Autumn 2026

Welcome. The Tor House Foundation Newsletter is now digital to better serve our supporters and audiences. We hope that readers will appreciate the convenience of a digital platform, as all newsletters will also be archived on our website.

I will be editing this publication and Alan Stacy will be publishing each issue. We welcome suggestions on enhancing our digital platform.

Donors will be recognized in the Winter issue, published in January, since we encourage our supporters to donate in December through Monterey County Gives! which includes a percentage boost in the final tally of donations. Throughout the year, additional donations will be acknowledged in each issue. Remember that membership to the Tor House Foundation includes early notification about events, including the popular concerts, “Not at Home Before Four PM!”

Thank you for your loyal support. We hope to see many of you at the Fall Festival, October 16, 17, 18. Susan Shillinglaw, Trustee

The 2026 Tor House Foundation Fall Festival

October 16 - 18 2026

Our Theme: “Shine, Perishing Republic”

“Shine, Perishing Republic” is a poem Jeffers wrote over one hundred years ago and published in his breakthrough book Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925). Our festival this year will consider the meaning and legacy of this prophetic poem as well as the fraught connection between art and politics. Jeffers himself addressed the issue in “The Poet in a Democracy,” a lecture he presented at the Library of Congress in 1941. What is the role of poetry in public life? What unique responsibilities do poets bear? What did Jeffers see when he looked back at the history of the United States and forward to its future, while living through an ever-fretful present? How does Jeffers speak to us today? What insights, what forewarnings, can be found in Jeffers’s seminal poem?

A distinguished panel of speakers will share their thoughts on these and other questions during the free Saturday seminars at the Woman’s Club in Carmel. For reservations and details on speakers and daily events, visit our Tor House Events page.

Message from the President

Greetings Jeffers enthusiasts,

I am pleased to introduce myself as your new Tor House Foundation President, taking over the position from Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, who retired from his six-year presidency in December 2025. Fran Vardimas also retired as editor of the Newsletter, so this publication will have a new look in an all-digital format. I am grateful to our Trustees for their confidence in me and especially to President Emeritus Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts for his mentorship and support.

Let me introduce myself. After retiring from the U.S. Navy in 1996, I spent the rest of my career in construction management, including executive positions at the University of Washington and UC San Diego. Fully retired since late 2021, my wife Holly and I make our home in Monterey. I first toured Tor House in 2017 and attended the first post-pandemic Spring Garden Party in 2022. I quickly fell in love with Tor House, the story of the Jeffers family, as well as the poetry and philosophy of the “Poet of California.” I have been leading tours as a docent for almost four years, and joined the Board of Trustees in January 2025.

My focus is to continue the Foundation’s three-fold mission: preserving Tor House, Hawk Tower and their collections; promoting the literary and philosophical legacy of Robinson Jeffers; and serving as a cultural resource for our community.

Addressing facility maintenance needs is one of my top priorities. Time and the elements at Carmel Point have taken their toll on the stone masonry, windows and doors – much of which needs our attention, some urgently. The Trustees are working to address these and other short and long-term facility needs. We will need the support of our members and our community as we continue to focus on the preservation and maintenance needs of our National Historic Landmark property.

Tor House continues to be an active and vibrant home to a wide range of impactful activities and events, including numerous poetry readings and a robust youth education program (see 3rd grade poems included in this issue). The Foundation has expanded the tour schedule to include Fridays. We are also expanding our beautiful music programs and much more. You will read elsewhere in this Newsletter about the exciting plans we have for our annual Fall Festival, October 16-18. I hope I will see many of you at these and other events in the coming months.

Eric Smith
eric.smith@torhouse.org

President, Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation
Preservation, Legacy, Community

A Tribute to Newsletter Editor Fran Vardamis

Fran Vardamis has edited the Tor House Foundation Newsletter for over twenty years, yeowoman work to be sure. She took over the position shortly after she and her husband Alex moved to Carmel in 2000. The couple had “been subscribing for years” to the publication, since Alex’s dissertation at Columbia University (under the direction of classicist Gilbert Highet) was a groundbreaking bibliography of secondary works on Jeffers, later published as The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers (1972). Fran, an English major, and Alex, new to the Humanities, read Jeffers together, just as they learned various languages together throughout Alex’s thirty-year career in the foreign service: German, Greek, Norwegian. Fran taught high school English and later translated a Norwegian novel about the Nazi movement in Norway, The Carriage Stone by Sigbjorn Holmebakk, “a depressing novel,” Fran admitted. She has also written mysteries, including Russian Doll and Pity the Children.

