The Sitting Room: A Treasure Trove of "Lost Ladies"

In this special episode, Kim and Amy recount their recent visit to The Sitting Room, a unique library and literary salon in Sonoma, CA, dedicated to women's literature. Trip highlights included a stay at a Julia-Morgan-designed architectural gem in Berkeley, a private tour of Jack London State Park, and a fascinating tour of The Sitting Room’s extensive collection of books and artifacts. Listeners will also hear snippets from an engaging evening with library co-founder J.J. Wilson, making this episode a heartfelt homage to the preservation and celebration of books by women writers.

Mentioned in this episode:

Julia Morgan

The Berkeley City Club

Litquake

Jack London State Park

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 27 on Charmian Kittredge London

Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

The Sitting Room

J.J. Wilson

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 187 on Kay Boyle

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 162 on Meridel Le Seuer

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 264 on Jessica Mitford

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 140 on Zora Neale Hurston

Lyndall Gordon

A Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf

The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories by Virginia Woolf

Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

AMY HELMES: Hey everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes here with my co-host Kim Askew. Today's episode is gonna be a little different. Rather than focus on a particular author, we want to share with you our experience at The Sitting Room Library and the remarkable woman who co-founded this space back in the early 1980s. Her name is J.J. Wilson. She's professor emeritus at Sonoma State University. She's still running The Sitting Room, which is located in Penngrove, California, near Sonoma State. J.J. is a wealth of knowledge and passion and fascinating anecdotes and this incredible spirit of connectivity and community, and she is in fact a lady of literature in her own right. She created and maintains there at The Sitting Room with the help of community volunteers. It just ties so well into what we talk about every week on this podcast. But before we dive into all of that, let's back up a little bit. So, Kim, you and I just got back from this amazing trip up north. We did a lot of fun stuff, which I'm sure I'm going to be breaking down some of our adventures into future bonus episodes for our Patreon subscribers. But let's do a quick rundown of our itinerary for our listeners. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, it's short but packed. So, um, we had a flight the Tuesday morning, um, that we were headed to Berkeley, but it got delayed. It actually canceled and then it kept getting delayed and we had passed the point where we could drive there. It's about six hours away. 

AMY: And it was pouring down rain. 

KIM: Yeah. My windshield wiper broke on the way to the earth. 

AMY: Your windshield wiper broke, but also your phone was broken because you dropped it the night before. 

KIM: Oh, oh yeah. My phone broke through the night before. Yeah. So I couldn't, I could only halfway use it. Amy had texted me to tell me the flight was canceled early that morning, but I didn't see it 'cause my phone was broken. So anyway, it was just The Perils of Pauline, it was one thing after another. 

AMY: All the roads were washed out around the airport. I was worried I wasn't even gonna be able to make it there. So we were going up for this panel in Berkeley andMimi Pond, who we featured as a guest a month or so ago, she was also at the gate because she was gonna be on the same panel with us. So luckily we were in good company there waiting for, oh, around three hours I think, right? 

KIM: Yeah. I was waiting for like five or something because I got there so early or six. But it actually went by really fast because we were chatting and everything. It was so fun. So we got to the Berkeley City Club, which is designed by Julia Morgan and it's absolutely incredible. We gave ourselves a tour of the whole place and we were just completely nerding out over the whole thing. We had dinner there and we went to the panel at Mrs. Dalloway’s. The panelists were, as Amy said, Mimi Pond, Cita Press editorial director Jessi Haley, Womb House books owner Jessica Ferri and Emily Van Duyne, who wrote the book Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation and our frequent Lost Ladies of Lit guest Iris Jamahl Dunkle. 

AMY: Great group, um, great turnout. Shout out to everybody who came.

KIM: Yeah, it was totally packed. There were people standing in the back, and we want to give a special shout-out to everyone who showed up, including someone I knew from high school who listens to our podcast, who drove at least a couple hours to get there. Thank you, Angela. It was so nice to see a familiar face there. And then also my former boss from my first job out of college, Dan, he came out with his wife, so that was amazing. And we also had Francis Dinkelspiel who introduced herself and pitched a few great ideas for future episodes. A past guest, Tania Malik, was there also. 

AMY: Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So it was great having all of those people in our corner.

KIM: I had a complete blast from the minute we got there. I was like, I'm just gonna have fun and have a great experience. 

AMY: Yeah. Everybody had interesting things to say. Mm-hmm. So after that panel we all ended up at a karaoke bar where Womb House books’ Jessica Ferri got up on stage and channeled Pat Benatar. So that was fun. 

KIM: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that was so much fun. 

AMY: And speaking of the “Julia Morgan” hotel, the next morning we're sitting at breakfast in this super posh dining room. It felt like we were in an academic murder mystery novel. 

KIM: Yeah. Dark academia. 

