Sarah Bania-Dobyns’s article, “Scriptural Reasoning in the Context of Limited Pluralism” was published in the November 2016 special issue of the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning.

Cara Byrne‘s article, “Every Tongue Silenced So One Voice Resounds: Redefining Zora Neale Hurston’s Legacy in Adapted Picture Books,” was published in the Winter 2016 issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.

T. Kenny Fountain‘s book, Rhetoric in the Flesh, was reviewed in the most recent issue of Technical Communication Quarterly.

Lou Giannetti is featured in this issue of art/sci (scroll down).

Dave Lucas gave the lecture “Attempt at a Mythology” on December 5th at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.

Erika Mae Olbricht has completed training to become a Peer Reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission, the Midwest region accrediting body for higher learning institutions.

Robert Spadoni is featured in this issue of art/sci.

Kirkus reviews Brad Ricca‘s new book, Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.

Jim Sheeler hosted a question and answer session in Guilford House with 15 visiting journalists from Cambodia. The journalists who visited Cleveland as part of the International Center for Journalists were funded by the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh.

Ongoing Projects: Iris Jamahl Dunkle (’10)

Charmian Kittredge married the bestselling American author Jack London on a cold Chicago night, November 19, 1905, and immediately stepped into the critical public eye. For the rest of Jack’s and Charmian’s lives, until Jack’s untimely death at the age of forty, reporters would follow their every move. She and Jack would travel the world exploring and writing together, but although the world remembers Jack London and his exploits, few know or understand the woman who was by his side, often driving him towards this adventure. Charmian Kittredge London often collaborated with her husband. She wrote every day, only instead of writing fiction, she wrote books about her travels as well as sketches for inclusion in her husband’s books. But history hasn’t remembered Charmian Kittredge London in this way. Instead, she is remembered as an uneducated homewrecker, who hindered her husband’s career.  One must ask why, after all these years, this cartoonish and negative image of the strong, well-educated, and independent woman persists?

The answer lies in a young writer named Irving Stone. Long after Jack’s death, when Charmian was in her sixties, she was visited by thirty-year-old Stone, who had recently received acclaim for his bestselling biography of Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life. Stone was determined to write Jack’s story and over the course of a year, he seduced Charmian and manipulated Jack’s step sister Eliza Shepard until they not only agreed that he could write whatever he liked, but also that they’d have no legal right to stop him. It was a mistake both would regret. In his bestselling fictional biography, Sailor on Horseback, Stone didn’t just write about Jack, he condemned Charmian to the caricature that would stay for the next eighty years. He wrote that Charmian “was not attractive looking” (183)  and that “she had thin lips, narrow eyes and drooping lids.” He also painted her as “an indefatigable talker” with an odd sense of humor (188). When it came to controlling Jack, though, he described her as being “shrewd and clever” (187). In his depiction, Charmain “was jealous of every other female” that Jack interacted with, and within nine years, their marriage had been “spiritually destroyed” (316-317). There are many reasons why this image of her has persisted, but chief among them is the fact that she destroyed many of her early diaries in reaction to the invasion of her privacy and restricted access to all her papers, manuscripts, and correspondence at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. To honor her wish, Eliza’s son Irving Shepard and later his son Milo kept the restrictions in place on her surviving diaries until very recently. Thus, no evidence was available to affirm or refute Stone’s inaccurate caricature and none, except for Clarice Stasz, author of American Dreamers and Jack London’s Women, have challenged his depiction of Charmian.

Our forthcoming biography Smiling into Ruins: The Creative Life of Charmian Kittredge London aims to do justice to Charmian Kittredge London’s own voice. Relying on her surviving diaries, drafts of manuscripts, and correspondence, my co-author Susan Nuernberg (Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh) and I have recreated an accurate portrait. Charmian was an artistic, adventurous, and intelligent travel writer, biographer, and correspondent, whose life jumps off the page the moment one reads anything she wrote.

Charmian was a woman who found joy in every day, in the fog that rolled in over the hills at their ranch in Glen Ellen, California, in the sunsets that illuminated the sea when she traveled the world. She was well-educated at Mills College in Oakland. When she met Jack in 1900, she was supporting herself as a stenographer in San Francisco, had already visited Europe and written a travel log about the trip, had traveled throughout the United States, owned rental property in Berkeley, kept a Swedish maid and a suite of rooms, rode and bred her own horse, read extensively, and was part of the literary group affiliated with the Overland Monthly magazine. She began publishing articles in the late 1890s and she collaborated closely with Jack on many of his novels.

Throughout her life Charmian faced immense hardships, losing her mother at the age of five, her father soon after, her only child thirty-eight hours after a difficult birth, and her ability to have more children due to complications. Then she lost the love of her life, Jack London, when he died in 1916. Charmian, however, took pride in being someone who could smile into the ruins of her life. She was the kind of woman we would love to have known. She was brave. She was fierce. She was extraordinary. Our book aims to take you on the adventure of her life.

Charmian London in Waikiki.

Faculty of the Past: Katherine Harriet Porter

b. 16 March 1888, Lansing, Michigan
d. 3 April 1983, Cleveland, Ohio

Katherine Harriet Porter was born in Michigan, but her family moved to Ripley, New York, during her youth. In 1906, she enrolled in Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, and then transferred to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts after her first year. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1910, subsequently returning to Lake Erie College as a teacher between 1910 and 1913. She received her Masters of the Arts in English at the University of Chicago in 1914, publishing a thesis called “The Development of the American Lyceum with Special Reference to the Mission of the Local Associations in New England,” and taught at Alfred University in New York from 1914 to 1919. In 1918, she joined the Red Cross and prepared to deploy to Europe to treat injured soldiers, but noted later that “all sailings [were] canceled on eve of departure.” In 1919, she began teaching at the Flora Stone Mather College for Women at Western Reserve University. In 1930, she completed her English PhD at Cornell University, where she was a member of Phi Kappa Phi. Her dissertation was entitled “Margaret, Duchess of Portland.”

Porter served as an Assistant Dean of Mather College from 1927 to 1929, and the Dean of English from 1927 to 1933. From 1930 to 1951, she served as the Director of Freshman English at Mather College and then served as the head of the Mather English Department from 1949 to her retirement in 1953. Between 1946 and 1949, she represented Western Reserve University at the American Association of University Professors. Porter also belonged to the College English Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Modern Language Association. Her specialties were composition, English literature, and American literature. During her tenure at Mather College and Western Reserve University, almost all of her publications were in-house, consisting of writing manuals created for the English department such as her Style Leaflet (1934, 1945), and articles posted to the Western Reserve University Bulletin. After her retirement, she published Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle (1958) through the University of Kansas Press, a book on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian mysticism.

Porter’s closest colleagues at Mather College were Eleanor W. Thomas and Margaret Waterman. According to a 1945 Alumni Folio article, Porter and Thomas began living together in 1920; they still cohabited in 1969 when Thomas died after a protracted illness at age 88. Mather College offered the Thomas-Porter Scholarship in their honor. Porter co-wrote two manuals with Margaret Waterman: Your Course Paper: How to Plan and Document It (1949) and Themecraft (1950), which Waterman later revised independently. Porter died at the age of 95 while residing at the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging.

Entry by Lara Klaber, from records in University Archives, CWRU, and from public documents. Photo courtesy University Archives, CWRU.