Editor’s note
All of us, I think, have had the experience of seeing someone else take credit for something we’ve done. But how many of us can say that our work was used by another person to earn a Nobel Prize?
The American novelist, poet, and editor Sanora Babb can, as Iris so brilliantly illuminates in her forthcoming biography, Riding Like the Wind. In Babb’s case, it was John Steinbeck who took credit for her work when — despite lacking her permission — he used her notes to write The Grapes of Wrath. His novel went on to win not only a National Book Award but also a Pulitzer Prize, and in addition to being turned into an Academy Award-winning film it would also eventually play a major role in Steinbeck’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Meanwhile, the novel that Babb had written was shelved, and it would not appear in print for more than 60 years.
As Iris’s publisher explains, “the stories we know — and who tells them — can change the way we remember history.” It was a privilege to talk with an author who has done so much to reclaim voices like Babb’s from the historical record.
Jana M. Perkins
Founder, Women of Letters
P.S. With this interview, we have officially launched Season 2 of the series! I am incredibly proud to have reached this milestone together, and I am so excited to be embarking upon a new one with our expansion into audio.
A very special thank you to Iris, for being our first guest on the podcast; to her publicist Cassie, for connecting us; and to all of you, for having been here along the way. I could not have dreamed of a better inaugural episode, and I can’t wait for you to hear it.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an Emerita Poet Laureate of Sonoma County and a faculty member at UC Davis. She has authored two biographies: Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, forthcoming). Her fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was recently published by The Center for Literary Publishing. Dunkle writes a weekly blog called Finding Lost Voices, which revives the voices of women who have been forgotten or misremembered and serves as the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
How did your childhood shape your ideas about what work looked like and what was possible for you?
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I grew up in a very rural part of Sonoma County, California, and on 10 acres, with no TV. So I grew up with a lot of time in my head.
I would take my horse out and just kind of wander the Redwood forest and eat apples that I picked off the trees. I didn’t realize it at the time — it was pretty idyllic, but at the time I thought it was very boring because I couldn’t go to 7-Eleven. But that idea of always having this space in which my imagination was thinking and examining the world, no matter how slow the world was moving, was really a gift that I got in my early childhood.
Another factor that really helped me growing up is my inability to follow rules. I was taught, I remember, in kindergarten or first grade about what a president was, and I was told, you know, our first president was George Washington. But what I understood it to be was that our first presidents were George and Martha Washington. I didn’t understand that Martha Washington didn’t share the responsibility of leading the nation — it just didn’t make sense to my feminist mind, even at six years old. So that paired with, when I was in like fourth or fifth grade, I was learning about the Indigenous people of California. There’s a whole unit on it, and they start off the unit by saying, “Well, as you all know, there are no more Indigenous people in California.” And I’m sitting in a classroom next to, like, friends who are Pomo and Coast Miwok descendants.
I was like, “Oh, so history is wrong. So we just need to question this all the way up.” And so that’s really kind of the foundation. I was raised by hippie parents in this really kind of rural environment that let me think freely, and I’m so grateful for that.
Fast-forward to today. How did the path to what you’re doing now unfold?
IJD: I was a poet first: I got my MFA in poetry, and I discovered poetry really young, and that was basically how I processed the world. But then I got to this project I wanted to work on, when I was a young writer — I went to Jack London State Park. I didn’t know you could be a writer as a profession. And when I went there, I realized you can travel the world and write about it; you know, what Jack London did. I was like, “Sign me up; this sounds amazing.” So, I was like, “Okay, well, this is what I’m going to do, but I don’t want to be poor, so I got to be practical about this.” Which, of course, I went and became a poet, which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
But when I got to this project — I was working on writing a book of poems about Charmian Kittredge London — I realized that the audience I was going to reach was going to be very limited with my book of poems. I mean, this was my fourth book of poetry, and so at this point I had a readership, but, you know, maybe a thousand, two thousand people were going to read my book. And I was like, “Well, how can I change the narrative?” Which was that Charmian Kittredge London hindered her husband’s career more than helped it and wasn’t actually worth the time of biographers.
And what I found out when I was doing my basic research was that she actually was kind of at the inspiration point for Jack London. She actually was further educated than him. She’d traveled the world, and she helped write his books and had never been given credit for it. And so I was like, “Oh my god — like, what if me as a little girl going to that park had met Charmian Kittredge London as a model instead of Jack London?” I would have had more agency and permission to be a writer.