AMY: There were people at different tables and we were starting to cast who our characters would be. Uh, those poor people had no idea. 

KIM: It was so easy 'cause everyone we looked at was like, oh yeah, this person would be that. 

AMY: Yeah. So everybody looked like a character. Clearly. We had a fun time together. So we checked out of the hotel then, and this is when we got our next real treat because we met up with Jessi Haley and Emily van Duyne from the night before at Jack London State Park. And who was there waiting with her clipboard and her informational material?

KIM: The ultimate tour guide! 

AMY: Ultimate tour guide, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, who wrote the biography of Charmian Kittredge London. Of course we did a previous episode on Charmian, that was episode No. 27. But yeah, nobody knows more about this place (it's called The House of Happy Walls), than Iris. And so she gave us an exclusive, I would say, behind-the-scenes tour. 

KIM: Oh, we literally got to go places you normally don't get to go. So Iris basically brought Char and Kittridge London back into the story because she is the one who created this museum for the life of her and Jack London to celebrate their lives. But everyone just thought of it as Jack London's house. “Jack London, Jack London.” But it's like, she was an integral part of his story all the way through his writing plus this museum and Iris helped bring that in. So we got the tour from Iris's perspective and Charmian Kittredge London's perspective, and it was just amazing. And the ruins of their house that burned down that place is like a magnificent, large, ruins, it was so much bigger than I imagined. You could see all the fireplaces still in the ruins. It reminded us of something like Tintern Abbey or something. 

AMY: So basically, yes, Charmian and Jack designed this grand home called Wolf House. And then a week before they were gonna move into it, it burned to the ground. So all that's left are the stone walls and everything. So then Jack London died pretty early at the age of 40, so before they had a chance to rebuild or anything. So at that point, Charmian decides she's gonna build her own house, the House of Happy Walls, which is also a really neat stone structure. And so now it's the museum and um, it's where Charmian lived for the rest of her days. So we got to see her dressing room. Yes, her clothes. Oh yeah, her clothes are gorgeous. Old photographs. So yeah, it was just really neat to be there with Iris because she's so passionate about it all. 

KIM: Yeah. Totally, and you wanna go back and listen to episode No. 27 if you haven't listened to it before, to hear about Charmian Kittridge London and her writing and her life, because it's super fascinating. As we said, Iris was our guest on that, so she's a great person to have to talk about all that. 

AMY: And yeah. By the way, listeners, as you're listening to this episode, if you go to our Patreon page, anybody can access it for free. I'm gonna post a bunch of photos from this trip, or maybe I'll even try to make an actual video that goes along with this episode, so, um, that you can actually see photos of everything that we're talking about. While we are talking, especially, you'll wanna go check out these pictures from our visit to The Sitting Room, because there are so many neat books and artifacts, and that is what we're gonna talk about next.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to talk about this part. 

AMY: So we ended up that night at this. I will say “magical” dinner party, that's the appropriate adjective, right? 

KIM: I kept saying to Amy like, is this a dream? Do we have a spell cast over us? Is this a fairy land? Like literally the most amazing night with the most amazing people, the most amazing books. It was a highlight. 

AMY: It just felt like we were plucked out from the midst of time almost and sat down in this place and you're like, what on earth? This is incredible. And the people were so incredible. 

KIM: Yes. It was an intimate dinner. 

AMY: Yes. About six or seven of us, including Jessi Haley from Cita Press, Iris, um, Emily Van Duyne. Then J.J., who we're gonna talk about in a second, and then one of The Sitting Room volunteers, JoAnn Borri, who was so nice. Didn’t you love her? 

KIM: We absolutely love her. Yes. 

AMY: And we have more to say about her as well. But first of all, just like, imagine you guys getting to have dinner in a library. That is a first for me.

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Especially one that is packed from floor to ceiling with books by and about women writers exclusively.

KIM: And archival material, including letters and photographs and everywhere. 

AMY: Everywhere. Everywhere you turned your head, you were looking at something that was pretty fascinating.

KIM: And J.J. toured us through it. So from the minute she opened the door, she had amazing stories about people that we've talked about on our podcast. Mm-hmm. That stayed at her house. 

AMY: Yes. Okay. So don't get ahead of yourself, Kim. I know you're excited. But first of all, I'm sure everyone listening is like, I don't even know what they're talking about. So it's called The Sitting Room Library. It's in Penngrove, California. So basically Sonoma County. I just lifted from Wikipedia here, the description, because it does a pretty good job of explaining everything about it. So let me just read this. 

