Member Spotlight: Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing gives us a way to talk back to history, to reexamine ideas we thought were set in the past and see them in a new light. Take, for example, the fact that I was assigned The Grapes of Wrath in high school. My family came from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl, so this book struck me. After I read it, I rushed home to call my grandmother to tell her about it. But my grandmother wasn’t impressed. Instead, she told me Steinbeck got it all wrong. I was confused by her reaction. Why was she so upset about this great author’s work? My teacher told me it was a classic. I had no idea how right my grandmother’s reaction was. Writing gave me a way to discover the life of another writer, Sanora Babb, whose novel about the Dust Bowl, Whose Names Are Unknown, was closer to the truth my grandmother told me. Writing allows me to reexamine the false history of the Dust Bowl I had been taught and find alternative ways to understand it. Ways that were closer to the truths my grandmother told me.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? For me, the best way to cure writers’ block is to head into the archives or to read writers who I admire. Just last week, I was at the Center for Creative Photography beginning to look at the collection of a possible future subject, and I left feeling completely enlivened and brimming with new ideas. I think you have to find things that activate your writing process. For me, that’s the archives. It feels important to me to find the stories of women who have been forgotten or misremembered, and usually, their stories are buried in the archives. So that’s why I find so much inspiration there. Books I’ve read recently that have inspired me are The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, by Lyndall Gordon, Norton, 2023; The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, by Sara Fitzgerald, Roman and Littlefield, 2024; Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne, Norton, 2024; A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri, Viking, 2024 and Trace of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Moger, Transit Books, 2024.

What is your favorite time to write? My favorite time to write is early in the morning, when I’ve already had a cup of coffee and am ready to go. Ideally, I’ll write all morning in my office, where I have access to all of my files. Having big chunks of time like this to work with my materials makes it easier to write in the long, sustained way that one needs to write when writing a biography.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? When I was a young writer and was getting depressed about the amount of rejection I was receiving, he told me that writing is a long game. It’s the people who stick with writing, who have the fortitude to continue even when they face rejection, who become writers. His words have stuck with me because he was absolutely right. It’s been a long, hard road I’ve walked to become a writer but there is really no other path I’d rather be on.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? I am excited to be writing biography in an age when it seems most important. So many of my subjects’ lives are located behind the archival wall, and they have almost disappeared from the internet and don’t come up in AI searches. I am excited to live in a time where unearthing their lives is so meaningful! And I’m also happy about websites such as Substack, where I can extend the number of subjects I can write about. Each week, on my Substack, Finding Lost Voices, I write a mini biography about a woman who has been forgotten or misremembered, and it goes out to over three thousand people. It’s been such a powerful experience!

Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb is out now with University of California Press.