So I was like, “Okay — I guess I need to go bigger.” And that’s when I switched from writing just poetry off of archival documents, which is what I do, to writing biographies. And I took a very novelistic approach to biography because I come from a more poetic sensibility, so I don’t write traditional biography. I write biography that challenges the way that a scene is set in a biography — it’s more a lyric scene, a sensory-rich scene, rather than fact, fact, fact.
Jana M. Perkins: What was it that initially drew you to poetry as you were making this decision? “Okay, I want to do something in writing” — how did poetry become the one?
IJD: That’s a great question. I can remember writing stories in third grade where I would just glue pieces of paper together and make a book out of it, right? And god bless my teacher who just let me do that all day long. Like, I did not actually learn anything in school — all I did was write.
I was probably a really annoying student, but I hadn’t been exposed to poetry, really, until junior high. And in junior high, someone gave me a book by Emily Dickinson. And I was like, “Oh my god — that makes so much more sense than prose.” Like it was just— that metaphorical leap just made so much sense to me. It’s the way that my brain interpreted the world. Not that I can think like Emily Dickinson — I mean, I wish I could — but I could suddenly see this way to describe the world that had never been open to me, and I just dove into reading poetry obsessively from that point forward. It opened up the space that gave me a language in which to express myself that I had never had access to before.
“I come from a more poetic sensibility, so I don’t write traditional biography. I write biography that challenges the way that a scene is set in a biography — it’s more a lyric scene, a sensory-rich scene, rather than fact, fact, fact.”
Did you have any mentors along the way?
IJD: Sure, I’ve had a lot of mentors. In undergrad, I had an amazing mentor named Jane Shore, who’s a poet at George Washington University. And she was just so open to, you know, opening the world of poetry up to me. And she had had a personal relationship with Elizabeth Bishop, so to really learn about Elizabeth Bishop from somebody who, like, knew her — because Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein, at that time, were like these huge idols to me — the idea that she could bring her to life in that way, it just… You know, probably I was already obsessed with biography without realizing it, but what I realized is that it felt more tangible to me because I could connect that to her life story and I could connect the work to, like, a physical description of her in the real world, and that was so powerful to me. So Jane Shore was my first mentor.
And then I was really lucky to go to NYU and get to study with Jean Valentine, and Jane, you know, Sharon Olds. I can still hear Jean Valentine’s voice in my head when I’m editing because it was just so succinct, you know? Her sense of the lyric is just so amazing. And then, when I went to get my PhD, another mentor that I was really lucky to find— because, when I was getting my PhD, I was a young mom. I had just had two boys. And it was tough to do that, right? To get a PhD with two young children and a husband in law school.
I had an all-male committee, and, I mean, I’m not going to say anything bad about my all-male committee at the time. But there was no leeway for me as a young mother, not getting any sleep, not being able to control my time in the way that I would want to. And, at a very important part of my PhD, before I went on to write my dissertation, the writer Mary Grimm stepped in and took over, kind of like helping me through, guiding me through, as a mother and a sister and somebody who just understood what it was like to be a woman in the world — she and Judith Oster, who became my dissertation lead. I forget what it’s called, but the person in charge of my committee. They made me believe that I could be an academic and I could be someone who achieved a PhD at a time when I was doubting myself. Because, I don’t know if you know this, but when you have children it’s like going through puberty all over again — you’re like, “Who am I?” You know? And so it was such an amazing gift to have those women in my life to lift me up and make me believe in myself in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise done. So I’m really grateful for them, as well.
JMP: Oh my gosh, I can imagine. I mean, I’m so glad you got the support that you needed. And it’s incredible how often that can come in just sort of one person swooping in and coming to save the day, you know?
IJD: Totally. It’s amazing.
JMP: To me, it’s really incredible that your early beginnings in poetry had such a feminine influence, beginning with Emily Dickinson. I think that’s really special and really rare, at least from what I’ve seen, because I think what more typically happens is that people sort of begin with the canon — which, as we know, is predominantly male.
IJD: Yeah, no, I feel really lucky. It probably had something to do with my sensibilities, that I didn’t like the other poetry as much. I did like T. S. Eliot and “Prufrock.” I read “Prufrock” at a young age, too, and I liked that poem. But yeah, it is lucky, and it’s also lucky, I think, that now I get to teach— like, I loved the work of Randall Jarrell as an undergrad, and especially “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.” It’s a poem I’ve memorized, and it’s very special to me. And I didn’t realize why I loved it so much until I was teaching feminist theory to my students, and we analyzed that poem and they’re like, “This man is appropriating the female point of view.” And they just, like, destroyed it. And I was like, “You’re so right.”
