PENNI: I think there was a need for an alternative voice, a feminist voice. We were looking to change the status quo as well as form a community of words that would reflect our community on paper and be an active part of the women's movement.

DONNA: What has happened to the dream and the reality of Herizons since the last publication date?

DEBBIE: Certainly the dream hasn't died. It was a tremendous loss personally and also collectively to us as women to have the magazine fold. Everyone talked about how important it would be to hang onto the thread and even now people still ask us what's going to happen and say please do all you can to bring it back, so the dream is very much alive. As a collective we agreed we would meet again, so after time to recover from the stress and the loss we, began to hold regular meetings, which we still do.

PENNI: I think the dream never failed; the magazine never failed. We didn't fail to be successful, we didn't fail to attract readers or do what we set out to do in a good feminist way. If anything, we were revolutionary because we did succeed for a certain period of time. We did very well in magazine standards, as far as getting readers, getting renewals, growing. The reason we stopped publishing was that our own goals of establishing an independent feminist magazine just weren't compatible with the kind of federal support program we were funded under.

DONNA: What about the act of writing and publishing as a collective experience?

PENNI: The collective experience was very important to how we operated and I think it was reflected in the final product. We didn't speak as one woman's opinion, we were a collective. I think we were accessible on an intellectual and political level too, and the variety of perspectives and the openness to look at other points of view kept us from being elitist.

DEBBIE: I was glad that we were never rigid in our ideas. People were always amazed that we produced all this work as a collective because the myth is that collectives can't really get anything done. I think it worked for us because we were able to divide up tasks and at the same time we knew that each of us had to be tied into another person's job. Even the government was always impressed at how quickly we got together and could change our plans in order to be responsive to our needs and open to change.

DONNA: Can you talk about the triumphs and difficulties of working together in a feminist way?

PENNI: I think doing something in a different way was a triumph for us. The difficulties were both external and internal. External difficulties were, for example, trying to translate our collective and feminist process into government language, and the ongoing pressure of not knowing if we would get funding from year to year.

DONNA: And internally?

DEBBIE: One thing I noticed was that in more traditional structures, where you own a piece of work entirely, it's easier to feel good about what you're doing because you get the credit, and when something goes wrong you take responsibility. When we blurred the lines it was hard and sometimes painful to know what we truly owned and could take credit for, because sometimes that's important, and what things we should take responsibility for.

DONNA: Are there things you would do better now?

DEBBIE: At our staff meetings we never really decided whether we should have "check-ins," where everybody just talks and socializes. We had always so much to do and had to be very task focused, but we were all pretty chatty too. We wanted to make room for that because we thought it enriched our work, so in terms of process, it might have been helpful to discuss how we would conduct a staff meeting and how we were going to build up trust in one another so we could share ideas and creativity.

PENNI: Yes, the feminist process can't be something that exists outside of us as human beings. There are going to be tensions and people who don't agree with each other so the process has to encompass that instead of assuming it doesn't ever exist. And it's a very long process. We were at it for years and we didn't have any guidebooks. We just said it was a feminist process and then every six months as crises arose we'd redefine it. We also felt lucky because we didn't have the structure of a formal operating Board, which tends to build in a hierarchy. You can't have a collective and still be accountable to a hierarchical Board. In our group, the people that made the decisions were the people who carried them out.