“The Sitting Room library is a reading room and archive in Penngrove, California that provides the community with access to women's literature and art. Established in 1981 by June Farver, Jane Flood, Marylou Hadditt, Susan Miller, Karen Petersen, D.A. Powell, and J.J. Wilson.[2] Recognizing the lack of access to books by and about women, a call for donations went out, and soon a library was established as a non-profit to house the growing collection of women's literature and other resources. Named The Sitting Room Library, it began in a rented office building in Cotati, California. In 2004 the library moved to a house in Penngrove. Inspired by the Morrison Reading Room at the UC Berkeley University Library, The Sitting Room began as a place for women to gather, hold salons, and celebrate the cultural contributions of women artists and writers.[3] The library's collection of books began with donations provided by early visitors and volunteers and has expanded to over 7,000 titles.

So “salon.” That's the right word for what that dinner party was like, right?

KIM: Yes. That's the perfect word. That's how I felt. Yeah. That's exactly what it was like. Yep. Like we were in this intellectual atmosphere with these other women.

AMY: Okay, so let's talk about J.J., because she does not like to be singled out from among this list of other founders of The Sitting Room that I mentioned, but we're gonna brag on her a little bit here because she deserves it.

KIM: Yes, she does. 

AMY: She started the first women's studies program at Sonoma State University. It was one of the earliest universities in the country to be focusing on this topic, and that's back in the early 1970s. 

KIM: Yeah. So it was J.J., who, along with Karen Peterson, wrote a book in the 1970s called Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the early Middle Ages to the 20th Century. It was a book basically about lost ladies of art. People loved this book, but art professors in particular kept saying, “We love teaching this book, but we don't have any slides of the artwork to show students.” So what J.J. and Karen did was they put together a collection of slides that could be used in conjunction with the book, and it sold so well, they used the proceeds to start The Sitting Room, which is so cool.

AMY: It's such a good story, I know. So J.J. is actually a Virginia Woolf scholar and she started The Virginia Woolf Miscellany, which is a monthly journal on Woolf, and that's still in production today. So, you know, we hear about Virginia Woolf having sort of a renaissance in the 1970s. You know, there was a risk of her becoming a “lost lady” of lit, just like all these other women we cover. But because of scholars like J.J. who were doing the work, she's obviously known now and people are still reading her and discussing her and studying her. Um, we're gonna talk more about Virginia Woolf in a few minutes, but first listeners, I realized right away when we showed up at The Sitting Room that this was gonna be something that we were gonna wanna share with you all. So I managed to get out my voice recorder on my phone and. As J.J. was showing us around, I was able to capture some of these moments. So we're gonna be sharing some snippets of audio of Kim and I on this tour from J.J. So you're gonna get a feel for what a hilarious, whip smart firecracker of a woman J.J. is. She's 89 years young, and Kim, to use J.J. 's own turn of phrase. I'll just say, “wasn't she, darling?”

KIM: I love her. I can't imagine a more engaged, personable … from the minute we walked up to the door, she came out to greet us. She had stories to tell us. She had questions to ask about ourselves. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. 

AMY: So, like I said, I'm gonna share some audio of our evening. There is a little bit of crosstalk in the background, but J.J. is the real star here, and you guys are gonna love hearing her voice. So basically she steps out on the porch to greet us. I wanted to give her a big hug, you know, but she's like, “Stop right where you are!” So we freeze in our tracks, like, “what, what?” And she says, “I need you to turn around and look over there.” We turn and she points out this potted plant. Well, this plant was previously owned by the writer Kay Boyle. 

KIM: Okay, and the connection is we did an episode on Kay Boyle last year. That's episode No. 187, if you wanna go back. But Amy, it turns out our lost ladies were everywhere in The Sitting Room. So still out on the porch, we turned as J.J. introduced us to a carved sculpture of a woman she christens Zora.

J.J.: So Fort Pierce is where Zora Neal Hurston is buried. I go every Christmas and put a rose on her grave, because I live in Florida half the time. So I kept seeing this statue.

out in front of a wonderful African store. And so I picked up JoAnn at the airport, and I drove her by and she said, “That's for The Sitting Room.” It fit perfectly in that car over there, just with one seat down, you know, in the back. She just rode all the way cross country with us. 

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: I know, because I'm thinking, did you put it on a plane? 

J.J.: Oh, I would've had to buy a ticket, I guess. So then, my wonderful nephew picked her up out of the car with one hand and plunked her down here. And she's been here ever since. And she likes it. Fine. Isn't she, darling? 

KIM: So then we walked a few feet into the front door, and right away my mind was blown when I looked around and saw all the books and all the names that jumped out to me. 

AMY: At this point, J.J. is just off and running, pointing out one thing to the next. You could barely take it all in, our eyes were bugging out of our sockets.

KIM: I was about to cry with happiness. 

