Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb

March 3, 2025 by David
Filed under Fiction, Non-Fiction, WritersCast

Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb — Iris Jamahl Dunkle — University of California Press — Hardcover — 9780520395442 — 416 pages — $27.95 — October 15, 2024 — ebook versions available at lower prices.

“This absorbing biography, written with both affection and admiration, shows Babb as one of the most indefatigable characters in American literary history.”—The New Republic

Perhaps sparked by years of exploring the shelves of used bookstores and the libraries of older writers, I’ve long been interested in learning about and reading works by “lost” writers, especially from the early to mid-twentieth century. At various times, I’ve sought out and published some relatively obscure novels and memoirs in hopes of bringing them to the attention of modern readers (if you’re interested in knowing about some of them, get in touch with me and I will send you a list).

Over the years, I had heard of the writer Sanora Babb, and had read some of her poems, though in all honesty her poems did not interest me very much. Then few months ago, I learned more about her writing and her life in an essay called “Correcting for the Male Gaze: On the Unique Challenges of Writing Biographies of Women” by Iris Jamahl Dunkle that was published in LitHub (a daily online newsletter I recommend to all readers). Inspired by her story, I bought a copy of Sanora Babb’s novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, and was transported by her writing.

That in turn led me to read Iris’s terrific biography of Babb, Riding Like the Wind, in which she tells the story of Babb’s remarkable life, the story of a singular woman.

Babb left her incredibly rough and difficult childhood in Oklahoma and eastern Colorado in the early twentieth century to move to California when she reached adulthood, determined to become a writer. Arriving in Los Angeles just before the onset of the Depression, and becoming involved with radical politics during the 1930s, she had close contact with many writers who later became famous, including Tillie Olsen, Ray Bradbury, and Ralph Ellison.

She was in her own unique style a feminist, whose long relationship with the cinematographer James Wong Howe included what was at the time an illegal marriage, because of California’s anti-miscegenation laws. Later, she was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Throughout her life, she continued to write and participate in literary culture as an editor, struggling to find publishers willing to take on her stories and memoirs about hardscrabble working class people in the plains and in the west.

One of the most impactful incidents in Babb’s life involves John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a book that became an instant bestseller and helped to define the narrative of the Dust Bowl that almost all of us know. When Steinbeck was struggling to write his novel, his research included visiting FSA camps in central California where Babb was working as a volunteer helping impoverished migrants—people to whom she related well, as they were farmers from the same sorts of places where she grew up. Babb’s supervisor naively asked her to share her field notes with Steinbeck. Sanora had been planning to use those notes to write her own novel about the Dust Bowl experience based on her deep first-hand knowledge of the people and their challenges. Steinbeck literally copied her field research into his manuscript, using her direct experiences to enhance the authenticity of his novel. Babb had no idea that her work was being appropriated, and she continued to work on and finally complete a draft of her own book.

Then, at the very moment Babb was about the sell her manuscript to Random House founder Bennett Cerf, Steinbeck’s book was published to almost instant and vast acclaim, thus killing off any hope it had of being published. It took many years more before her work eventually was published.

While Babb did experience terrible frustration during her lifetime, this biography shows that her influence was widely felt. Ultimately, Babb’s work did make an impact on many. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns’s award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl, and also inspired Kristin Hannah’s bestseller The Four Winds.

Dunkle continues documenting other neglected and lost women writers through her indispensable newsletter, “Finding Lost Voices.“

Iris Jamahl Dunkle earned an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. Her poetry collections include West : Fire : Archive, Interrupted Geographies, Gold Passage, and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Her biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer was published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Buy Riding Like the Wind (from Bookshop.org)

If you’re interested in knowing more about Sanora Babb, here is a great blog post at UC Press: Ten Intriguing Facts about Fearless Writer Sanora Babb

“The new history is coming, if you dig through the archives with a new gaze.”—Iris Jamahl Dunkle

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Eric Vickrey: Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash that Changed Everything

February 9, 2025 by David
Filed under Non-Fiction, WritersCast

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Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash that Changed Everything – Eric Vickrey – Rowman & Littlefield – Hardcover – 9781538190722 – 176 pages – $34 – April 16, 2024

I am sure that most of my listeners already know that I have long been a dedicated baseball fan – at least since I was six years old and was captivated by seeing the New York Yankees play the Milwaukee Braves in the 1957 World Series on a tiny black and white television set along with my best friend at the time, Tony Grafton. As a kid, I absorbed baseball history like a sponge, reading everything I could lay my hands on and memorizing the names and statistics of all the great players who lived long before I was born. Even now, I am always attracted to reading books about baseball history, and especially stories I have not ever heard of before.

Eric Vickrey’s terrific book tells just such a story, and while it is about a terrible tragic event that almost no one today knows anything about, his storytelling brings an otherwise obscure story to life for modern readers.

On June 24, 1946, the minor league Spokane Indians baseball team’s bus crashed in Washington state’s Cascade mountains, going off the road and down into a steep ravine, killing nine players and injuring many others.

You do not need to be a baseball history nerd to be captivated by this story because Vickrey spends a considerable amount of the book outlining what happened before and after the accident and exploring the world of minor league baseball in the pre-war and early post-war era. His portraits of the people involved are compelling and based on personal interviews with family members and people who were alive at the time of the accident.

World War II completely disrupted and changed American society in many ways. It had a huge effecy on the major and minor leagues, first during the war, when so many players joined the military that baseball, while carrying on as an important form of entertainment for the folks at home, could not find enough able bodied players to keep the game alive at every level. And then after the war, with hundreds of players returning from military service, the game was suddenly crowded with players of all ages and experience. The Spokane Indians had several top prospects and former big leaguers arrive to play for them that season.