This working pair stepped nimbly into the Tor House Foundation sphere—he as president, she as editor.

In the early 2000s, the Foundation office was in the basement of the Sunset Center: “I have an image of going into the basement room, and then President John Hicks (who had taught at the University of Massachusetts for thirty years), then in his 80s, and Jackie Bowmann, editor, cutting and pasting in order to make the Newsletter, then to bring it to the printer, then make a Newsletter out of it. Very few people used a computer at that time.”

Fran did.

With a great sense of purpose and dedication, Fran produced four editions of the Newsletter per year under four presidents of the Foundation: Alex, Vince Huth, Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, and currently Eric Smith. “It’s hard to give up these things,” she sighed, revealing her love of both Jeffers and the Foundation. “I never missed an issue except one” (when she and Alex were traveling around Europe). I made the next one a double issue.”

Of course her biggest challenge, true of any editor, was to convince others to share in the writing and help with submissions. Formatting the Newsletter also took a great deal of time, particularly the Summer issue which included the poetry prize. “I became a master at putting things in columns,” she laughed. “I got in every poem that Elliot submitted.”

Fran is particularly proud of the “News and Notes” column, inspired by Robert Brophy’s Jeffers News, which included everything that happened in the Jeffers world—“Medea performed in Nebraska” for example. “I tried to duplicate that.”

“It’s been fun,” Fran concluded. When she accepted the position, she had never done any editing, and she made a crucial error—someone submitted a “bad poem” and she left off a couple of stanzas. “Boy did he get angry.” After that, she always consulted with authors and came to realize “the pleasure you get out of being an editor . . . a sense of accomplishment.”

We’ll miss that steadily burning light. Thank you, Fran.

— Susan Shillinglaw

A Docent’s Perspective

In each issue of the Newsletter, we’ll invite Tor House docents to comment on what is most inspirational in their own tours. We begin with the docent coordinator, Dan Jenson.

 I have been a fan of Jeffers' poetry for over 35 years, but I didn't know much about Jeffers the man or the poet until I became a Tor House docent 12 years ago. Since then, I've learned that the story of Robin, Una, and Tor House can be seen as an engaging drama of metamorphosis.

Jeffers had various influences, but for me his "muse" was the act of building with granite, so I usually include Jeffers' stonemasonry in my tours, making a point of showing how his way of arranging stones was more than a little like poetry, and that in building poetically, he revolutionized his relationship with words. His approach was to identify specific stones that fit each other in the context of the structure, rather than cutting stones to purpose (as was done with the cottage). The stone-poet collects a courtyard full of stones that will await placement, like jigsaw pieces spilled out from a box — a box with no cover image as a guide. He respects the character of each stone as though it were a word — or an individual — with its own personality. This adheres to Jeffers' theory of art: a focus on the beauty of things (as a stone-fitter) rather than the craftiness of the artist (the stonecutter). In doing so, Jeffers transforms from a "mimic" of the books he was trained on as a boy into a man retrained through the labor of his hands (and mind). In looking at Jeffers this way, we see that as Jeffers made the tower, the tower made Jeffers. — Dan Jenson

Finds from the Archives

Tor House Programs

A Visit to Tor House and Hawk Tower — Through the Eyes of Third Graders: Ms. Hartnett’s and Ms. Gillooly’s Classes

On April 6, 2026, our third-grade classes had the joy of visiting the magical Tor House.  From the moment we slipped through the secret entrance to Hawk Tower, we were transported to another world—one built stone by stone through one man's extraordinary vision and determination.

Read more about the visit in our blogs, including: “At Tor House”, Poems by Ms. Hartnett's and Ms. Gillooly's River School 3rd Grade Classes.

