so awful. They just, Trump-supporting, super hate-filled ideas about people. I kind of lucked out that Eric was like, okay.

HW: So, you met him what year of college did you say?

KFB: We met actually at The Crucible. He was on stage.

HW: Oh, wow.

KFB: We were friends for a long time first before we started dating and then we eventually got married. Again, too soon, and I'm always like-I tell him now, I wouldn't marry you! I'm like, I would choose you! [laughs]. I would live with you and I would have your babies but I wouldn't-I mean, we probably would have 00:31:00ended up getting married anyway. The tax benefits are too great. The compulsory heterosexuality is very strong in our country, but he's pretty amazing and really fun. We had these connections with people separately and because I had been connected to the college, even when I was in high school there were these long relationships. A couple of people I know, like I've known longer than I've known Eric. Susan Shaw, one of the professors at OSU, that's how I ended up at OSU, was, she was one of my professors when I was an undergrad. I think I had her, her second or third year teaching right out of her Ph.D. program. I mean, she had to get out because it was so awful. I met her back in 1988, when I was 00:32:00still in high school. We've known each other. Susan's like I've known you longer than I've known almost anybody. At least out here and certainly up here.

HW: We'll have to circle back to that, though, when you get to talk about your experience at OSU.

KFB: Yeah.

HW: Because that sounds interesting to me. You mentioned about your husband Eric and he was willing to go on a feminist journey with you. That was, in fact, my next question about your journey with feminism, because just to clarify-yeah, just for the interview purposes, yes I took two classes with you. Both were in the Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Department, and so obviously learned a lot about feminist theory and stuff in those classes. I wanted to focus a bit on that. Now, I have learned that your husband went on this journey with you so I want to hear all about that journey and how that came to be.

KFB: We met in the theater and ended up doing theater and then connected. I was friends with Melody and then when we started dating then we both, good friends of their family, even after we were both out of college we were still connected. I would still do some costume design for some of the shows. He ended up doing some directing. We did this drama team thing. Thing-this is stuff that I don't disclose very often in class because I don't want people to think things about me based on the denomination of the college because I don't ascribe to any of that anymore, but we had these drama ministry teams. Even after I graduated from 00:34:00college they had somebody drop out and I ended up stepping in and we toured, we did a couple tours. We went to Hawaii once. We went to Alaska and did a couple weeks. Eric's family's from Alaska. Then we both got involved in community theater, so not connected to the university, to the college, but community theater and that was really, that was kind of a return to a more secular kind of community not connected to church or to a college that was connected to a Christian denomination. It probably started there. Now the students have to sign stuff, but when I was there we didn't have to sign anything saying we promise 00:35:00not to drink or have sex or anything, but now I think they do have to sign. I don't know, there was just something really freeing. Cast parties are completely different when you can have beer at them [laughs].

Community theaters are, and I don't know-there's not very much research out there about community theaters. I would do, but I don't have time, especially in southern California because it's-I was far enough away from LA. I knew people in the industry. My friend that I was just talking to last night, she worked professionally for several years in LA, but the community theater was so rich and vibrant and active. People working full-time jobs and then all of our other time was at the theater, at one of the theaters or a bunch of theaters. It's a really active, the whole, and the numbers vary. There's a ton of theaters that 00:36:00are all closed right now. That was probably the first. We started-he was auditioning for stuff. I didn't do very much acting, mostly tech stuff, some assistant directing. Community theater would do plays that were thought provoking and edgy and taking on issues that we wouldn't have in college because of the Christian ideas. It was kind of, definitely there. It wasn't articulated until actually I got pregnant. It was while we were expecting our first baby that I started connecting, and I was working full-time. I was a financial aid counselor at the college because it was my student worker job, my work study 00:37:00job, and then a full-time position was opening up as I was graduating. It ended up being perfect because I was able to walk into it really easy. I was familiar with everything. Because it was so small, I was able to work out a super flexible return to work after Ethan [phonetic] was born. So, that was good. It was when I was pregnant with Ethan that I heard somebody say for the first time that I was an expert in my own body. I was like, I never thought that I could be an expert in that way. I think we're just so, and certainly with the Christian overtones my whole life. It was definitely my family and then certainly in the 00:38:00context of the college that I didn't know that. I hadn't thought about what I really was and could be and could make decisions. After Ethan was born and I connected with a La Leche League, which is a peer breastfeeding support group that's been around. It was created in 1956 to provide mother-to-mother support following births of babies and certainly back then in the middle of the 20th century when there was so much doctor control over childbirth and then you got a bunch of male doctors. There were hardly any women doctors back then. These women are like we need good information. We need to talk to somebody who's actually breast fed before because these people don't know what they're talking about. That's not going to help us. The organization's still active today and 00:39:00providing that, so any community, there's groups in Corvallis and numbers people can call and say I have questions! Whatever, milk supply or getting babies to latch on or dealing with post-surgery kind of stuff. It was at a meeting, and then I was going back to work so I'm like I need to meet other people who are working and also breastfeeding and wanting to continue that even after I went back to work. It was at those meetings that I heard the next level, you are an expert on your baby. Nobody knows your baby as well as you do and your doctor needs to listen to you and you're a team with your baby's care. I would not have called myself a feminist then, but looking back that was when I was like, well yeah! I am.

