Emily Lin

The Library hosted a program last week with Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel’s biographer, Betty Blanks. A close friend and “surrogate daughter” of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Ms. Blanks shared a history with the poet as a child of Dust Bowl migrants.

“Wilma and I were like family. When I first met her, the sound of her voice was so familiar to me. I recognized the people in her poems. She spoke about back home with the same longing that I had always heard from the elders in my own family,” said Blanks. “I was born right here in the Valley, in Visalia. But I recognized Wilma’s longing for that old ‘home,’ because I always heard that same deep longing expressed by my own family.”

Her recent work, Pick Up Your Name and Write: The Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, begins with McDaniel’s move from Oklahoma to escape starvation during the Great Depression, and describes the “affliction” by which the poet felt compelled to express her acute observations and appreciation of life—writing almost daily. “She devoted her life to telling the story of her people,” said Blanks. “And I believe she thought their story was just as important to the world as Homer’s Odyssey.”

Ms. Blanks began working on McDaniel’s biography in 2019, after retiring from law practice. “When I began the research for this book, I was delighted to find that that van load of boxes we had had carted over from Wilma’s place in Tulare had been magically arranged into a very logical and accessible collection of information.”

UC Merced Library became the custodian of McDaniel’s literary archive in 2009, largely through the advocacy of the late Professor Jan Goggans, a member of UC Merced’s founding faculty.

“I have spent a lot of time in law libraries, but I had never before had any contact with a literary archive,” Blanks said. “Over the next four years, that would change drastically, and I came to have the greatest respect for literary archives and the people who run them.”

According to Blanks, McDaniel “chose UC Merced as the home of her official archive” because “she felt a real connection to this land.” Upon moving to California, McDaniel first lived in the Livingston area, in Merced County. Her new life in the San Joaquin Valley became the subject of her writing as much as she is honored and remembered as the “Okie Poet.”

Students, faculty, and members of the community attended the talk and also heard remarks from Lillian Vallee, a poet and local educator who served as trustee of McDaniel’s literary estate. The program concluded with a screening of the short film, Down an Old Road: the Poetic Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, by documentary filmmaker Chris Simon.

Author Betty Blanks (center), with University Librarian Haipeng Li (left) and Emily Lin, head of Archives & Special Collections (right)