Finding Lost Voices: On the Precipice and the Life of Mary Hunter Austin (1868 - 1934)

A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.

My biography about Sanora Babb, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, will be launched in two weeks. It’s a surreal time right before a book launches. For years, the project has been private. It was something you shared with writing groups and editors, but it was always at its heart, yours. But, once you publish it into the world, the book is no longer yours. It becomes shared with an audience. It’s a scary transition, especially when trying to tell the story of someone whose life has been misremembered or forgotten.

For the past two days, I’ve been in New York. A place where I first lived when I was a grad student at NYU in the late 1990s. Whenever I come back to the city, I feel that early commitment I made to dedicate my life to the writing surfaces and set in again. On Friday night, I went with other members of the National Book Critics Circle Board to a reading at Community Books in Brooklyn, where Tess Gunty (author of the incredible first novel, The Rabbit Hutch) and Zain Khalid (author of the equally incredible first novel, Brother Alive) were interviewed by Lauren Le Blanc about what it was like to move toward writing their second book after having had such great success with their first. I first encountered both of their books on the Leonard Prize committee and it was such a joy to meet the authors behind these works finally. It was striking, too, to hear what had changed for them post-book publication. How what had once seemed private had turned public. It got me thinking about what it is like to finish a biography. For so many years, I’ve been in a private space trying to summon Sanora Babb back from the archives, the physical places she lived, and the interviews I conducted with her friends and family. As I was writing the book, it was a story that was continually being rewritten and revised. It’s a heartening precipice to be standing on, but also, in some ways, terrifying.

When I went up to Zain Khalid to have my copy of his book signed, we were talking and my new book came up. When I told him who it was about, he recognized Sanora Babb’s name. It was a stunning moment — like another I had in New York last June when Phillip Palmer, the Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library, also knew who Babb was. One that makes me see across that precipice I’m standing on, waiting for my book to launch, to another future where more people will hopefully recognize Babb’s name. A future where another young girl like myself, who grew up a grandchild of survivors of the Dust Bowl, might be assigned to read Babb’s novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, in addition to or maybe even instead of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. A future that will give her a different perspective on what it meant to survive that atrocity. Of who the people were before they suffered. And how they were treated after they fled everything they knew and started again in California.

Yesterday, the National Book Critics Circle Board met for our board meeting at Arader Galleries, where the walls were covered with original Audubon and Bierstadt paintings. But upstairs, in a glass case, there was a rare copy of Mary Austin’s 1903 book, The Land of Little Rain, that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of. The book was rare because in between the pages of Austin’s lyrical essays about Owen’s Valley and the Mojave Desert, someone had painted wildflowers native to that area.

Mary Hunter Austin (1868 - 1934)

Mary Hunter Austin (1868 - 1934) was born in Carlinville, Illinois. She attended Blackburn College before moving to a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley. She married Stafford W. Austin in 1891, and the two lived in towns in California’s Owen’s Valley. But it was in Independence, CA, on the back of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, that she would settle and live for years. Austin was an explorer. She disregarded the gender norms of her day and traveled boldly and unchaperoned across the vast open country. She befriended Spanish shepherds, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, miners, Shoshones, and Paiutes and, because of this, discovered the stories that would become her first book. Austin was a writer who wrote in conversation with the land. Her work decentered the human and set nature instead at the helm of the world, where it naturally resides in the landscapes she describes. When her first book, The Land of Little Rain, was published in 1903, it was an immediate success. How fitting then that one of her books fell into the hands of a gifted botanical painter who extended and enhanced the life of her famous book.

After the board meeting ended, Jonah L. Rosenberg, the Head of Rare Books at the Gallery, graciously removed the book from the glass case and let me look through its pages and photograph the beautiful watercolors painted inside it (subscribers, I’ll be posting another post with more photos of these paintings, along with photos I took of a first edition of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona on a paid subscriber post tomorrow). No one knows the painter's name, but her collaboration lives on in this book, which was once a huge success. I wonder if Austin ever saw this hand-painted edition—the afterlife of her book that has lived on past her.

This is all to say that my biography about the courageous woman Sanora Babb, with whom I’ve had the privilege of spending the last five years researching, comes out on October 15. I am standing here, waiting, trying to borrow a bit of my subject’s fortitude to share her story with you. I hope what we see on the other side of this is a world that knows Sanora Babb and celebrates her because she deserves it.

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 4th 3:15 - 3:30 PM - 58th Western Literature Association Conference The Hilton Resort of El Conquistador, Tucson, Arizona.

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