Then it was these experiences: the experience of how messed up, especially our country, is with family leave, or the lack of family leave. So many states don't even have protected pay leave for birth. I had to take disability. I was on short-term disability [laughs] following. That was the only way I could have access to any kind of income during those first weeks. Then I was able to work out with my boss-I went back part-time. I worked part-time for the first six months, and I did for the few months I worked at home. This was in '95, so oh my gosh, the laptop they got for me and the way that I had to dial in to do 00:41:00[laughs]. It was I don't know-I actually think about that, during Covid, I'm like oh my gosh I was doing this back when it was barely even thought of in any other kind of situation. Looking back, I'm like I really did a lot of, I actually did a lot of advocacy work for myself. Those were very feminist-I didn't think about it in those ways then, but when my second baby was born we couldn't afford, we couldn't afford for me to keep working. I made less than Eric did and this is how women drop out of the workforce. It's too expensive to put two, a toddler and an infant, in full-time childcare. It would have eaten almost all of my salary. I stayed home. I wanted to spend more time, and certainly I wanted to be there longer with little baby Luke [phonetic]. Then, I 00:42:00had a daughter, my third baby who was assigned female at birth. They don't identify as a girl anymore, but that got me thinking about things in much more explicit ways. When Zephyr [phonetic] was little I started, a good friend of mine and I started writing together. We did writing every week together and I was in training. I became a Le Leche League leader. I was just in those circles where explicit women empowerment spaces so that I was just completely positioned when I was pregnant with my last baby. I started in the search for Sophia's name. I started reading feminist theology because the other kids all have, or 00:43:00had, names from the Bible. Ethan's was accidental. We didn't realize Ethan was in the bible. We just liked the name. Then we liked Luke, and that's in the Bible. Then we picked an old name for Zephyr. Then I had to make the case for Sophia, because Sophia's kind of in the bible but it depends on-in Greek translations of the bible Sophia's there because Sophia is the word for wisdom. But then I started reading all this stuff about feminist theology and the feminine face of God, the way that-and we were involved in church. We were involved in our church doing theater. I was like, why are all the women directors and all the men pastors? I started asking those like people-in questions. By the time Sophia was born I was starting to leave the church, and 00:44:00then I wrote a play about women from the Hebrew scriptures that was my goodbye letter to the church. Actually, I was thinking, I don't think I told anybody out loud that I was a feminist. I knew I was. I was using that word for myself in thinking about my identity, but on post 9/11 is when I started, I started coming out as a feminist.

