Alice: This is where I go to recharge, you know,
and I just love it, out in the woods and
out in the wild, and so I feel at home here.
Reporter: Home for writer Alice Walker
is the coastal wine country north of San Francisco.
It is her refuge from the troubled world
she ponders and writes about,
delivering opinions both informed
and emotionally driven, things she simply
knows in her heart to be true.
-: I think what most concerns me is that
I don't know if people will learn to like
being awake long enough to make a change.
I think that people really, on some level,
like being asleep.
-: Walker sees a world too dominated by
corporations and conventional religion.
She is, quite proudly, a pagan.
By her own definition, one who worships Mother Earth.
When you're here, is it easier to feel hopeful?
-: It is, it is, because the Earth is always doing something
and I have never known the Earth not to give us spring.
Every year there is spring.
But I see it in my life because I've lived
long enough now to really see that
you just do what you can, and you never know
what it's going to become.
You write out of your experience, you write out of
what you read, you write out of everything,
you bring it all to the page.
But then, the curious thing is that
once you bring it all to the page,
you basically forget how you got there.
Then it seems like it's magic.
Reporter: Alice Walker the author
writes from her heart and head
stories drawn from memories and visions of the future.
As an author, as a writer, and activist,
do those two roles feed off each other
or are they separate?
-: Oh, they do, they do, they're very much
the same in a way because you know, over time
I realized it's those moments when I have been
really profoundly moved, angered, saddened,
challenged, that I feel I have to creatively respond.
Reporter: One of those times was at age 13.
She saw the blown-away face of a poor hardworking
neighbor woman shot by her husband.
Walker remembers looking at the woman's feet.
-: And she still had on one shoe and had
a piece of paper stuck in it
to cover the hole in the sole.
And I knew this was a good woman,
I knew this was a good person,
and i knew no one should have harmed her.
And I knew that somehow, some place in me
was profoundly stirred, and I knew that
if I ever grew up myself I would get to
the bottom of what I thought was this story,
and it would be about poverty, and it would be about rage,
and it would be about oppression, and it would be
about sexism and misogyny.
All of these words, of course, were words
that I didn't know anything about hardly.
But I knew that I would learn how to tell her story.
Reporter: Telling that story and others
became Walker's life work.
Her most popular novel, the Pulitzer prize-winning
The Color Purple, sold over five million copies.
It remains one of the most respected books
in American literature.
The Color Purple also earned her an enormous
following from all walks of life,
including women she met with recently at
Boston's Pine Street Inn, a shelter for
homeless and battered women.
-: All the things that happened to me,
them are my feelings and them are my secrets.
Reporter: What were you thinking as you heard
several of these women bare their souls,
or some of the hard times they've been through?
-: Until you can say what it is, you can't really see it.
So I know they're on the way, and I'm just
happy to be the person that they could talk to.
Reporter: Right or wrong, Alice Walker is
a radical and an optimist,
a writer of strong opinions gently delivered,
and she has earned her place among the great authors,
those who both aggravate and inspire,
and tell a good story along the way.
-: So instead of throwing a bomb I can write a novel.
So you cannot really change consciousness
by murdering people, or brutalizing them.
You can only change it, I think, by
very patiently actually creating
a vision of a different kind of world.
And so that's what I do.