Vickrey explores the lives of three Spokane players in particular—Vic Picetti, Ben Geraghty, and Jack Lohrke—showing the impact of the war on players and their families as well as the challenges they faced in minor-league baseball, and of course, the terrible impact of the crash at the heart of the story.

Eric and I had an entertaining conversation about the players and people, and the tragedy that took place almost sixty years ago that hopefully now will no longer be a forgotten part of American baseball history.

Eric Vickrey is a lifelong baseball fan who enjoys researching and writing about the history of the game. He started as a contributor to the Society for American Baseball Research BioProject. His first book, Runnin’ Redbirds: The World Champion 1982 St. Louis Cardinals, was published by McFarland in 2023. In that book he records the story of the 1982 Cardinals from Whitey Herzog’s rebuild to the final out of the Fall Classic.

“Eric Vickrey has done tremendous research and gives us this well-written, gripping tale in remarkable detail.” — Marty Appel

Author website
Buy the book

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Jon Wlasiuk: An Alternative History of Cleveland

January 21, 2025 by David
Filed under Non-Fiction, WritersCast

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An Alternative History of Cleveland – Jon Wlasiuk – Illustrated by Libby Geboy – Belt Publishing – Paperback – 9781953368799 – 244 pages – paperback – $19.95 – October 15, 2024

This is a terrific book published by the very fine independent Belt Publishing (now part of Arcadia Publishing, a company that specializes in books about locales). Belt has long focused on books about the midwest, specifically the rust belt from which its name derives. One of its goals has been to dispel myths about the midwest and its places, not just for outsiders, but for the people who live there themselves who often do not realize the depth of the places they inhabit.

Jon Wlasiuk’s Alternative History of Cleveland is unusual and surprising. Based on the title of the book, I was expecting to be reading a Howard Zinn style political history of the city, but what Wlasiuk has done is to write a much more inventive, somewhat personal, and thoroughly engrossing narrative that takes us from the geological underpinnings of northast Ohio, through the comings and goings of indigenous peoples, and into the modern historic era, weaving together ecology, sociology, geography, arts and culture, to open our eyes to a place that so many have failed to fully comprehend. The theme throughout is that city and nature are thoroughly intertwined, and there are many people today working to make Cleveland a better place for people and nature to thrive together. Wlasiuk’s vision of the city and its environs is one that all of us can relate to, wherever we ourselves inhabit the earth. It’s a wonderful book I can highly recommend.

Talking with Jon about this book was rewarding and enjoyable for me – I hope you will feel the same after listening to this episode.

Jon Wlasiuk was born in northwest Ohio and earned a PhD in environmental history from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He has taught at colleges throughout the Great Lakes region, and now lives in the Slavic Village neighborhood.

Illustrator Elizabeth (Libby) Geboy was born and raised in Wisconsin, and lives in Colorado. Her illustrations translate favorite subjects in the natural world, specifically food, flora, and fauna into art.

Buy the book.
Belt Publishing

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Publishing Talks Interview with Jack David of ECW Press

January 6, 2025 by David
Filed under Ebooks and Digital Publishing, Publishing History, PublishingTalks, Technology, The Future

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I began Publishing Talks a number of years ago as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology. Most of these interviews originally involved the future of publishing, books, and culture, talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Later this series broadened to include conversations to go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me on many levels. I have gotten to speak with visionaries and entrepreneurs, as well as editors and publishers who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues I have met or worked with during the many years I have been in the book business.

More recently, I’ve been talking to book folks about what is going on in publishing today, quite often about the changes in marketing and promotion that have marked all media industries as social media has overwhelmed traditional media, creating an extremely complex and constantly changing environment.

One thing is certain about publishing – there are no final answers, but there are many really important questions that we should be asking all the time.

ECW is a terrific independently owned and operated Canadian publisher, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. I’ve known Jack David, one of its co-founders, for a long time. He is a really smart guy, and notably has managed (with the help of partners and a great staff) to create a thriving independent publishing business across the five decades the book business has changed the most in its history. It is decidedly difficult to be a book publisher in any time and place, but I think being commercially viable for a half century and being based in a relatively small market country with a geographical spread greater than the US makes ECW’s success even more remarkable. ECW does things its own way, to its advantage, in the long run. Unlike most publishers, they publish their own audio books. And their list is built the old fashioned way – through the enthusiasms of its editors. There is much here to be admired and learned from, not just for book publishers, but for anyone interested in media in the modern era.

Talking to Jack about books and culture is always fun. Getting to talk to him about book publishing for this podcast was and is a distinct pleasure I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Editor’s note: this interview runs longer than most (60 minutes)

Here is what ECW says about itself:

“ECW is Entertainment. ECW is Culture. ECW is Writing.”

Publishers Weekly recognizes ECW Press as one of the most diversified independent publishers in North America. ECW Press has published close to 1,000 books that are distributed throughout the English-speaking world and translated into dozens of languages. In the next year, we’ll release 50+ new titles and will continue to support and promote a vibrant backlist that includes poetry and fiction, pop-culture and political analysis, sports books, biography, and travel guides. Books by writers whose names you know and love — and by those who we’re very pleased to introduce for the first time. Who are we? After three decades, we still get asked about our name, those three little letters: ECW.

At first the acronym was self-descriptive: Essays on Canadian Writing (the name of the journal of literary criticism we started in 1974). But as the company grew and changed, our name, in our minds, also changed. We’ve heard the company called Essential Canadian Writing, Excellent Contemporary Writing, or, more recently, Extreme Cutting-Edge Writing. And these names have been, and still are, appropriate. But now we realize that each of those letters represents a particular strain of ECW Press’s diverse passions — Entertainment, Culture, Writing.

ECW Press