Finding Lost Voices: Following the Signs to Find Dorothy Allison (1949 - 2024)
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered
The road up to Pond Farm, near Guerneville, CA, where I’ve been living for the last two weeks on residency, is steep. It’s a single lane, with treacherous corners. If you meet another car coming up, you must find a way to back down to let the other car through. Perhaps that’s why when I’m here, nestled on the rim of Fife Creek, I feel so far away from the world below. Or, it’s because I’ve been immersed so deeply in the life of Marguerite Wilderhain, the Bauhaus Master Potter who lived here from 1940 to 1980. Her ashes are spread in the yard, and my first night up here, removed from the world, I felt her presence. Or was it that I felt my own presence more fully? Regardless, some enormity opened up around me, and it’s in this state of mind that the hidden stories find me, that a more profound understanding of my environment finds me.
When I come down from the mountain to take breaks, half of my mind stays in the cabin of thought I built in my mind. So, I follow impulse. Look for the signs. At the local bookstore, Books and Letters, Michael, the bookshop owner, informs me that the late author Dorothy Allison’s (1949 - 2024) books are being sold at the Guerneville Library. She’d been living here since 1993. So I dive into the hundreds of books she’s left behind and purchase six bags of treasures. Michael also tells me where Allison lived, and I drive by her shingled house. I keep telling myself, I’m not writing about Allison, so why am I following these leads? But I can’t help but follow, can’t help but wonder where they might take me. Will I find something in one of her books? What will it feel like to stand next to her house?
And the books are filled with treasures. In Woman Poet, from 1981, Allison underlined sentences in an interview between Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde:
“I began to learn about courage, I began to learn to talk.”
Words she read and underlined a decade before her novel, Bastard out of Carolina (1992), based on her harrowing and abusive childhood, was published to great acclaim.
And the house the was once her house is filled with warmth. The way the trees framed the shingled home. The way the river spoke from down below.
At the library book sale, I was so giddy with joy that I kept talking with the volunteers.
I can’t believe she just donated all of her books? Did anyone write down a catalogue of her entire collection before you started selling it?
No. They said.
And from experience, I knew we would feel that erasure ricochet for years to come. Now we would lose the network of books and ideas that shaped Allison, that led her to the path where she would find her own voice.
The way she talked back on the page to Sheila Jeffreys’ The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930, starring names like Dora Russell and her book Hypatia (1925), which showcased the success of female education based on the life of a Neoplatonist female philosopher who lived c. 350–370 – 415 AD.
It made me realize that already there are people who may not know about Allison.
In 1989, when Allison sold her book, Bastard Out of Carolina, she was flat broke, living off grits. Previously, she’d written a short story collection called Trash and a chapbook, The Women Who Hate Me, in 1983. Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina. Her mother was fifteen when she was born. She did not know her father. But when her mother remarried, her husband began to abuse Allison from the age of five.
In the New York Times obituary, it stated that she claimed feminism had saved her life. Well, I have proof of that now that she is no longer here in her physical body to speak for herself. These stacks of books, so many about the women who came before her, who made space for her voice, tell me so.
All of this is to say that the voices of women are everywhere, and right now, I can hear the past speaking to me louder than the scrub jays. As I dive back into writing the essay while I’m here at Pond Farm about the artistic friendship between Marguerite Wildenhain and Ruth Asawa, I'm surrounded by Allison's books, and it feels like a chorus cheering me on.
Upcoming Events
September
September 14, 4-6 PM - “The Art of Biography” Writing workshop on writing mini-biography at Pond Farm Pottery, Guerneville, CA.
September 20, 10:00 AM - “Out of the Shadows” Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Holly Baggett, author of Making No Compromise at the Kansas Book Festival. Topeka, KS
September 23, 10:00 AM - Western Literature Association Keynote: "Sanora Babb, and the Importance of Telling the Stories About Women Who Have Been Forgotten to Understand the Past, the Present and the Future" OKANA Resort & Indoor Waterpark, Oklahoma City, OK
October
October 4, 11:30 - 12:30 PM-North Bay Poetry Fest Print and Poetry Festival - I’ll be reading with four other writers.
October 4, 1:00 - 4:00 PM- A Roundtable at the Sitting Room, Cotai, CA, about my visit to Sylvia Plath’s Grave in Heptonstall, England.
October 11, 9:00 AM - “Echoes of the Sierra: A Poet Laureate Conversation” with Karen Terrey (Nevada County), Jesse James Ziegler (Reno), Moira Magnessen (El Dorado), Melinda Palacio (Santa Barbara), Iris Jamal Dunkle (Sonoma Co. emerita), and Lara Gularte (El Dorado emerita)at the Tahoe Art Haus in Tahoe City as part of the Tahoe Literary Festival.
Tuesday, October 14 at 7pm - “Scribbling Women” Strike Back: How Long-Silenced Voices Have Fueled a New Resistance” — with Emily Van Duyne (Loving Sylvia Plath), Jessica Ferri (Womb House Books), Kim Askew and Amy Helmes (Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast) Mimi Pond ( Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me) and Jessi Haley (Cita Press) at Mrs. Dalloway's,2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA 94705, as part of Litquake.
Tuesday, October 21 at 7 pm - “The Who, What, When & How of Literary Prizes” — with May-Lee Chai, Jane Chiabattari, Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Oscar Villalon, at Page Street Writers, 297 Page Street, San Francisco, as part of Litquake.
**An audiobook of Riding Like the Wind: the Life of Sanora Babb will be released in September!
Mighty cool to find those passages underlined in her book before she'd even published Bastards.
I met her in 1991 or 92 at UCSC when she came to a tiny lit class I was taking. The prof was a friend of hers and we read Bastard in that class. She told us that she and her partner bought their house with the money from her book, and that they called it “the house that bastard bought.” She’s an amazing voice and writer