In the era where I was being educated, it was almost the entire syllabus was — you know, except for my female professors — the full syllabus was male and white men. That was it. I can distinctly remember, when I was at NYU the first semester, I was taking a survey on American poetry. Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore were the only women on the syllabus. Langston Hughes was the only person of colour. And I had to get away from NYU for a weekend — I was just like, feeling really freaked out, and I’m like, “I made the wrong choice coming here.” You know? And I bought some books at the bookstore and got on a bus and went to my best friend’s house in eastern Pennsylvania.
And on the way, I read Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar cover to cover. And talk about a mentor — it blew my mind open. I was like, “Okay: if I can do that, if that’s okay, I can do this.” And I also read Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” in Glass, Irony and God. And I was just like, “Okay, why aren’t we reading this on the syllabus?”
Tell us about some of the projects, ideas, or questions you’re currently working on.
IJD: So, October 15th — this fall — my new biography on Sanora Babb will be released from the University of California Press.
JMP: Ahh, congratulations!
IJD: Thank you! Yeah, it’s really exciting — Sanora Babb is an amazing writer who hasn’t really been acknowledged as much, because she wrote this book about the Dust Bowl called Whose Names Are Unknown, which, in 1939, it was under contract with Random House. And three weeks before it was to be published, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck came out to huge success.
It was an international bestseller right away and got a Hollywood movie contract within a year. Turns out, though, what made the story even more interesting to me is that, while Sanora Babb was writing this book, she was working in the migrant camps in California. And she did her documentation there, for Tom Collins, and Steinbeck had visited these camps, and she had given her notes to him via her boss, Tom Collins. And he had appropriated many of the images and ideas from her work into The Grapes of Wrath.
And so, when I heard this, also paired with the fact that my grandmother came over in the Dust Bowl from the panhandle — her family lost everything. And when I read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, I went to my grandmother immediately and was like, “Grandma, you have to read this book — they wrote a book about us.” And she was like, “I will never read that book.” She said, “He got it all wrong,” about Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and “that’s not what happened to us.” And she was so angry. She’s like, “Don’t speak about that book again.” And I was like, “Wow, grandma!” Like, I thought she was just grumpy, you know?
Fast-forward years later, it’s absolutely true. It is not a Dust Bowl novel. It’s about the tragedy afterwards. And I live in a place of disaster, you know — I live in California. I live where wildfires have, like, destroyed our entire community overnight. And if you met people the day after that happened, they’re a completely different person; it’s a completely different context than if you met them six months before and you knew who they were before the worst day of their lives. So, for me, the way that Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown is structured is we get to know the family before the worst days of their lives. We get to know their love of Oklahoma, their farm, their community; we see them as real people, and then disaster strikes. And so we’re with them every step of the way.
As soon as I learned this, I had to write a book about Sanora Babb. I was like, “Okay,” and I reached out to her literary executor Joanne Dearcropp, who was so supportive and a good friend to this process. But while I was doing that, I went on a book tour, and I was in Oklahoma for the first time in my life, and I was doing a reading at the University of Oklahoma, and on the way there I just on a whim bought The Grapes of Wrath at the airport and, like, a pack of pens. And I just started erasing it.
I had been being haunted by my grandmother’s voice, while I was writing a biography — which, you can’t put your grandmother in a biography, right? That would be weird. And so I started erasing The Grapes of Wrath to weave kind of my grandmother’s story in with Sanora Babb’s story and kind of make sense of it for myself artistically. And, in doing so, I created a collection of poems called Endnotes on the West, which is an erasure of The Grapes of Wrath. It’s a multimedia project: it’s a manuscript, but it’s also an artistic object meant to not be readable as itself. So the book is The Grapes of Wrath, but you can’t read it, and that’s the point.
What do you wish you’d started doing sooner?
IJD: I love that question. I think a lot of women in my generation might have that question, because I wish that I took myself more seriously sooner.