J.J.: Now as you step in … So when you get books over the transom, do you know what that means? No. See, you're so young. Before air conditioning, doors used to have transoms, and often if someone wanted to deliver something, the transom would be open; you'd just toss it over and you'd find your mail down on the floor. So we get books that way, they just donate. So we got this book and I don't know who it was from, but I was very glad to get it 'cause it's by Helen Keller. And we didn't have a book by Helen.  And I opened it up and it was full of all kind of wonderful clippings. And then I looked down at this piece of paper and I unfolded it. It was a letter! From Helen Keller! See, that's how her signature was made if you remember with the ruler, if you saw the movie.

KIM: So this actually wouldn't be the first encounter we had with Helen Keller on that trip. 

AMY: Yeah, I know. Weird, right? I might actually do a little bonus episode because she turned up the following day as well in something that we were exploring. But anyway, we're still standing in the foyer of The Sitting Room at this point, and I see a wonderful painting on display. I'm gonna let J.J. tell you all about it, listeners.

J.J.: Let's come in and look around. 

AMY: There's stuff everywhere. J.J.! Oh, look at that painting!

J.J.: So that is by my wonderful friend, Isota Tucker Epps, now dead. [Aside: Emily! I know you’re having fun, but I'm about to give a tour of something that might interest you if JoAnn lets you go.] Emily tells me that she loves A Room of One's Own. So I want her to see this notice that Isota has carefully put in Anna Achmatova because she was reading her at the time and loved her. She is not part of Virginia Woolf's vision, but so that's a little of a cheat. Okay, Emily? 

EMILY: Mm-hmm?

J.J.: Do you recognize these women? They're from that book you like so much? 

EMILY: Uh, the women in the painting? Um, well, there's Virginia, there's Jane Austin, uh, there's, uh…

AMY: Mirasaki Shikibu? Is that her up in the top? 

J.J.: Yeah. So they're all the people who appear in A Room of One's Own, and here's how it was done. She was babysitting her grandchildren while their mother was in hospital. I like that. And Isota was afraid she'd stop painting or something 'cause there was so much going on. But the kids did go down and take a nap,so she would do one painting at a time. And she realized that's why women did quilts because it's an interrupted art. Isn't that a little bit brilliant? 

EMILY: There’s that Audre Lorde line about why women write poetry, because it's an economical art, like you don't need reams of paper and you can do it on your 15-minute smoke break, right?

J.J. Yeah. Audre could have, maybe. Most of us not so much! Yeah, her statements are sometimes a little overstated!

KIM: Speaking of the economics of poetry, J.J. also pulled out a beautiful volume from 2013 called The Gorgeous Nothings. It's an art book, really, showing Emily Dickinson's envelope poems. And that sparked an impromptu discussion about why Dickinson was a recluse. Amy, do you wanna play that clip too? 

AMY: Sure. That book was really cool, and I loved her little anecdote that she went on to tell. 

J.J.: JoAnn, would you just go pluck that large book about Glorious Nothings off the Emily Dickinson shelf in the Poetry Room? Not everybody might have seen it and it's fascinating. 

AMY: I feel like you know every corner and where every single volume is. I mean, I know it's where it's supposed to be for a reason and that's how a library works, but it's still pretty impressive.

JOANN: [returning with the book] It's interesting to use the word pluck with a book this size! c

J.J.: Do you see how they've done it? How beautifully? This is cool. Lyndall Gorden, whom I admire… she wrote a really good book on Virginia Woolf, which is not easy to do. And she wrote a book, the biography of Emily Dickinson. And in it she said she thought, she figured her out, that Emily Dickinson had epilepsy. And in those days, if you had epilepsy, you were considered to be possessed by the devil. And the cue that she had on this to explain why Emily Dickinson, who seems in her letters so social and out there really and busy, and having to find time, was not in the village… it was because she was afraid she'd have an epileptic fit.

EMILY: They proved that with the … I'm sorry, you probably were getting to this and I interrupted you. I'm so sorry.

J.J.: But I love being interrupted. And correct me if I'm wrong, but when her brother went on business to Boston, she would give him the prescription for something that supposedly was good for epilepsy. Turns out it wasn't, but you know how we all get caught up in this stuff. And she didn't wanna give it to the local pharmacist because it would've been all over town. [to Emily]: Do you have other proofs? 

EMILY: Oh well, Karen Kukil, who’s the longtime curator of the Woolf and Plath collections at Smith….

J.J.: I like her. 

EMILY: Yeah. Oh. Do you know Karen? 

J.J.: I met her recently. I mean, pretty for me recent, yeah, at a Virginia Woolf conference. It was held there. Yeah. 

EMILY: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Uh, and so I, I hung out with her a little bit this past August and she was talking about working with a Dickinson biographer but yeah, they found the pharmacy records to prove that, that is to back it up.

J.J.: Oh, I'm so glad. That's really good news.

KIM: And what an amazing discovery. Wow. 

