The Network of Forgotten Women

A conversation with Iris Jamahl Dunkle by Sophie Baker

I recently got the opportunity to speak with Iris Jamahl Dunkle, a poet, writer, and researcher who specializes in American Western history and forgotten women. We discussed her ongoing Substack project, Finding Lost Voices, in which she uncovers the voices of women who have been neglected by historical record. She is the author of two biographies, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, and four collections of poetry, including West : Fire : Archive, published by The Center for Literary Publishing, Interrupted Geographies and Gold Passage by Trio House Press and There’s a Ghost in This Machine of Air by Word Tech.

Sophie Baker: Your project focuses on uncovering women's voices that have been lost to history. What initially drew you to launch this project, and was there a particular story that motivated you to start your Substack?

Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I have always been drawn to digging into the archives to find answers to questions that didn't make sense to me and how they were taught to me. Both of my poetry books that I did for Trio House Press, Interrupted Geographies and Gold Passage, were about the process of digging into the archives to find hidden stories about women. I didn't know that was my research interest yet, it's just what I focused on without realizing it.

I started researching the life of Charmian Kittredge London, whom I discovered when I was writing a book of poems called There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air, and I came across a photograph that Charmian Kittredge London took of Jack London sitting on Sonoma Mountain on a horse. It's a really famous photo, and underneath it it says, “taken by Charmian Kittredge London.” I never knew she took that photograph, and I grew up in Sonoma County, raised on Jack London. I discovered that she had helped write her husband's books, she took photographs of her husband, and nobody knew that. I realized that if I just wrote a poetry book about it, it wouldn't get out there as widely.

So I wrote a biography, which, for a poet, is really hard. I also realized that biographies take about 5-6 years to write. How many women's lives would I actually be able to bring into the world? What I realized was that there were so many stories dropping into my lap about women who had been forgotten or misremembered that I needed a way to get out there. So I discovered Substack, and I started a blog about a year and a half ago called Finding Lost Voices, and it just has gotten bigger and bigger every time I publish a post. I'm really grateful for the readership, because it's given me a platform to change this narrative that I grew up in, that it was an anomaly for women to do extraordinary things.

SB: How do you navigate that when there are stories where you don't have the full picture? When there are parts that are missing? I mean, a lot of these women have been completely erased from historical record. How do you find those stories, and how do you tell them as completely as you can?

IJD: Well, they kind of find me. I'm always looking. You know that feeling when you start to become aware of something, and you see it everywhere? That's what's happened with lost women in my life. For example, one of my most popular posts is about Joan Vollmer, who was William S. Burroughs' wife, whom you might not know about—I certainly didn't. I was raised reading the Beats. I love them, and I went to see the new movie that came out called Queer. Have you seen it?

SB: No, but I did read the Joan Vollmer post, and I had no idea that story had anything to do with that movie.

IJD: Yeah, I went to see the movie, and when I experienced it, I was like, God, I feel so weird. There's this motif of an apple being shot off of William S. Burroughs' lover’s head, who is a man, in this case. I thought I remembered the story of his wife, but I couldn’t remember her life or her name. I immediately went down this rabbit hole, which is literally how I spend my life now, and I found a little bit of information about Joan Vollmer, and I thought, well, maybe she's not worth writing about. I literally said that in my brain! But then I Googled a little more, and these letters emerged that she'd written. She was so buried that she was a ghost in that film. And like the fact that I almost gave up on her before I made that post taught me so much about how I have been educated about women.

SB: I was going to ask you a little bit about Sanora Babb, because you released a full-length biography on her story. What drew you to her specifically to dedicate that much of the page to?

IJD: Sanora Babb's story came to me when I was watching a Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl. My family came over in the Dust Bowl, so I had this idea of the Dust Bowl that my grandmother told me about. Like, I knew not to say the word “Okie,” because that was a bad word in our house. I'd read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, and I remember when I read it, I told my grandmother about it. I was so excited. I was like, “Grandma, they wrote a book about us. This is amazing.” And she said, “Don't ever speak to me about that book again. It's garbage. It does not represent what happened to us, and it makes us look like victims.”

It didn't occur to me until I was watching this documentary, many years later, that my grandmother was absolutely right. So here was this woman, Sanora Babb, who worked in the camps, who had grown up poor in the Midwest, lived in a dugout, farmed Broom Corn, and lived in poverty. When she saw the Dust Bowl happening, she immediately went to the camps to volunteer her time and write her novel, Whose Name Are Unknown, which I immediately picked up after I saw Ken Burns' documentary, because he highlights how incredible it is. What it does is it empowers the people who are suffering one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States, and makes them look like the real people that they are.