Because I wasn’t made to do so by society. Not that I couldn’t have gone against that myself, but the authority and power I see in my students nowadays — I’m so grateful for it. I’m so grateful for it. And I try to empower it even more so, because I think, as women, we are conditionally made to think that we should not be independent. We should not be focused on the story of women, or we should not be strong — you know, physically strong, we should not be mentally strong. We have these other layers of identity that come across, like mother, wife, or partner, you know — like, all of these things that are meant to divide us.
I think I would have maybe not— I mean, I don’t regret any of the steps that I took. But I think I would have taken on biography sooner, and I would have taken on this talking back to history sooner, and I could have done more work. That’s all. Like, I could have done more work to fix the problem. Which is why I started a Substack, because of that. So, weekly, I publish a mini biography, because I can’t possibly write enough biographies in my lifetime — I’m already 50 years old, so there’s only so many decades left. But, in the meantime, I can write, like, 52 mini biographies a year.
JMP: I’m so glad that you were able to arrive at that. Because, as you said, I think that is regrettably such a common experience for so many women to this day.
IJD: Yeah. Sadly. And I like to think that it’s better, but there’s other aspects to being a woman nowadays, you know, growing up a woman — there’s always hindrances, and I just feel so lucky that I get to fight against that with my career. It’s really wonderful. It’s very empowering.
“Is it still the fact that white men are mainly being published? Yes, but it’s less so than it was when I was a baby poet, and I’m grateful for that progress.”
What book have you most often gifted to others?
IJD: That’s funny — I really love East of Eden by John Steinbeck.
JMP: Oh my gosh! Iris!
IJD: I know, isn’t that funny? But, most of my poetry students — I’ll give them Loose Sugar, a lot of times, by Brenda Hillman. I’ve given that book a lot. Glass, Irony and God, same thing. I’ve given it a lot, because it’s opened up so many worlds for me.
There’s so many books. I give away Elizabeth Bishop a great deal. I give a lot of poetry away. But yes, I have given East of— I mean, John Steinbeck, as a western writer I grew up on John Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner. You know, those were the people that I got to read growing up that wrote about where I was from. And I was kind of told that the woman’s voice didn’t really exist — she was just a secondary character, you know? It’s so fun to have people like Sanora Babb now, [where] women aren’t the secondary characters in her books and stories. And there’s all these western writers, these women in the 1930s, that were writing where women were the protagonists. And of course they were, you know?
The thing that drew me to Jack London, ironically, as a young writer and reader, was his book Valley of the Moon, which has a female protagonist. And I was like, “I love how he writes women!” Well, the reason why he did that is because his wife wrote that part of the book.
JMP: Oh my goodness.
IJD: So, it was like, that’s why it was so meaningful to me when I found out that Charmian Kittredge London had helped write Jack London’s books, because I had been duped by it. I had been sucked into this persona of Jack London as a man who could understand a woman’s experience. But, no, he was just really good at taking in other people’s voices.
JMP: I’d love to hear more about your poetry gift-giving practices. Do you give poetry books to poetry lovers and non-poetry lovers alike? What’s the system?
IJD: I do, cautiously. I think I don’t give my strangest selections. Like, I have a couple spare copies of Diane Seuss’s new collection and probably won’t give it to my friends who don’t read much poetry. But I get a lot of books from reviewing, and I often give them to students because they care about them, but I do believe it’s important to share poetry with people who wouldn’t often read it.
I spent a couple years as the Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, in California, and during that time is when we had the really tragic fires in our town, in Santa Rosa. And so part of my role as Poet Laureate was to kind of help with facilitating this healing of the community, because really what people wanted after that happened was art. And I would have people call me up on the phone, like a lawyer’s group, and they’d be like, “Okay, I can’t get my team to focus at all. We’re all just, you know— the fires are still going. We can’t think. Do you have a poem that you could give us that we could read together?” And that’s literally— I would be sending poems to, like, lawyers, or I’d go into schools and we’d do a writing exercise, because you can’t think when you’ve got disaster on your heels all the time, or tragedy is just constantly circulating through the news.
What you need is poetry. It’s like what we turn to when we have no language. So for me, then, what I realized was everybody needs poetry. Poetry is our way to deal with grief and sorrow and happiness and all of these words that we can’t describe, that we all experience differently. And poetry is kind of like the language that we have to express those feelings, so I don’t mind giving poetry to people that maybe don’t know that they need it. Whether they read it or not, I’m not sure.
“All I wanted to do was study literature and write. Like, that’s all I wanted to do with my life, but I was told that that was a bad choice.”