AMY: Okay, so now we are gonna move on to a little cabinet that is at the front of The Sitting Room. J.J. called it the Cabinet of Curiosities. And Kim, we were there for hours, but we actually didn't even have that much time to really look within any of the books because there were so many shelves that we were looking at. But we actually didn't get to browse many of the titles. So when we go back someday, because I'm sure we will go back, I wanna spend more time with the Cabinet of Curiosities. You're also gonna hear me get totally distracted when I catch a glimpse of another one of our previous lost ladies nearby, Meridel Le Seuer.

J.J.: The other thing I wanted to show you all, even before you got to take off coats or whatever you wanted to do, is in here, because this is what I think you said Iris, they would love. Somebody said you all would love it. There are lots of weird and wonderful books here, and they're the ones, the librarians can't figure out where the hell to put. We have two wonderful librarians who are pretty strict. And so they go in the Cabinet of Curiosities. Mm-hmm. And I try to get everyone who comes in to take one thing out and look at it, you know, they want to be read. But people are so anxious to get to their own work. So they walk by and they don't even notice. 

AMY: So Cabinet of Curiosities. Okay. 

J.J.: Well, that's what they called them, right? And they became not, they're kind of, you can't categorize them. Yes. Yeah, they're out of your culture categorization. Do you see Pearl? 

KIM: No, I did see that, but Lady Godiva and Master Tom, check out this cover! [laughing Oh my gosh. 

J.J.: Yeah. That's actually an interesting thing to analyze, that myth. So, this one I love because during COVID, we had a remake of the house. And the guys would put their tools out and work away and everything. And one of them had figured out what we were all about and he said, “you know, I have a book I wanna give to the library.” And he brought me this Pearl [a book about Pearl Bailey].

AMY: I see Meridel Le Seuer!

J.J. Yes. Could you turn on that other light underneath The Girl? You'll see better. Yeah. Oh yeah. Now this, we are very proud of this exhibit. And you're cool that you spotted it, Amy, right?

AMY: Yeah. I recognized her profile there. 

J.J.: Oh, that profile, yeah. It's amazing. So she's one of the ones who has stayed here, the other… was Decca Mitford. I thought that would blow your mind.

AMY: Stop it right now! What do you mean “stayed here?” Both of them! What? 

J.J. So Meridel stayed here. Her daughter is still alive and did this beautiful piece of ceramics. Okay. But at any rate, Meridel was here because she has four daughters, and one of 'em was having a baby as a surrogate, and it irritated Meridel; she did not like giving away her DNA and she was angry with them. And she came and hid out here, and even her kids were frantic. Where is mother? You know? I was torn.

AMY: You had a fugitive! A literary fugitive in your house!

J.J.: She had sworn me to secrecy. I finally just had to tell them. Anyway, we had a big holiday party here and Meridel said, “No, I'll stay in my room.” But she popped out. She couldn't resist the audience, you know? She came out dressed. 

AMY: How old was she when that was all happening?

J.J.: Oh, plenty old, God. I mean, she lived almost to be a hundred, you know? We have, I think, one of the best collections of Meridel anywhere. We have a file on Meridel... You think it's bad, the one on Plath? [To Emily]: Did you go back to the Plath one? Look at her. 

AMY: Emily, what was your reaction when you saw the Sylvia Plath stuff? Is it stuff you haven't seen?

J.J.: Oh, she's taking photos of it a mile a minute.

EMILY: There's quite a few reviews in here that I have not seen before, which is amazing. Did you show them the Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth? 

AMY: No, we're three feet in the door. We haven't made it very far yet. 

J.J.: You have to turn right around in fact and look for something else. It's really fun to turn this. 

KIM: Oh, turn this? 

J.J.: Mm-hmm. Okay. So what would we have in the closet? 

AMY: Oh, good. I get that. I get it. That was Rosemary Manchester's bright idea. Oh, that's great. You're not using, you don't have any coats, J.J. What a great use for it. But yeah, the early stuff, right? I mean, everybody's a lesbian now, but that was…

KIM: She's just so fun and entertaining and delightful. Like words can't express. 

AMY: I know everything that came outta her mouth was a complete crack up. She is so funny. 

KIM: Totally. Yeah, totally. It's like she's a character in a play, but it's real. Everything she says is brilliant and funny and wonderful. 

AMY: Yeah. Okay, so what she was showing us there was the LGBT section of their books by women, which are housed in a closet, if you couldn't follow what was happening there. In the middle of the main front room, there was actually a round table that was covered with books, and this was great because J.J. had collected a bunch of titles that she thought would be of interest to us, and she set them out. She's so thoughtful, and actually one of the books on that table was called Hardy Californians by a female botanist, Lester Rountree, who I had never heard of before, but Kim, it actually made me think of our trip the following day to the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens. I'm totally getting off topic here now. We just did so many cool things. But here's J.J. pointing out some more items and talking more about Decca Mitford’s overnight stay in the house. 