I immediately Googled her and connected with our website, found out she was also a poet. So I connected with her literary executor, Joanne Dearcopp, who is this extraordinary woman who was actually one of Sanora's close friends. She said, “You're a biographer, let's go,” and totally got me working on the project. So five years later, I released Writing Like The Wind: The Life Of Sanora Babb from the University of California Press. It's been an extraordinary journey, it's really gotten out there, and it's been wonderful to see Sanora’s story reach so many people now.

SB: That's awesome. What has been the most rewarding feedback you’ve received so far? What makes you think, alright, this is doing something.

IJD: Well, let me give you two things. First of all, when I wrote my biography on Charmian Kittredge London, they used it, before it was even a book, to remodel the museum that I had once gone to as a child, which only represented Jack London. Now, after using my book, they incorporated this whole exhibit called the Trailblazer Exhibit that includes Charmian’s story. So now all these little girls who might go to the park will also see a foremother, a role model they can be like in the future. That was the first time when I was like, oh my God, when we do research, it can change things in the real world.

Then, when I was on the road for my Sanora Babb biography, I was talking to a lot of people who are “Okies,” and who were really embarrassed about their heritage. They said, after reading my book and Sanora’s book, they felt proud of who they are and their heritage. That really meant something to me, the fact that we can be proud and uncover stories that help us understand who we are. It is so important.

Because these women are not visible to us, we forget half of the world. Half of this human story. Things get forgotten. It's been so extraordinary to uncover just a little tiny bit. That's really changed my goals as a writer going forward. This is what I'm going to do with my life.

SB: Besides Sanora Babb, is there a particular story that you've researched and written about that really sticks with you?

IJD: Wow, they all stick with me. But there’s two I'm working on right now. The first one is an article about Sylvia Plath, whom I'm going to be traveling to England next week to visit her grave in Heptonstall and the places she lived in England. But I'm also going to an Amy Lowell symposium. I'm going to be writing about the influence Amy Lowell's work had on Sylvia Plath that I didn't even know existed.

The other totally different project that I'm working on is based on my interest in fitness. I came across the story of Pudgy Stockton who did hand balancing and weight lifting at Muscle Beach in Southern California. She ran this column for years called “Barbelles”, which normalized being a female athlete in America. It was one of the first steps of normalizing that in American culture. Because up to that point, if you were a woman with muscles and a strong body, you were condidered a freak. We wanted to reduce women, make them smaller. I'm calling it “Strong” right now. It's the story of strong-bodied women in America and how far that's come, and how it can keep going farther.

SB: Similarly to Amy Lowell and Sylvia Plath, how do the voices of these women you research find their way into your personal writing?

IJD: When I find them, I can't help but write about them. I obsess over them, actually. I was writing another column last week, and then I went to a museum exhibit with my girlfriends. You know these girlfriends that hold me up, right? It was a Ruth Asawa exhibit at the San Francisco MoMA. After I went to that exhibit, I felt like my life had changed, because I knew her work, but I'd never seen it hanging in a room. It's these huge basket-like structures. When you're in a room with it, it kind of vibrates with energy. It's so crazy. These forms are completely influenced by basketry, but also weaving techniques, and dance, all these different art forms that she experienced at Black Mountain College in the 1930s.

Then I'm walking through the exhibit, and all of a sudden, in the last room, I see this marker that says, she was deeply influenced by Marguerite Wildenhain, whom I'd written a post on a couple of months ago. And I thought, oh my God, I didn't know they knew each other!

So these women, the stories, find me in real life. I have three more columns in my head that I'm writing and working on right now, but this one interrupted it for a second, so I could get it out. So that's how it works in my mind; they're constantly visiting me. When you're on a path and you're staying on that path, these things find you as a writer. I believe in that, and I'm really grateful for that.

SB: I was actually going to ask you about that, but you got there on your own. I was going to ask if you went out of your way to research these stories, or if they just found you. But that makes so much sense that they just find their way to you.

IJD: Granted, people send me stories all the time, which I'm so grateful for. So if someone reads this, and they're like, “Oh, you gotta write about this person,” please send their name to me.

SB: Is there anything else you want to talk about or discuss before we wrap up?

IJD: The last thing I want to say is I hope that this inspires other people to go out and find stories about women or other people who have been forgotten or misremembered. It's really important, especially now that we see what is not there. If you go on AI and you ask it a question, it doesn't see what's not there, what's behind the archival wall. It's our job to kind of push against that wall and bring people out into the open so we can see them again. The work that I'm doing feels more urgent every single day. I hope this inspires other people to do the work and to support the work. It's important to support independent presses like Trio House Press and to support independent researchers like myself who are doing this work.