When you think of women who have inspired or influenced you, who comes to mind?
IJD: Living or dead? Does it matter?
JMP: Either or.
IJD: There’s so many women that have inspired my life, going back to someone like Sappho, who wasn’t afraid to use Homer’s ideas in her own poetry as a way to create a new way to talk about a woman’s experience. I can’t get enough of reading H. D. for the same reason — I wrote my dissertation on her and Amy Lowell and Sappho. And you may not be looking for this far back, but women today that inspire me, beyond the work that’s being done poetically and in biography and all of these fields, are the women that are not afraid to write against the grain of what is the norm.
When I was writing and publishing, barely publishing in the 90s and 2000s, there was not a space for what I’m doing and what I wanted to do with my life. Really, the only person that I knew that was writing back to history in their poetics — I mean, there was docupoetics, there was Muriel Rukeyser, there was C. D. Wright, you know, there were all these foremothers that I’m so grateful for — but it was hard to get through the gatekeepers on that. And I just feel like that’s opened up, and I feel like it’s not only women, but it’s opened up to all different identities in a way that it was not available before. I mean, is it still the fact that white men are mainly being published? Yes, but it’s less so than it was when I was a baby poet, and I’m grateful for that progress.
JMP: What was your dissertation on? That’s such a brilliant collection of poets.
IJD: It was on how Sappho — so, Sappho uses Homer’s ideas. Like, Odysseus in the Odyssey will be compared to the gods, right? Whenever he did something, he was isotheos phōs, right? “Oh, he’s like a god, but he’s not a god,” right? And that was the highest compliment you could give to him whenever he was doing something that seemed otherworldly. And so what Sappho did was she used, in her “Fragment 31,” she said that anyone looking at her lover was like a god because they got to be with something that was godlike. And so she appropriated this idea from Homer that was only for war and warriors and heroes and used it for her lover. And she did that with a lot of different Homeric ideas and phrases, and so I looked at how she did that.
And then Amy Lowell appropriated Sappho in her poem “The Sisters.” So she writes back to Sappho, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in that poem, and in the Sappho part she compares Sappho to a burning birch tree. Birch trees don’t grow in Greece, and so it was taking Sappho and planting her in New England soil, like appropriating Sappho into her work. So it was like two steps away from Homer, and I looked at how she did that.
I also looked at how H. D. did the same thing with the Greek Anthology, like her translations of the Greek Anthology — which were often authored by women, those poems, even though they were anonymous. So just the way that that modernist and imagist area of poetics opened up this portal back to the ancient world, where women did have this freedom, and which extended forward. But it was a portal between those two times that was happening, and it created this expanse of American poetics that I felt reverberated forward into, like, Twenty One Poems by Adrienne Rich, or Olga Broumas. There’s so many examples of how far it went — it was kind of amazing to see that. So it’s on sapphic modernism, is the term that that is called.
JMP: I mean, I think I’m gonna have to go back and read your dissertation now.
IJD: I don’t know — I read it recently. I was like, “Oh!”
Outside of your work, what’s something you feel you’ve thought about more deeply than most other people?
IJD: So, I grew up as an athlete. I was a swimmer, so I spent like four hours underwater every day. And I was in a really muscly body, so I grew up just being different from my peers, and I remember feeling really ashamed about my body, growing up, because it was different. Like, I didn’t fit into a prom dress, and I was very strong, and I was a fast swimmer. And I should have been told that was amazing, and I should have felt like that was a powerful thing.
But the way that society made me feel — you know, if you look around, what is the ideal body type during that period? Well, it was Kate Moss; like, the opposite of me. And so I was like, “Okay.” So, something that I’ve been fascinated with ever since is, because it took me a long time to — like, now I love being muscular; it’s great how lucky I am that I can make muscles. But it took so long to get there, like until my 40s that I could get there. And a part of that was just coming into conversation with pop culture and that idea of what a muscular woman is, and how to normalize— like, why is it not normalized?
So it’s actually something I’m interested in writing about. I love lifting weights, I love all kinds of— like, it’s a very unusual thing to be a poet and, like, a weightlifter. But I’m obsessed with it. And I still swim, but I do more like CrossFit as well.
“The thing that drew me to Jack London, ironically, as a young writer and reader, was his book Valley of the Moon, which has a female protagonist. And I was like, “I love how he writes women!” Well, the reason why he did that is because his wife wrote that part of the book.”
