Finding Lost Voices: Sanora Babb in the Desert, and the lost voices of Gertrude Atherton and Mildred Walker
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
I’m in Tucson this weekend at the Western Literature Association annual meeting. I’ve never been here before and have been completely stunned by the desert landscape. I had also somehow forgotten that Tucson was a place that Sanora Babb visited during the 1960s when her husband, the cinematographer James Wong Howe, was on location filming The Outrage (1964) and Hombre (1967), two Westerns that starred Paul Newman. They were filmed in a recreated western town called Old Tucson, located on a 300-acre ranch that’s nestled between the remote desert landscape of Saguaro National Park and Tucson Mountain Park. While Jimmie was on set, Babb visited the nearby open-air Desert Museum, where she particularly liked spending time with a prairie dog colony. Watching prairie dogs reminded her of the prairie dogs she’d once seen when she was growing up in Eastern Colorado. In my biography, Babb’s visit to the museum is only a brief note. But now, being here myself, it feels like more. I can feel how this desert environment must have reminded her of home. It seems strange to me that these two places still exist. That I can walk into the same entrance at the Desert Museum that Babb did over sixty years ago.
I’m just over a week out from launching Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, on October 15 and I should be making this post all about Babb and only Babb, but my life is now constructed so that I am constantly bumping into the stories of women who have been erased or forgotten, so it's difficult to stop. I’m so excited to launch this book into the world, though and I hope you will find me at one of my upcoming events located at the end of this post.
Yesterday, I spent time in the Center for Creative Photography archives at the University of Arizona, where the photographer Hansel Mieth's archives reside (for more about Mieth, read my past post about her). This meant that I got to see all the negatives of photographs (some of which I’d never seen) Mieth took the day she and her husband Otto visited Charmian Kittredge London at her home, The House of Happy Walls in Glen Ellen.
I’d waited years to see these materials. Several of these photographs appear in my previous biography, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, and while I was researching these photographs from afar, I discovered that Charmian had given Mieth a box of Jack London’s negatives, but there was no way to know what was on these negatives. So, it was that I may have hooted and hollered a little bit (apologies to the wonderful staff who had to listen to me!) when I finally got to look at these negatives and see what was on them. As it turns out, they were photos from Jack and Charmian’s Four Horse Trip that they took up and down the West Coast as research for their book, The Valley of the Moon. To see these negatives—and realize what story they held—was one of those moments in the archive that I’ll never forget.
But let’s go back to why I traveled to Tucson. I am here to read from my book at the Western Literature Association conference. I sat on a panel with two other scholars: Megan McGilchrist (The American School, London) delivered a paper on the author Gertrude Atherton, and Theo Davis (Northeastern University) delivered a paper on the author Mildred Walker. Both women were famous when they lived but have been all but forgotten today.
Gertrude Atherton (1857 - 1948) was born in San Francisco. Her father was prosperous, but when she was two years old, her parents divorced, and she moved to San Jose, where she was raised by her maternal grandfather, Stephen Franklin (a relative of Benjamin Franklin), on his ranch. He encouraged her to read early on and insisted on her education. In 1876, Atherton eloped with George H.B. Atherton. But her marriage was not a happy one. Atherton refused to follow the rules of gender of her day, and her husband was constantly trying to correct her. When he died at sea in 1887, Atherton was finally freed to pursue her life as a writer. Her first novel, What Dreams May Come, was published in 1888 under the pseudonym Frank Lin. She wrote over forty novels and many nonfiction works during her long career and much of her work features strong-willed female protagonists (like herself). She wrote a weekly column for The San Francisco Examiner and was a close friend of the writer Ambrose Bierce. She is best known for her California Series, which includes The Splendid, Idle Forties (1902); The Conqueror (1902), and Black Oxen (1923).
Mildred Walker (1905 - 1998) was born in Philadelphia. She attended Wells College and then went on to graduate school at the University of Michigan. While she was in school, she wrote and published her first novel, Fireweed (1934), which won the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award. While in Michigan, she met and married her husband, the Michigan-born physician Ferdinand Schemm. But she set the terms of their marriage so that she would always have the time and space to write and made sure she married a man who would be absolutely supportive of her career. Walker would go on to write eleven more novels and to be nominated for the National Book Award. Yet, Walker is often brushed aside as a “regionalist writer” of little value.
It strikes me, on the eve of publishing my next biography, how lucky I am to have this forum on which to expand the reach of my work. Thank you to all of you who have supported me thus far. I greatly appreciate your support. It’s because of you that I am able to keep diving into the archives and finding these stories.
Upcoming Events
I hope to see you at one of my upcoming events! If you don’t see a reading in your area, and you are interested, let me know as I am still adding dates.
October
October 15 - Vromen’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with The Lost Ladies of Lit Co-hosts Kim Askew and Amy Helmes,
October 16 - 6:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Bookmine in Napa.
October 18 - 7:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Copperfield’s Santa Rosa, CA - Register here.
October 23 - 5:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Readers’ Books 130 East Napa Street, Sonoma, CA
October 26 -10:00 AM - 3:30 PM Creative Writing Retreat at Dominican University
Sign up to take the workshop, “Mini Biography as an Act of Revolution, a creative nonfiction workshop with Iris Jamahl Dunkle” and attend my keynote talk, “Taking Back History, One Story at a Time: Why I Write About Forgotten Women's Lives”
October 30 - 7:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Harry Stecopoulos at Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, IA
November
November 1 - 6:00 PM 7:30 PM - Catamaran Lit Chat with Iris Jamahl Dunkle - Catamaran Literary Reader - 1050 River St., Studio 118 Santa Cruz, CA 95060
November 7, Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, Tulsa, OK
November 13 - Book Club at Pasadena Heritage
November 18 - The Book Club of California
November 19, 4:30 PM UC Davis Manetti Shrem Museum in conversation with Matthew Stratton
November 20, 5:00 PM UC Berkeley, English Department (Room 300)
November 22 -23, University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK and Author Talk at Full Circle Bookstore, Oklahoma City. OK
December
December 1, 2:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Kristen Hanlon at the Alameda Library, Alameda, CA
January 2025
January 24 - Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
January 25 - Reading with Jan Beatty at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh, PA
January 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Donovan Hohn at Literati in Ann Arbor, MI
January 28 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Morgenstern Books, Bloomington, Indiana
February
February 21, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s talk at New York University, New York, NY
February 26, 6:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
February 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, Salt Lake City, UT
March
March 5 - The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA
March 13- 5:00 PM Garden City Community College, Kansas
March 14 - 17 Books and Books in Coral Gables, FL and Key West, FL (Exact date TBA)
March 21 - 2:00 PM New York Public Library, New York City
You're coming to Case!!