News & Notes

OLLI course on October 13, 10:00-12:00

“Considering Jeffers: Anticipating the Jeffers Fall Festival” will focus “Shine, Perishing Republic” and “The Poet in a Democracy, offered by Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts and Susan Shillinglaw.

Tor House Featured in Preservation Magazine

In February, we were contacted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation about featuring Tor House in an upcoming issue of their quarterly publication Preservation. On March 28, we hosted photographer Leslie Williamson, who captured numerous beautiful images of Tor House, its contents and the gardens.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” by David Ignatius

The author references Jeffers’ “Shine, Perishing Republic” in The Washington Post opinion section, July 2, 2026: “A toast to America at 250, glowing and decaying all at once. The country still dazzles the world. But it no longer leads it the way it did.”

The Robinson Jeffers Association Welcomes Tor House Foundation Members

The Robinson Jeffers Association (RJA) was established some thirty-five years ago as an academic organization to promote scholarly research and critical explorations of the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and to promote the teaching of his work. Several of its projects may be of interest to Tor House Foundation members.

The RJA website includes, for instance, downloadable PDFs of Jeffers’ first four major collections (all now Public Domain) that incorporate the corrected texts developed for The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. These can be accessed here.

The RJA also sponsors the journal Jeffers Studies, which is now an open access publication and can be accessed here. To sign up to receive an email notification of the publication of the next issue, click “Receive Email Notices” in the left panel and enter your email address.

The RJA also sponsors several online programs.

Poem Club is a series of informal, small group discussions, each focused on a different Jeffers’ poem.

RJA Webinars are somewhat more formal presentations where scholars, researchers, and experts explore different aspects of Jeffers’ work.

By the way, you don’t need to be a member of RJA to attend or participate in these sessions via Zoom. The simplest way to be notified of upcoming RJA programs and other RJA resources as they are made available is to subscribe to the free RJA News and Notes distributed using Substack. Simply send an email to rjaadmin@gmail.com with “News & Notes” in the subject. — Tim Hunt, President, Robison Jeffers Association

In Memorium

It is with great sadness that we note the passing on April 22 of long-time Foundation Trustee Christopher Williams.   Christopher's contributions to Tor House are significant.

In 1992, with his wife Susan and special projects docent Pauline Allen, Christopher, an architect by trade and love, produced a complete set of architectural plans for Tor House and its additions and for Hawk Tower.  These plans—which included floor plans and elevations—plus his plot plan were key components in the Foundation's successful nomination as a National Historic Landmark in December 2024.

When the Foundation assumed ownership of the property in 1999 after the death of Lee Jeffers, Christopher addressed some greatly needed improvements.  He designed and oversaw four major architectural projects:  converting the master bedroom on the second floor of the East Wing into a meeting room and office; redesigning the family room to serve as a library and meeting room; converting the laundry room to an archival storage area; and remodeling the entrance hall and bathroom so they are handicap accessible.

When one enters each of these spaces, one senses Christopher's presence:  how much he loved his time working at Tor House.  And that love extended to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, "whom," his wife Susan notes, "he regarded as a kindred spirit."  How many poetry readings the two of them attended at Tor House.

He is survived by his wife, Susan, his four children--Farrell, Seaberry, Ariel, and Theo--and his sister, Lacy, who is also a long-time Foundation Trustee.

Christopher loved and lived for the written word.  His blog site, "The Erratics," has the following explanation of the title:

"... it is only fair to say that it is the ‘normal’ people of our society that are the ones who make that society work. The straight-and-narrow are there to keep life sane and functioning. No order would exist without them. But it is the erratics of this world that give it that spark. They are a light in the dark of monotony and regularity. We need the reliable, and we need the steady, but we also need a sprinkling of erratic to have movement and wonderment in life."

Christopher was one of those reliables who had a sprinkling of erratic.  Well, perhaps a bit more than a sprinkling.  He was a light who created movement and wonderment.

We mourn his passing.  He will be missed.

~Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, President Emeritus, Tor House Foundation

The Last Word, According to Jeffers

Shine Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily
thickening to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth.