Reading, teaching, and translating Steinbeck, the subject of San Jose State University’s first Steinbeck conference since 2019, attracted a reported 30 attendees to the downtown San Jose, California campus, March 22-24, 2023. Many if not most papers and panelists were virtual, and at least one speaker was pre-recorded, giving the gathering a sketchy, spare feel. But a pair of in-person presentations, accessed by jockeying between two concurrent sessions, stimulated conversation and served as a reminder of conferences past to those who remembered 2013 and 2016. Susan Shillnglaw (in photo) profiled Toni Jackson, Ed Ricketts’s live-in partner and a familiar figure around 1930s and ’40s Pacific Grove who, like Steinbeck’s spouse Carol Henning, served as frequent typist and sometimes-editor in the relationship. Carrying on the tradition of research on Steinbeck by readers outside the academy, Daniel Levin—a chemist by training—traced the literary and theological lineage of timshel, the free-will-vs.-fate concept borrowed by Steinbeck from Talmudic Judaism in East of Eden.