When we were in the leadup to the bombing of Iraq and the beginning of all of that, the very beginning of 2002, I started being active as an activist, started with the Women in Black vigil group. Once a week we would meet and stand in 00:45:00silent vigil against the war. Of course, we knew it was coming, the way that George W. Bush was, and everybody-he wasn't alone in it, of course. Then I just kind of connected-there was another group that grew out of that vigil that then I was part of that vigil for five years before we moved to Oregon. Then I connected with this group right around International Women's Day, so in March of 2002, they started planning a-they had events for the whole week leading up to March eighth, which is International Women's Day, and then there was a conference, a whole bunch of events. It was a little, small group, but it was very cool. They were all just radically feminist and it was really, especially 00:46:00that first year it was pretty diverse, and I went to my first one in [inaudible], one of my friends from there is from Morocco. We did a whole Muslim service one night. Then another night we went to Sabrina's [phonetic] mom's house and we did a whole feminist rosary evening and so there was like this spirituality that was beyond anything that I had known was possible. Sometime, it was probably around in there, that I knew that I was doing all this feminist theology reading and somebody I knew from college, who is a philosophy professor there, and it was a pretty safe person and his wife and I were friends. The 00:47:00couple, Scott [phonetic] and Mary [phonetic] and Eric and I were friends and our kids were growing up together and I thought he was the same person and Mary, and he was in a lot of ways. I was like, oh my gosh I'm reading-who was it that I said I was reading? Now I can't remember who I would have been reading. I said, "Scott, I want to ask you what do you think about"-it wasn't Mary Daly (Mary Daly I could maybe understand his reaction). I don't remember. I'll have to think. I'm looking at my bookshelf and I don't see it. Anyway, I asked him, I was like what do you think about this person? He went, "oh you need to be careful." I was like, "I don't want to be careful!" [Laughs]. Then a couple of weeks later Mary was like, well, you know Susan Shaw I think is teaching Women's Studies, and she was in the Religion Department when I was in college. So, we 00:48:00both knew her. I was like, hmm, maybe I should connect with Susan. I sent her an email. I said, Susan here are these people that I'm reading and Scott, who she also knew, Scott told me I should be careful. I don't think I need to be careful but I need to talk to somebody who like gets the Christian, like the depth of that stuff. I want to go there and I don't want to be safe, but I also don't want-I wanted to feel like my questions were serious. I didn't want to be belittled because I was like, but what about what I learned about all my life? How do I do that? She answered me like, I don't know, it was within 12 hours. She was like, I would love to talk! Then she just did a run down. She was like, okay, yeah these are great people to start with. Here are some more names. She 00:49:00just gave me more, so we emailed for it must have been a couple of years. Then I started thinking about grad school and was thinking about doing a religious studies, like women's studies/religious studies combined something. I was like, I don't know. I don't know how I can afford that. I have these little kids. Susan said, well, if I give you-so it's a job you need? I can give you a GTA position to come do your master's at OSU.

HW: Oh, wow.

KFB: So, that's how I ended up at OSU. So, mothering led me to feminism and that led me to feminist theology, which led me to some overt feminist activism.

HW: Interesting. That development seems like it-yeah, that's a pretty clear path but just lots of experiences along the way. That's pretty interesting, indeed. Going back to Susan Shaw. She is basically the reason why you ended up at Oregon State?

KFB: Yes.

HW: So, let's touch on that a little bit. So, how you ended up here and just your experiences here so far, what you've been involved in?