KIM: I mean, we were just dying when she said Jessica Mitford … we're obsessed with the Mitfords. And she's like, “Oh yeah, she happened to stay here.”

AMY: Oh yeah, no big deal. 

KIM: Of course she did. 

J.J. Yes. Hardy Californians. Do you know about her? It's a her, and she's marvelous. Let's put it on your table of to-look-at things. Okay. This. The essays; I really believe in the essays. But I have to say, we had a fun round table on this bookshelf here, which is all letters from writers. And I always say, I love reading other people's mail, you know? What is horrifying is how much theirs are about money. Louisa May and others, you know? 

IRIS: Well, it’s all she was thinking about!

J.J.: Iris, speaking as a writer. And so watch out Iris! We're gonna publish your letters! We'll know all about how dire they are.

AMY: We are saving your emails. 

KIM: You didn't tell us about Jessica Mitford visiting. 

J.J. So she came to speak with Carl Jensen, who did a wonderful program on stories that don't get enough coverage. I loved her book on The American Way of Death. It was the first investigative journalism book on death. It blew me away. I so lived by it. Everything I looked at, I looked at that way ever after, you know. So Carl said, “I ain't got no room at my house; Can she stay with you?” And I said, “Sure.” Because what you're gonna see soon is the Writing Room used to be a guest bedroom, but not a very big bed. Lucille Clifton slept there too, and she was a little dubious about its narrowness in her own beautiful body. At any rate, so we took [Jessica] to — you locals will be amused — we took her to the Washoe Tavern. 

IRIS: Oh, you did?The Washoe House?

J.J.: The Washoe House. It’s the second oldest tavern in Sonoma County. They always say “second” 'cause they know someone else is gonna claim to be first. So cover their asses. But at any rate, it had buffalo hamburgers and things. We thought she would like that. But yeah, she was a little dubious, I think. But at any rate, she came back here and slept and woke up in the morning … breakfast. But I love the stories you all told about her and it helped me appreciate her a in a larger sphere. So would somebody who has a feeling for the writing room show those guys. Can you show them the Writing Room and the Poetry Room?

IRIS: Show 'em the Woolf Wall! 

J.J.: Well, I wanna cook the rice.

IRIS: But first can you show them the Woolf Wall? 

AMY: Yeah. You're the Woolf expert. 

J.J.: JoAnn is the best person to show it. She understands that. JoAnn is the curator for the Woolf collection. 

AMY: We heard about this. Yeah. 

J.J.: Look over there. So exciting. Yes. This is our “new and noteworthy!”

AMY: Okay, I just want to cut in here for a minute, because The Sitting Room isn't just a depository for old books. They're constantly acquiring important new titles. So new biographies, new additions that get published by classic women writers. They update their catalog all the time to make sure they have them. So while we were going over to check out the Woolf Wall, there was this table with all the new titles out on Virginia Woolf. One was called The Life of Violet, which is out new from Princeton University Press. Um, it contains three of Woolf's early stories that were newly discovered, and they're based on the life of her friend Violet Dickinson. And then that table also had a copy of the newest Cita Press title, A Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf.

KIM: Which I'm so excited to read.

AMY: Yeah, I started this a night ago. I'm only two essays in right now, Kim. But it's really cool. So, as we mentioned listeners before, um, another woman that was at The Sitting Room that night was named JoAnn Borri. She is a volunteer there, but she was actually instrumental in making this Cita edition happen. So basically, JoAnn would not consider herself to be a scholar on literature. She had a career in the medical field. But she was always interested in Virginia Woolf and had a passion for her, and when she retired she started to volunteer for The Sitting Room and reading everything she could get her hands on by Virginia Woolf. And she realized like, “Hey, I'm seeing a connection here between some of these critical essays that she writes on writing and you know what literature should be.” So you can get a copy of that book. It's out now, or you can also read it free online. You download a free PDF at Citapress.org So anyway, here's some audio of JoAnn pointing out some of these new Virginia Woolf titles. And then she takes us over to the Woolf Wall, which is a wall of the library entirely devoted to Woolf’s works, critical works on her. I thought Kim, it was gonna be like some sort of shrine or something, but no, it's actually meant to be used and explored. At one point we realized though, that our glasses of red wine were perilously close to some of these first edition Hogarth press titles. So you'll hear us yelling like, “Move the wine! Move the wine!” in this clip. Because oh my God, what a disaster that would've been. 

JoANN: I noticed that there were certain essays that were constantly referenced in many of the critical studies I’d read and so I just made a list of 'em and then I looked them up in Mark Hussey's, Virginia Woolf, A to Z, which is a wonderful reference book and so I told J.J. about it. And then Jessi appears in The Sitting Room and Jessi told the board and they wanted to do it. I know it almost makes me wanna cry.