What’s a commonly shared piece of advice that you disagree with, and why?
IJD: I think, a lot of times, people are told to either wait as long as they need to or to get after it right away with their first book, when it comes to being a creative writer. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we were taught that we needed to wait until we were like 30 and 40 to write our first book — like, you know, you don’t have anything to say until then. And fast-forward to the present moment, which is people who are 22, 24 are writing their first books and becoming huge successes.
I think the advice that you’re given about these things is bullshit. Like, I think you should write your book when you’re ready to write your book. And I think when people are young and they’re 22, 24, they have amazing things to say — I mean, I see them all the time in my classroom and in my world around me. I’m grateful to be surrounded by young people that say things differently than me, and thank god they do, because our world needs these multi-layers of experience. So I think the idea that someone can predict and lay out your life for you — either your parents or your mentors — I think that’s something that you should take with a grain of salt, because I think a lot of times we limit ourselves because of that. And I think it’s important to grow into the artists that you are.
I’m glad that I didn’t publish until I did, because I am somebody that thinks I’m ready with something when I’m not. You know? I’m, like, ready, ’cause I’m excited, but I’m not ready. And it’s better that there’s all these gateways that I have to go through, especially with, like, biography: you got copyedits, you got proofreading, you got indexing, you got a lot of steps to get through once you’re done, so if you have some errors you can fix them along the way. But with a poetry book, you’re like, “Okay, here’s my manuscript,” and there’s not a lot of steps between that — there’s some proofreading and editing, but then it’s out in the world.
So I’m grateful that I waited, just given what I write about in my process with, like, docupoetics. I think I needed to learn a lot to get to where I am in my voice, and it worked for me, but I would never give that advice to wait till you’re in your late thirties to write your first book to my students. Because I feel, like, why? Because there’s so many interesting things that they might be encountering and doing in their twenties. I do tell them to wait if they’re, like, 15 and they’re ready to write — like, it took me a little bit.
JMP: No, you’re spot on, though. There’s such an impossibility surrounding the expectations of age and timing — especially for women, I think. I mean, I remember just feeling such a sense of not being able to accomplish the things that I wanted because people were telling me, “It’s too soon for you to do this. You can’t do this yet. You need to be more experienced, more X, Y, Z.” And then, very quickly after that, reaching a point where it felt like, actually, now it’s too late. You know? There was a very slim, kind of golden period where it was okay for me to be accomplishing things and reaching for things.
IJD: Yeah! That’s so true. I love the way you called it — that golden window, right? Because to limit that is — that’s horrible. Like, why would you limit someone’s ability to dream?
I teach an undergraduate section of intro to fiction this quarter, and they’re so adorable, but a lot of them are non-English majors. And they come to my class, and I’m like, “Creative writing’s the best!” You know? And I convert a lot of them into English majors, because they didn’t know it was okay to do that. If I hadn’t had my undergraduate professor who was like, “You really like to write, don’t you? Why are you trying to be practical and become—”, you know, I wanted to go to international affairs, take all these economics classes that I was failing. And all I wanted to do was study literature and write. Like, that’s all I wanted to do with my life, but I was told that that was a bad choice: like, you know, you’re never going to make any money. I’m like, “Well, okay.” And so, when I switched majors, I was so happy, but I wouldn’t have if a professor hadn’t told me, “You can do that. It’s okay. You get to choose your path. You’re an adult now.” You know?
JMP: It’s amazing what those small acts of permission can do, yeah.
IJD: Yeah. That’s at the heart of my teaching, is to allow permission. ’Cause I felt like that was something that was really important to me as a student, is to get the permission to be allowed to be who I was.
Brenda Hillman is still a mentor, because she wrote that book and afterwards I was like, “Oh my god, you changed my life.” And she was like, “Really?” So receptive and kind. I call her my poetry mama, because she lifted me up from that moment. I discovered her and I was like, “Oh my god. Thank god this exists, but how will I ever get there?” And she was like, “Just go for it.” You know? It’s the kindness of people like that. She didn’t have to do that — she didn’t have to be open to some young fangirl, basically, reaching out to her, and she was. And I’m just really grateful for that.
“That’s at the heart of my teaching, is to allow permission. ’Cause I felt like that was something that was really important to me as a student, is to get the permission to be allowed to be who I was.”