KFB: Yeah, so my initial thought was so my friend Mary and my friend Paige, all had, like I remember when Mary finished her Ph.D. She did a counseling psychology Ph.D. and Paige had a master's degree, and they were both teaching as adjuncts. Then I had another friend who had a Ph.D. and she would teach an occasional class. I'm like, that's a really good gig for part-time. It's not 00:51:00secure, but it's very part-time. You can say no, but it could be kind of a good gig. I was thinking, my initial thought was if I go to grad school, I'll wait until Sophia's in kindergarten, so she's in school, and all the kids will be in school and then get a master's degree and then I can teach adjunct classes. It will be a little bit of extra money but I'll still have the flexibility to be there for the kids in ways that they might need. I did that for a little bit. I did my Master of Art in Interdisciplinary Studies. I combined, back then, it was Women's Studies and Theater, because of my theater background. Then I did, I adjuncted. I taught one or two classes a term for the next couple of years. I 00:52:00was just taking-I had a guest speaker in my class, and she graduated from OSU in 2009 and she was the TA in one of my classes. She was an undergrad TA in one of my classes back. So, let's see-when did I start? I guess it was two years I just did adjunct. It was just term-to-term. In 2009, we got approval from the state, you have to do these massive curriculum proposals, for us to officially have a women's studies major for undergrads. It's a different system now, but it had to go through all these levels, all the universities in Oregon, all the public universities in Oregon-anyway, it's a different system now, but it had to go through all these approval levels. It took like a year or two for that to 00:53:00happen. It was finally approved. We had a stand-alone major for undergrads and we were going to build an e-campus major and so Susan, because I was already teaching classes regularly, Susan was like if you want a full-time job, we needed somebody to do-they had money from ecampus-to oversee the development and to develop several, you know, a fair number of those classes for our e-campus major. I said yes, because the kids were getting bigger and more expensive and because, so then because part of my job was specifically e-campus it didn't require me-by that point we were living in Portland, but I didn't have to be on campus everyday. That's how I ended up with a full-time job [laughs].

HW: What year was that in?

KFB: So, that was in 2009.

HW: Okay.

KFB: --was the development and our major. Our first majors graduated in 2010, 00:54:00like spring of 2010. Before the major, we had the minor. We had lots of minors. If you wanted to major, because we didn't have a formal major, people would major through the Liberal Studies Major at CLA. So, the journalist that I just had visit my class this afternoon, that's what she did. She combined Women's Studies and Journalism. She kind of built her own degree because at the time we didn't have a major in either one of those. Then I just, I teach. You know, I teach a lot of intro classes [laughs]. A lot of intro. Advising was always part of my, was always part of my job. That's what I do.

My position is an instructor and I don't have any research percentage to my job, 00:55:00but my service component is pretty big because I do still coordinate our E-campus program and I advise for e-campus and I'm back up for our on-campus major advisor. One of our Ph.D. students is doing that advising work, so I'm the one she comes to when she needs stuff. I'm serving on our leadership team. I'm like our ecampus person and then we have a Director of Grad Studies and Director of Undergrad Studies. We're like, we don't one person in charge. The three of us are going to do it together. You know, feminist shared leadership idea. It's fun. Susan and I have team-taught a bunch of classes. There is the couple of feminist theology classes we've team-taught together and then women and sexuality class that we team-taught for a few years now. I've taken that over 00:56:00completely. It's fun having that long-term, Susan and I have known each other for 32 years.

HW: Wow. And here you are ended up here together.

KFB: I know, right? It's kind of funny.

HW: That is. Other than your teaching and being on the board and everything are you involved in other things in the school? Like have you done any theater work or anything since you've been at Oregon State?

KFB: Yes, and nothing recently. I wrote my master's thesis on The Vagina Monologues.

HW: Oh, wow.

KFB: We talked about that last year, right?

HW: That's right. Yes, I remember you telling me that in class.

KFB: So, I was part of two of the-two years I acted in that. Then the year I 00:57:00think it was in 2006 or '07, '06 maybe, I was in a production of Birth the play in Eugene that was very fun. The director from The Vagina Monologues was hired to direct this. It's another activist play to get conversations started in communities about childbirth. I was in that. That was totally fun. Then I've done, I've played around with some writing and been involved in a variety of ways. I did a play reading series I guess when I was still in grad school. We did every other month we would read a play and we would just like hang out in either the Women Gender Center or one of the other centers and whoever came we 00:58:00would just pass out scripts and people would just read parts, but reading plays written by women about women. Then that grew into eventually my friend who's retired now, she was a theater professor, into doing some formal play readings where we cast them and then rehearsed them and then did them, but it's a play reading. It's a lot less rehearsal. You have the script there. We did minimal kind of staging but we would do those for-so, we did primarily, I guess we did two readings that had a focus around anti-violence but all the rest of the readings we did were about women in science. Women playwrights writing about women in science. I think it's important for OSU as a research STEM institution. That's been fun. I miss Charlotte [phonetic]. Charlotte and I are so silly, we'd be like, "Let's put on a play!" We'll like call up our, and now we have this 00:59:00little quasi-little troop that we always call and we're like, hey are you available? But we've done some fun things. We did, oh my gosh it's a beautiful play called Photograph 51. I might have even talked about it in 223. There's only one. It's about Rosalind Franklin and the DNA, which is-

HW: I think I remember this, yeah.

