Finding Lost Voices: Riding Like the Wind is Now Available for Pre-order and the Lightning Rod, Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948)
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
I’m incredibly excited to share that my biography Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb is now available for pre-order! The cover features Babb as a teenager in Forgan, Oklahoma, facing her world with fortitude. I can’t wait to share Sanora Babb’s story with the world! Order your copy today!
This saga of a writer done dirty resurrects the silenced voice of Sanora Babb, peerless author of midcentury American literature.
In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb.
Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. There, she befriended the era's literati, including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison; entered into an illegal marriage; and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb's field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb's impact was profound. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns's award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl and inspired Kristin Hannah in her bestseller The Four Winds. Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history.
It wasn’t until much later in life, graduate school, in fact, that I discovered how warped our image of Dickinson was (and in some ways still is). How her “persona” had been created to sell her “odd” verse. It was also when I discovered that early female writers such as Amy Lowell and Genevieve Taggard were at the forefront of upsetting this propaganda by writing biographies that probed deep into finding the true Emily Dickinson: to look past the single photograph we have of her, and find the woman stuck in the attic. To help her escape. Lowell died before she finished her biography (and sadly burned her drafts, so we’ll never know exactly what she wrote). However, Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948) did finish her work, publishing The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson in 1930, a biography that looked deeper into the poet as a person who loved and intimately experienced the world for the first time.
Aside from her biography on Dickinson, I got to know Taggard through her friendship with my latest biography subject, Sanora Babb. Like Babb, Taggard (or “Jed” as she was called by friends) was a communist writer in the 1930s who published in the communist publication the New Masses like Babb. Babb would often spend time with Taggard at her home in Vermont, and the two exchanged work until Taggard’s untimely death at age 53. Letters between the two illuminate a deep respect. For example, Taggard wrote to Babb about her short story, “William Shakespeare,” “When I first read this, my reaction was that it was a masterpiece…. It is a great American short story. It has the taste of dust and the blind wild aspiration; it has loneliness, the rejection, the commonsense, and the violence.” Taggard’s home in Vermont was where Ralph Ellison would escape from the city, and it’s the place where, after his stint in the Merchant Marines in WWII, he would begin to write his novel, The Invisible Man. In many ways, Taggard was a lightning rod. She was a fierce literary citizen, loyal and supportive of her friends.
Her fierce commitment to being a literary citizen likely began when she grew up in Hawaii before it was a state, and she witnessed the imperialist takeover at age four. (She writes about these experiences in her memoir, “A Haole Scrapbook," 1924). She brought these experiences when she left Hawaii to attend college at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1914, where she began writing about them in poems like “The Tourist.” After college, she moved to New York and became deeply involved in the rising Leftist literary scene. Taggard co-founded the journal The Measure, married novelist Robert Wolf, and would go on to teach at Mount Holyoke, Bennington and Sarah Lawrence Colleges. She had one daughter, Marcia, with her first husband. In 1934, she divorced Wolf and a year later married Kenneth Durant. Taggard died in 1948, during the Red Scare, and because of this, her work was quickly forgotten.
Given how she supported her literary friends like Babb and Ellison and brought voice to an Emily Dickinson that got us closer to the truth of who Dickinson was, it seems essential that Taggard’s work is also be remembered. Feminist Critic, Louise Bernikow called her “twice neglected” because she was a woman and because she was a radical. To Bernikow, Taggard was a part of the “buried history within the buried history” that is American Poetry. Many of her books are out of print, but a new collection, To Test the Joy: Selected Poetry and Prose edited by Anne Hammond, has recently been published by Recovered Books.
UPCOMING EVENTS
THURSDAY, APRIL 4, Sonoma Community Writers Festival:
4-5:10 PM - DARWIN 102 - SITTING ROOM: OUR PANOPLY OF POETSPANELISTS: Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Kim Hester-Williams, Maya Khosla, Patti Trimble, Terry Ehret
5:20 - 6:30 PM - STEVENSON 1201 - APPLYING TO WRITING CONFERENCES AND RESIDENCIES: TIPS AND ADVICE Marcy Gordon, Joey Garcia, Iris Dunkle, Chingling Wo, Eliana Yoneda
7- 7: 50 PM - STEVENSON 1201 - A READING OF THE NAPA VALLEY WRITERS CONFERENCE STAFF—Andrea Bewick, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Caroline Goodwin, Angela Pneuman
Saturday, April 13, 2-7:30 PM Lit Crawl Sebastopol - 3:30 PM at The Redwood (234 South Main St., Sebastopol) MFA PROGRAM CREATIVE WRITERS of Dominican University of California: JOAN BARANOW, MARY STEPHENS, ROBERT F. BRADFORD, CATHARINE CLARK-SAYLES, NICHOLE TURNBLOOM, TURNBLOOM IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE
April 20, 2024, 10:00 AM - SUITE 300A, NEW ORLEANS HEALING CENTER, 2372 ST CLAUDE AVE (New Orleans Poetry Festival) Marcela Sulak, Charlotte Pence , Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Sarah Rose Nordgren, Nicole Callihan and Danielle Pieratti