Looking for a great pick for Women’s History Month? Join us March 14 for Iris Jamahl Dunkle discussing her book, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb. We had the opportunity to ask the author a few questions to whet your taste for the book and event.
Q: Who was Sanora Babb, and how did you come to want to write about her?
A: About five years ago, I was watching Ken Burns’ incredible documentary The Dust Bowl when, all of a sudden, he started talking about a woman named Sanora Babb – a writer from the Midwest who worked at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps in California in the 1930s, helping refugees from the Dust Bowl. In the documentary, he mentions that she wrote a novel about the Dust Bowl called Whose Names Are Unknown that was under contract with Random House but wasn’t published when she wrote it in 1939 because John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath had come out a few weeks before. What’s worse, Steinbeck had appropriated Babb’s research and interviews about the refugees and used them in his book, rendering her book essentially unpublishable.
When I heard about her, I was so excited that I immediately picked up her novel (which was eventually published in 2004 by the University of Oklahoma Press) and loved it. You see, my grandmother came over during the Dust Bowl, and she hated The Grapes of Wrath because it made us look like helpless victims. In Babb’s book, Whose Names Are Unknown, you get to know the survivors of the Dust Bowl well before the dust storms hit, so you feel empathy for them when they have to leave everything they know and go to California. As soon as I read her book, I knew she would be my next biographical subject.
Q: What do you enjoy about writing biographies, and specifically about writing biographies of unsung women?
A: I have never been someone to listen to the authorities. I was raised by hippies, and since a young age, I questioned the history I was taught. It never seemed to tell the full story, and it always excluded people, especially women. Writing biographies allows me to bring back these voices. But biographies take half a decade to write, and let’s face it, I’ll only be able to write a handful during my lifetime. That’s why I started my Substack, Finding Lost Voices, where I could write a weekly mini-biography about a woman who has been erased or misremembered. So far, I’ve gathered a community of over four thousand people and written over 70 posts. It’s been an amazing experience to foster this community.
Q: What does your work as a poet bring to your other writing, and vice versa?
A: I usually work between two genre projects. My last biography, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, actually began as a series of lyric poems written in response to Charmian’s brilliant diaries written aboard the Dirigo – a three-masted schooner – she and Jack sailed on from Baltimore to Seattle. I found the diaries at the Huntington Library in Southern California, and I was surprised to find out they had never been published. So, I did a poem-a-day project where I wrote poetry in conversation with her diaries (some of these poems would eventually make it into my collection, West : Fire : Archive). But as I was doing this, I discovered something amazing: Charmian had helped her husband, Jack London, write one of his books, The Valley of the Moon, and had never been given credit for her work. The more research I did into Charmian’s life, the more I wanted to learn more and spread what I learned to a larger audience, so that’s why I started writing a biography about her.
When it came to Sanora Babb, I started by writing a biography about her, but as I was doing that work, I couldn’t help thinking about my grandmother’s story. How she, too, had survived the Dust Bowl and how The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck had not been representative of her story. So, I picked up The Grapes of Wrath when I was on a plane headed to Oklahoma to give a reading at the University of Oklahoma, and as I was reading it, I started an erasure project. I crossed out his words to make room for my own and wrote poems from the letters I found in his book. It was a cathartic experience and really made me feel like I had permission to “take on” Steinbeck in my biography about Babb.
Q: What are you looking forward to doing in Key West?
A: Well, honestly, I can’t wait to visit your bookstore! I can’t wait to visit the house where the poet Elizabeth Bishop lived and perhaps visit Ernest Hemingway’s House so I can learn more about his wives. I really want to write a column about Hemingway’s wives in an upcoming post for my Substack, Finding Lost Voices.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR / LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EVENT ON MARCH 14th