Tell us about a time when you had to take a big risk in order to move forward. What did that experience teach you about how to navigate difficult circumstances?
IJD: Well, I am somebody that likes to take big risks. But what I did was, I was working at Cisco Systems as a computer programmer, right after grad school, and—
JMP: You were a programmer?
IJD: I was a computer programmer, yeah.
JMP: Oh my goodness — that’s incredible.
IJD: I have a weird brain. But poetry and programming are really similar. It’s really interesting, and we could talk about that for hours, but it’s not that uncommon that people can think in both ways.
Was I a really great programmer? No. But I left that job, a really good job at Cisco Systems, to take, like, a tiny academic job in western Pennsylvania at Clarion University. It was crazy to do that, and my family thought I was crazy, my friends thought I was crazy — everyone thought it was. Why would you do that? You have the secure job. But I couldn’t be a writer in that position. It was financially a good job; it probably would have been a great idea if I could have done it, but I couldn’t be who I was as a person, and I had to change.
So I took this job, and I didn’t stick with it — we couldn’t make it work, living in western Pennsylvania with the kids and my husband’s job. But when we came back, I committed to this life. I was like, “I am now a writer. I am now a professor, and this is what I’m going to do with my life.” And I was able to stick with that, because I took that risk. And at the time it seemed crazy, but it changed the course of my life and helped me kind of divorce myself from the imposter syndrome I was feeling about being a writer, but I had to make a living. You know? I had that, growing up poor, that I had to make a living and then I could be a writer. And I had to let that go so that I could just be a writer.
JMP: There’s a passage I want to read to you, if that’s okay.
IJD: Sure.
JMP: It’s from one of our interviewees from last season, Beth Kephart. And the reason I want to read this to you is because it resonates so much with what you just shared, and I think you’ll appreciate it. So, if you’ll indulge me — this is Beth writing.
She says, “There was a time — a long stretch — when I was working eighty-hour corporate consulting weeks so that I might pay off the mortgage and make certain our son would have the college tuition he would need and that sort of thing. I became brittle — depleted and sharp-edged. After many years, I made the decision to leave much of that work behind and to begin writing, instead, for magazines. It wasn’t easy financially. It was anything but certain. But I was no longer the person I wanted to be, and I knew that to save us, and to save me, I had to take that risk. The lesson, for me, was that you must protect your own soul, you must still harbor your own dreams, … to be the wife, mother, and friend you believe you were meant to be.”
IJD: That is so true. Wow. I totally agree with her. Yeah, it’s so true. And, you know, it’s something that leads you — it’s like a domino effect. Once you make that decision, you can make another one, [and] you can make another one that leads you towards the path that you’re meant to be on. And then you’re in the groove of it, and your life is just… not easy, but it’s just authentic. And once you’re in your authentic self, you can’t go wrong. Even if you’re poor and— you know what I mean, not publishing, or whatever, you’re living the life that you were meant to live. And I think that’s so important.
JMP: I love the way you articulated that. I think the authenticity part is key, and I think it’s something that’s come up for a lot of people in these last few years with the pandemic and kind of the reckoning that brought about. Because it really gave a lot of people the opportunity to stop and say, “What is important to me? What am I working towards? What do I have? What am I missing?” And I think, for a lot of people, they had a similar experience where they realized, “You know, I might have X, Y, Z — looks great on paper — but, actually, it’s not feeding this authentic part of me that I want to be experiencing.”
IJD: Exactly. Yeah.
“At the time it seemed crazy, but it changed the course of my life and helped me divorce myself from the imposter syndrome I was feeling about being a writer.”
Where do you feel the most scarcity in your life? Where do you feel the most abundance?
IJD: Where I feel the most abundance is in the archives. When I am in the process of discovering stories and ideas that have been sequestered away from the single story that we’ve been told, I feel most alive.
I recently had the opportunity to be on a special tour at the Morgan Library in New York City, and at the New York Public Library, part of the Bird Collection. Actually, last week I was in New York for the Biographers International Conference. And it was just— like, I was giddy. I was so excited. And I think the reason why I feel that way is because I feel like there’s so much that we’re not able to see, and I feel like more and more people don’t realize that they can’t see things.