KIM: But it also feels like doing the podcast and stuff too. Like, what reason do we have to do this beyond loving it? It's enough, you know? You don't need somebody to tell you, “oh yeah, you can do this. You're allowed to do this.” 

JoANN: Yeah. Right, right. 

JESSI: Yeah. And in the Woolf context, it's exactly a continuation, I think, of her philosophy of what reading is, you know? She doesn't see reading as the realm of scholarship and institutions. She sees it as people plumbing the depths of each other's ideas, right? And so it perfectly embodies her ideas to have this kind of collaboration. 

JoANN: And the whole issue too, of access, because you know, in A Room of One's Own, famously she's shooed off the lawn and she's not allowed into the library because she's a woman and she doesn't have the right credentials to get in. Or the right genitals, I guess. 

AMY: So that might have been a little fuzzy to hear in some points over the background noise, but I just wanted to include it because I love the fact that JoAnn, who is not a scholar, just a tremendous fan of books and of Virginia Woolf's work, made this literary contribution. And that's the sense you get from The Sitting Room, that everybody is able to weigh in and participate. And I feel like. J.J. has this gift that she's able to see people's strengths and channel them. So, you know, she saw when JoAnn started coming to The Sitting Room that she had this passion for Woolf, and so she was like, “Okay, I'm gonna put you in charge of curating all the Woolf materials.” It's amazing. 

KIM: Yeah. If this is a cult, I want to be in it. Because when she looks at you and talks to you, she just really sees you. It's really, really wonderful. Anyway, 

AMY: I know at one point during the dinner, I was thinking back … remember we did that book that was um, Margery Latimer. And she had a literary mentor who was another author who had all these…

KIM: Zona Gale.

AMY: Zona Gale, yes, who had all these young authors that would just sit at her feet and want to soak up everything she had to say and made me think of that, except for in that case, it was kind of dark and a little bit nefarious. Yeah. And in this case, all you got from J.J. was just lightness, positivity, and humor and kindness.

KIM: Completely. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

AMY: I mean, I felt like we were her disciples or something that night. 

KIM: Completely. Completely. 

KIM: And we should say Iris is the person who first turned us on to this place. So she also gave us a little tour of two of the back rooms, the Poetry Room, and the Writing Room. Iris and Jessi both come here all the time when they need a quiet place to do work or research, and it ties back into that whole concept that Virginia Woolf spoke about, that women need a room of one's own sometimes to be able to write. I think Iris said this place was pivotal to her when her kids were young. You know, it was one place she could come and there was silence and she could, you know, devote her brain to it. Um, so anyway, yeah. Here is Iris touring us through two of these rooms. 

IRIS: This is the Poetry Room. And these are all alphabetical and there's like, you know, treasures. They have everything by Amy Lowell and they have chapbooks. These are all early chapbooks, like from the Seventies, like the women's movement. So there's like all kinds of writing in there, like Alta’s from Shameless Hussy Press. Then they pull out, like these are kind of like big names, so like, Plath is here… Rich … Dickinson. But the treasure of this is the hanging files. So these are all of the different women. Like I come here always in check to see what they have on a specific author or topic. And whenever I get research, I add it to the files under the different names. Or I encourage them to create a file. It's just like documents and things. So here's the, wow, here's the list of names and it's not like, um, any kind of like, um, hierarchy so like the Meridel LeSeuer, I used it when I was writing my book. So there's some of the shit from my book in there. Because I was writing about it like it'll be an email that someone printed out or it'll be an article someone copied, or it'll be an original document from that person, like, you know. Mm-hmm. It could be all of those things.

AMY: Like the one you sent, you sent me one, Meridel LeSeuer to Sanora Babb?

IRIS: Yeah. That's an amazing letter. Yeah. That's from the Harry Ransom Center.

AMY: But you add it because you found it, and then you, so then the next person mm-hmm. Who's looking, will also be able to find that.

IRIS: Exactly. So like, Emily's gonna send them a bunch of Plath stuff. 

AMY: Oh my gosh. Wow. So it really is a network. 

IRIS: It is. And I like, there's no hierarchy to it, so that's what's kind of neat is like, I could add to it as a scholar in this area. And the intern that works here who's like 15 could add to the same pile.

KIM: So it's totally, it's egalitarian. 

IRIS: Yeah. Whatever goes in there. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter. It's kinda like the women's movement standard. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a great place. And people are given keys so they can come here and just write. Um, you kind of now have to check with J.J. what her schedule is, but this place always has women in it, working. And you should look at the, um, those are HD's original publications.

KIM: Oh, wow.

IRIS: You know, everyone has like, “I want you to meet like my boyfriend” or like, you know… “I want you to meet my J.J.” Or like The Sitting Room.  It makes me very happy. This is a treasure. 