KFB: One of our friends was like, she's like, "I would like to direct it," and "Let's flip the gender," so we can cast more women, basically, because there's five men and one woman in the play. We cast, Russ [phonetic] played Rosalind and then all of us, all of us women played men's parts. So much fun, really, really fun. It emphasizes the gender. It was weird-for this one man and all these women 01:00:00to have that flipped it made you notice language in a way that was really fun. We've done that. We revive that every so often.

HW: That's funny.

KFB: I've done that. What else? I feel like there's something else. I'm writing another play, but I don't have time.

HW: It's in the works, though?

KFB: It's in the works. Someday, I don't know. Maybe I have a third of it written. Someday it'll be ready and we'll do some readings, you know, so I can hear dialogue and stuff and eventually I'd love to hand it over to somebody to direct it and see it. It's definitely, of course, feminist. I guess that's my involvement. Charlotte and I did a, there's a play that's also used as an 01:01:00activist play around breast cancer. It's in the pink [inaudible]. I can't remember the name of the play. That was fully staged. We've done a few things. Oh, and then, this is a ridiculous thing that we did. So, she knew somebody from years ago who she heard had written this play as part of the Sloan Foundation. Got this funding, combining art and science. Staci wrote this play called The Feeble-Mindedness of Woman, about Gerty Cori, another Nobel Prize winner, first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for medicine. She and her husband are the reason that we have insulin for diabetes. They figured out the carbohydrate cycle that allowed for the development of insulin. There was this play and 01:02:00Charlotte was on faculty then and she was like, let's do a full shoot. They hired a director to come in. It was a fully-staged play. We were like, as part of it let's do some stuff around it. Because she knew the playwright we arranged for Staci to come out. Staci talked to my gender and science class and to a bunch of theater classes and then Charlotte and I, because we're always like, let's put on a play, we're like, let's make a documentary. Neither one of us have ever done anything like this before [laughs].

Oh, my goodness. We were so silly. I'm using it now. Somebody who was a graduate of the theater program at OSU has a videography business and so Charlotte was able to get a little bit of funding to hire Jason and so he was our camera 01:03:00operator/director. The three of us just all did that together. We did interviews with women scientists at OSU. We got fantastic stories from women in chemistry and engineering, forestry, biology. We had some really good faculty and students participated and we got some really interesting, some heartbreaking stories and put together this little, it's like about a half an hour. It took us forever to finish it and get it up and by the time we were done Jason is like, I know so much more! There's so much I would have done differently [laughs]. It's okay. We always thought it was just going to be for me to use in my gender and science class. That was fun. It was ultimately, it was a fun experience.

HW: That does sound fun. Other than the theater, I did just a little bit of 01:04:00research and I read that you've written a book and published it. It was Performing Motherhood. That was from 2013. If you don't mind, just giving a little summary about what that book was about and what inspired that, what inspired you to write that?

KFB: I actually have the book on my shelf.

HW: Oh, exciting. This is even better, then.

KFB: A little show and tell.

HW: Great.

KFB: This is the cover [holds up book to screen] Performing Motherhood, and my co-editors Amber Kinser, is a communications professor at East Tennessee University, and Terri Hawkes is an actor and director in Toronto.

HW: Oh, wow.

KFB: A Ph.D. student at York University. That's how I met-actually, at a conference, at a mother's study conference. Terri read a paper. This is what 01:05:00inspired this book. Terri read this paper about the experiences of mothers continuing a theater career. It was based on her experiences after her twins were born and that she still was auditioning and then more often than not not getting cast post-motherhood. Actually, you may know, do you know Sailor Moon? It's an animated show.

HW: I'm not very familiar, yeah.

