West: Fire: Archive - Paperback

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle (Author)

West: Fire: Archive is a poetry collection that challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography, and history fueled by the western myth of progress presented in Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis." The first section focuses on mending the erasure of the life of Charmian Kittredge London, the wife of the famous author Jack London, a woman who broke gender norms, traveled the world, and wrote about it. The second section examines the act of autobiography (or what defines the author). In it, Dunkle writes through the complex grief of losing her mother and her community when it is devastated by wildfires and reflects on how these disasters echo the one that brought her family to California, the Dust Bowl. The final section questions the authenticity of the definition of recorded history as it relates to the American West.

Author Biography

Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-18 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, California. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies, and There's a Ghost in This Machine of Air. She is the author of the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, published by the University of Oklahoma Press (fall 2020). Dunkle has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, the Lannan Foundation, and Squaw Valley Writers' Conference. She teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.