KIM: I mean, I feel like re-inspired and reinvigorated for what we… things we're working on. This is so cool. 

IRIS: Good. That's what you want is to leave that way. And then this is, um, come down here. I mean, these are novels, but in here is like the biography section. So this is the Writing Room. So these are biographies. Um, and she, they pull out the ones that are special because they're so sweet. 

AMY: Oh, there you are!

IRIS: But this is a really great book. You Can't Catch Death. Brautigan’s daughter, Ianthe, she's amazing. She's a friend of The Sitting Room, too. 

AMY: Okay. So this was the room where Jessica slept? Can you take any book home?

IRIS: No. Well, you can take it, you just have to ask. 

AMY: Okay. I'm sure it's different depending on what the book is. 

IRIS: It also depends on who you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But most people, you're not supposed to. They don't have a lending thing, but I think it would be good. 

AMY: Sui Sin Far… They have so many of our episodes!

KIM: So J.J. turned us on to another friend of The Sitting Room, the late Etel Adnan. A Lebanese American poet essay an artist, and here's J.J. telling us about her:

J.J.: …Your right hand is someone else who was a huge fan of The Sitting Room. Etel Adnan. Now I would like to say she's lost, but she really kind of isn't. She lived so long she got to see her art put in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. My friend went to see the exhibit, and she kept telling me, J.J., I found a young artist you're gonna just love. It was Etel!

AMY: Oh, you're like girl, preaching to the choir. 

J.J.: Isn't that great? Yeah. Yeah. But it wasn’t only preaching to the choir, but that she saw her as young, and here she was 104. So Simone Fattal is her partner and a very good artist herself and we are still in touch with her, but Etel came to The Sitting Room frequently and said, “I like your little cloob.” She said, with that French accent, you know? And I thought “Little Cloob” was a good name for it. And we have three archive files on Etel. So, as I say, in a way, she's not lost because she just happens to have died, but her work is all over the place. 

AMY: Okay, so that's the last clip I had for you. From that point on, the tape recorder went away and we were just able to enjoy our dinner. The conversations continued for several hours more. It was such an amazing night sharing stories and wine and amazing food. 

KIM: Yeah. J.J. had made a big, beautiful dish of chicken and kumquat. It was amazing. 

AMY: Yes. I didn't want it to end, but we eventually all started yawning. Yeah. And then we wrapped it up. But we can't wait to get back up there at some point to actually look closer at more of these books. But what I wanted to end with is the fact that actually the women's studies program at Sonoma State that J.J. founded, it was actually eliminated this year, after more than 50 years. “Budgetary cuts” was the reason, maybe the political climate of the day was a contributing factor. I don't know, but hearing this is just absolutely devastating. 

KIM: Yeah, it's so sad. And you know, we think that progress is linear. We think these authors and these ideas will remain visible once they're brought into the spotlight. But the work of preserving lost voices will never be finished. But what an inspiration J.J. and The Sitting Room are. I mean, I literally feel completely reinvigorated and re-energized to just continue the work we're doing. You know, somebody really should do a documentary about J.J. and The Sitting Room. If anybody out there can do that or knows people who are interested, she would make an amazing subject. 

AMY: I mean, yeah. Yeah. She's had such an incredible life. I feel like we didn't even get all the information about what her whole life was like.

KIM: She started at Stanford at the age of 16. Um, she taught at Smith College. Yeah. There's so many things we didn't dig into. And Jessica Milford stayed the night at her house. Anyway. 

AMY: So listeners, if you are in Northern California and you wanna go see this place, you are free to do so. They welcome visitors. You just need to reach out to The Sitting Room to schedule a time to stop in. Um, highly recommend going when J.J. will be there to entertain and inspire and enlighten you. Um, The Sitting Room also has really interesting speakers throughout the year and events and round table discussions as well. If you're not in Northern California, you can also go to The Sitting Room library.org and check out their online catalog through Library Cat, just to see what sort of titles they have there. You'll get lots of ideas, and you can also browse their list of women authors who are in their research archives. So you never know if you're working on some sort of project and you're wondering, mm. “Maybe there's something on this woman at The Sitting Room?” you should check into it, um, because it's a very shared and collaborative collection of scholarship there. So we're gonna put all the pertinent links in our show notes. But yeah, thanks for listening to our fun Itinerary. It was the first Lost Ladies of Lit Road trip, I guess you could say. 

KIM: Many more I hope in the future, and I am still just flying high from last week. I mean, it was amazing.

AMY: And thank you to J.J. and Iris and Jessi. They all contributed to making this happen.

KIM: And JoAnn.

AMY: And JoAnn, yeah. We are so thankful for their hospitality. Patreon subscribers. I'll be back next week with a bonus episode. Everyone else will catch you in two weeks with another Lost Lady of Lit and another fun book to introduce to you. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.