At that same conference, I did a panel on AI and how these LLMs are recreating narratives for unknown subjects. I tested it by feeding in some of my forgotten — you know, I do this Substack called Finding Lost Voices — and so I put a woman’s name in there that is really difficult to find, and it created all these hallucinations, like all of these false facts about this woman, and wrote it in this authoritative voice. And it was just devastating to see that. Because I realized that, even if I were, like, to use AI to help me write biography in early drafts, it’s completely wrong. And I know that you can, you know, deal with the models and form better prompts and feed information into the AI. But the reality is most people aren’t going to be able to change it in the way that it’ll actually be close to the truth when it comes to the things that move away from the master narrative that we’re told. And so for me, that was just, like, “I should write a sci-fi novel about this.” Like, wow. So that was both a place of abundance and a place of fear and anxiety.
I feel like the future is terrifying right now as a woman. Being a woman in our society, everything that I read about in Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler growing up is coming to fruition, and it’s scary. And I really want to fight against that, and the only way that I know how to fight against that is through my writing. And so that’s really become my life goal, is to write against that horror in the same way that Shirley Jackson did. You know? I mean, I hope I can ever write as good as Shirley Jackson, but that idea of moving into the space of your fear and owning it with power — that’s what I’m trying to do.
What keeps you going?
IJD: What keeps me going is every time I tell someone a story about my subjects, and I’m like, “… And, her husband took credit for her books,” or, “John Steinbeck appropriated her material for his book.” They’re like, “Of course he did. Of course he did.” Like, that’s their first reaction. And that keeps me going. If it’s so common that everyone’s going to have that reaction, I got some work to do. Like, let’s go. Game on. I’m ready.
So that’s what keeps me going, is that it means something, what I’m doing. I had this physical representation of it that really changed my life. I wrote Charmian Kittredge London in 2020 — it got published in 2020. But right before that, they were remodelling the museum at Jack London State Historic Park, and they used my book — the planning committee used it as part of how to repopulate the exhibits.
Charmian Kittredge London built that house, the House of Happy Walls; Jack London never lived in it. And before that, the museum was all about Jack London. When I went as a child, it was just Jack London that I met; she was barely mentioned. So they used my book and made a whole upstairs exhibit called the Trailblazer Exhibit that is all about her. They use photographs that I found of her, like an older version of her, or they made her office — which they called “the guest room” before — into her office again. All of these things. There are photographs of her mother that were not named. All of that was fixed, and it was just like, “Okay, now I feel like I am actually truly a feminist, because something has been done with the work that I’ve done that can affect other people.” And that, for me, it was like that’s what it’s all about.
That’s all I want to spend my life doing. Like, that is just — I helped the future little girls that are going to go to that park, and they’re going to see this woman that made her own freaking pants because they weren’t available for her to ride her horse. She didn’t want to ride sidesaddle, because you’d fall off if you went at a high speed, and so she cut her skirt in half and made her own culottes. And this is displayed on the walls, right? I mean, that’s amazing. It’s telling you, in that exhibit, to go against gender norms that were very repressive.
“What keeps me going is every time I tell someone a story about my subjects, and I’m like, “… And, her husband took credit for her books,” or, “John Steinbeck appropriated her material for his book.” They’re like, “Of course he did. Of course he did.” Like, that’s their first reaction. And that keeps me going. If it’s so common that everyone’s going to have that reaction, I got some work to do.”
Is there a project, initiative, or cause you’d like to highlight?
IJD: I would love to tell you guys about Cita Press. Have you ever heard of Cita Press?
JMP: No, not yet.
IJD: So, Cita Press is kind of like Project Gutenberg. But what they do is they bring into print books by women authors that have gone out of print — either by famous authors, who it’s like a novel that you didn’t know they wrote, or women that you’ve never heard of before. And they make them free and available for people to read. And I would love to send people to citapress.org to see what they have available.
I use them in my teaching all the time. They’re doing amazing work: they’re very involved in not only providing something like Project Gutenberg, where it’s an HTML version of a text, they [also] get like a graphic designer to make a cover that’s relevant. It’s really cool what they’re doing, and they make reading guides, and I love the work that they’re doing there. So I’d love to highlight what they’re doing.
Where can our listeners and readers find you?
IJD: I have a Substack called Finding Lost Voices that they can subscribe to. I also have an author page — you can go to www.irisjamahldunkle.com — and if you join my Substack, you’ll learn about my forthcoming book, which comes out October 15th. And I’ll be going on a book tour, so I’d love to see your listeners wherever I end up going over the next year or so.
We spoke with Iris remotely. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