KFB: You should look that up. Terri Hawkes did the first Sailor Moon voice.

HW: Wow.

KFB: In English.

HW: I'll have to look into that.

KFB: Yeah, check her out. I heard her read this paper and it was probably in, I mean it might have been in 2010. It was a long time ago. I was like, oh my gosh. 01:06:00I went up and talked to her afterwards. I was like, that was so amazing! I have this theater background. It was the only theater thing at this whole big conference. Then I talked to, I knew the woman who had started this organization and she's always looking for ideas for books for Demeter Press, and I'm like, hey I have an idea. Terri was her student. I was like that paper that Terri wrote, I'm like I think that's the basis we should do, it'd be cool to have a book about performance and mothering, like mothering and theater engagement. The editor was like, that sounds awesome! She connected us. I had never done anything like this and Terri hadn't. She connected us with Amber, who also has, she's a communications professor and a pretty, a fair amount of theater, 01:07:00certainly a lot of performance. The three of us edited it together.

HW: Wow.

KFB: It's a little-the subtitle is, Artistic, Activist, and Everyday Enactments. Because it's a Toronto press, about half of the pieces have to be Canadian, or from Canadian authors. That was a little tricky because there's just a lot more people doing that work in the United States, so we had a lot more submissions from U.S. folks, but since Terri's Canadian it was a split. Some of the pieces are people working in performance themselves, like Terri and me. My piece is actually a script. Then there are some performance art pieces in it. Performing 01:08:00motherhood in daily actions. A few of the pieces are that. There's a couple of pieces that are more about music, like creating music and performing music as a mother. It's a bunch of different kinds of performance represented. It was lots of fun to work on. It takes a long time [laughs] to do this kind of stuff.

You know, this Demeter Press is pretty amazing. The piece that I wrote, it's part of a script that is another play that someday I'll write based on the oral histories I have with moms or women telling their mother's stories. This is a first exploration of some of the stories that I was hearing. It was very fun, so 01:09:00we actually performed this at a conference in Toronto another year and it was really sweet. One of my good friends from my Women in Black and Women Creating Peace Collective in Riverside, her sister is a midwife in Toronto and she was there. Gale [phonetic] and her sister were in this and Amber and one other person I had read with us. One of the stories I tell is about, it's going to make me cry, about Gale's mom and the loss of her mom. Anyway, someday I'll write the rest of that story. That oral history project started because I wanted 01:10:00to know. The question that I got the best stories out of was: what was the bravest thing your mom ever did?

HW: Oh, wow.

KFB: They were really cool stories.

HW: I'm sure you could get just so many unique... wow. That's really interesting. I didn't know you'd written a book. That's very cool.

KFB: Edited it.

HW: Still. How long was that process you said?

KFB: Oh, my goodness. When did you say? You said when it came out: 2014. I think we probably sent the call, I think we sent the call out for submissions in 2011.

HW: Okay.

KFB: Then we got a bunch in and then something happened. I can't remember. There was something that delayed us. I don't remember when it was. Anyway, it just took us-all of our schedules. Terri was a Ph.D. student. Amber and I teach 01:11:00full-time. We ended up doing a lot every summer we spent-that first year we got a bunch of stuff and we didn't do anything until the summer and then we had these, it was before Zoom. God, Zoom would have made it so much easier. Because we're Tennessee and Toronto and Portland having these-

HW: All over the place.

KFB: Right? It was really hard to get video. We did some of them with just audio, which is a little hard. God, Zoom would have made that process really, really easy. Sharing screens-like, we couldn't share screens. I think we were trying to do that stuff in Dropbox but it's not, you can't watch it happen and so it's not like Google Docs.

HW: Yeah. That would have made it a lot more easier.

KFB: I'm glad Amber had edited before, so she was like, okay here's how we do it.

HW: Well, that's good. Very nice. Well, now that we've talked all about Oregon 01:12:00State and everything, I just want to get into a little bit more of the current times. I want to ask you how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected both your professional and your personal life? How has it impacted you?

KFB: This has been the longest year. On the one hand, I don't know what happened to this term. It's just like almost over. Yet, it has lasted forever. I don't know how both of those things can be true in the way that they have been true. My mother-in-law died from Covid last June in California and it was a very fast, very fast decline. She was, the diagnosis came back in May. It was about three weeks from when she was diagnosed to when she died. Yeah, direct impact in that 01:13:00way. We did not go down and his brother was close by. My sister-in-law was with her. Not immediately, but they-I just, I don't know how the nurses, all the staff but especially the nurses all the extra work they're doing for folks. The nurse, we would have to, they would give us, we talked to the doctor a couple of times, and, of course, Lee and Jen [phonetic], Eric's brother and sister-in-law, were there, so they were able to talk. This is before, nobody was, hardly anybody was wearing masks, at least in the United States. It was much less than it is today. We would call and they wanted, they're like people are so lonely. She was at one point she wouldn't keep the oxygen on her nose. She was really 01:14:00out of it. They did intubate her and put her on the ventilator and of course they said they needed to do that. But, all the stuff we know that people are still aware and so we wanted to talk to her. We would call and the nurse would like, we'd have to arrange it so when somebody could be in the room and put the phone, you know so we could call on the phone or on her phone. Then, when we knew that it wasn't looking good, just probably wasn't going to recover, and they were like, okay, we'll let you suit up, like fully suiting up. Jen was with her when she died.

HW: Okay.

KFB: That's making me [waves hand in front of face with emotion]. Yeah. My parents are very cavalier about Covid [laughs]. I haven't seen them. We've only visited them a couple times in the last year. They live not very far from us, 01:15:00but they're so cavalier about it and they're like, you know, we wear masks and we just sit outside. We haven't gone into the house. They're just: if it's our time to go, it's our time to go. They're still very evangelical Christian, and finally this last time Eric was like, but it's not my time to go! [laughs] And I don't want to get it from you! We're wearing masks to protect you. We're not-you're old. You're more vulnerable than us, but we also don't want to get it from you and they're not being careful. That's hard. My mom and I don't have a very good relationship. She's very overly-critical and doesn't agree with me being a feminist and, you know, we're not Christians. We've fallen away from the Lord and I understand that hurts her heart.

HW: It's your life and your decisions.

KFB: She's also just not very nice. She's very critical. When my play-my play in California was produced, we did like 30 performances of it. We traveled with it. We did it in all kinds of spaces, and it was my goodbye letter. It was my breakup letter with the church basically, but here's the hope and so we did it in churches. We did it for women's groups. It was beautiful and the people who were in it were just amazing and it was super powerful. When my mom came to see it the woman who did the choreography for it. It was just like, what! You should be so proud of your daughter! My mom could not, even when asked point blank, are you proud of your daughter? She could not say yes. That's how, anyway, with 01:17:00Covid. They're in denial. They actually asked Eric, I don't know it was over winter break, they were like did your mom really die from Covid? What's on her death certificate? Eric is like, are you kidding me with this question?

HW: Oh, boy.

KFB: We asked Lee. He's like, Lee, because you get so many with the funeral home stuff we got several copies for all the places you have to send them too. Lee's like, yeah, I got an extra one. I'll send you a copy of it [laughs]. We proved to my parents-I don't know.

HW: Okay.

KFB: That's the personal and then of course my kids, my Sophia was at Cascades Campus, OSU Cascades in Bend. We went and picked Sophia up on that Friday, the snowstorm Friday. We like barely made it back. It was snowing so hard on our way over the pass. I'm like, we better not get stuck on this mountain at the 01:18:00beginning of this pandemic. We didn't, but it was getting slick. Sophia took one, was scheduled for a bunch of classes and then ended up just staying in one and dropped the other ones last spring because it was just really hard to do remote. Then of course moving everything to remote. I teach on e-campus, so a lot of it, I'm like okay I know how to do stuff. It's different because we do synchronous stuff is different than what we do with e-campus. I think our transition was as a program was a lot easier. My son, one of my sons, goes to Fordham University in New York City.

HW: Oh, yeah.

KFB: He's a theater major. Is a transfer student. He's already older than everybody else. He's like 23 and he used to, and he had all of fall term and 01:19:00then half of spring term and was like I don't know. Most of my friends aren't leaving. I was like if you get sick, you'll be by yourself. He had pneumonia. We wonder if maybe he might have had Covid in January. He was really sick and then whenever they did a pneumonia test and they're like oh you have pneumonia. I'm like, okay no wonder you feel like crap. But I'm like, remember when you had pneumonia? It'll be worse than that. And you'll be all by yourself and you'll be completely isolated. Nobody will be able to be there with you. He's like, okay I'm coming home [laughs]. It's sad. I just think all the things all of you students that you're getting not, I mean I think in a lot of ways a lot of classes, you know, you're probably getting, you might be getting better education in some ways.

HW: Yeah.

KFB: But there are things you're missing out on. As I'm watching, it's been 01:20:00hard. He's like I don't want to go back. It's too dangerous there. He had initially thought maybe this spring going back. But nothings open yet. He'll be a senior next year, and I'm like if theaters aren't open, if you're not going to be able to launch and I don't know. It's hard watching that and seeing it. His bedroom is underneath my study downstairs, so this morning he was doing one of his classes they do a lot of vocal exercises, so I can hear him through the floor [laughs] doing acting training. He was in the mainstage show in the fall. This was fun. We got to be there. He's performing in the basement, live, and we're upstairs watching it on our screen.

HW: How weird.

KFB: That was cool. That was hard. So many of our students have had Covid or had 01:21:00people who have been diagnosed or who have died. Also, people like, I mean every term I always have a handful of students who lose a grandparent or have a very sick parent but there's more, of course more. The trickiness of how do you be with your family if they're ill. I mean a lot people are doing some back and forth, but then some people-I had a student last term who was like my dad's immune compromised. I haven't seen him since March. He's been sick. He was on chemotherapy and she was like I'm scared I won't ever see him again, but I'm not going to go see him because that could be deadly for him. I think that that's, I mean that kind of stuff is, we don't know how, we're not very good with death and illness anyway in our culture I don't think. This is making it particularly, 01:22:00I think, hard for people.

HW: Definitely. It's just, yeah, we just don't know when it's going to end.

KFB: This guest speaker that I had come, Lindsay [phonetic], she's a reporter for U.S.A. Today outlet and she was like, I think we're going to have-she was saying herd immunity-but she's like I think we'll be fine by Labor Day. I'm like, really? I don't see it. I just don't see that [laughs]. But she was really sure. I mean, she's like hearing things in her world. I'm like, God I hope you're right. I mean the vaccine rollout is so much better now. There's still problems absolutely and problems in particular ways in particular spaces. Oh my 01:23:00gosh, did you know Tara Williams, the Associate Director of the Honors College?

HW: The name sounds familiar.

KFB: Okay, yeah. She left last at the end of January last year. She's at University of Alabama now, the Director of the Honors College there. So she literally got there her first day was like March first or whatever the first weekend of March. She was literally on campus for a week before shutdown. Now, you know Alabama won that championship. I'm like, we used to carpool together, so I was like, so our carpool chain, I'm like ah-how are things with you? [Laughs] She's like, well, we're okay right now, but she's like who knows what the fallout's going to be after that celebration after the championship. The photos, I was like oh my gosh!

HW: Hundreds of thousands.

KFB: Yeah. And the mayor and the president of the university, everybody was like don't do it. Everybody did it anyway.

HW: Yep. Sounds about right.

KFB: I always think, we're not doing everything right and we're not small-University of Alabama's much bigger as well, so, but.

HW: Yeah. Well, I think that's about 90 minutes, which is what we were going for. I think we covered a lot of stuff, though. That was great.

KFB: Oral histories must be fun because you're just like, talk about yourself! [Laughs].

HW: Yeah. I know, I mean it sounds like something I would do. Talking about myself for 90 minutes. Why not!

KFB: Right?

HW: Just thank you so much for doing that for me, and I'm going to stop the recording now.

KFB: Okay, yeah.

HW: Stop recording.