Judy Wells' Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West

Dear Phebe by Judy Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judy Wells’ Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West, resurrects her ancestors in a poetry and prose reimagining of her great-grandmother and great aunts and uncles’ lives, culled from a trove of letters found in the 21st Century which were sent to Phebe before and after she came West from Massachusetts. Wells’ work is an exposition of the pioneer wife’s existence after she moved to Walnut Creek in 1865 as described in family letters, but poignantly reconstructed by Wells from the 21st Century. It’s a beautiful book from Crockett, California’s Sugartown Publishing, not light, but profoundly moving in a “real-life” way. “Delia,” she has one character say, “your pride in teaching/ gives you money and power/ to change your life.” True then as now!
Not exactly “mail-order brides,” the three sisters were highly sought after helpmeets, courted by dozens of suitors. The dangers, joys and losses of their young wife-and-motherhood and maturation and in her great-uncle’s grim Civil War history appear materially in Wells’ own life as she holds her grand-nephews, Nathaniel and Damon; and then as she recites “the names of my dead in the last year.” It is all fabric of the same cloth as she bluntly observes:
“I want to accept death
though I do not accept death.
I want to be courageous
though I am often fearful.”
It makes me want to read some of her eleven other poetry books and prose, including I Have Berkeley and The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon, co-edited with Marsha Hudson, Bridget Connelly, Doris Earnshaw and Olivia Eielson.

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