 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is a Commission's weekly online event. Yes, you can call us a webinar. It's okay, we won't be offended. Or we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but they are all recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can go to our website, which I will show at the end of the show, and look at all of our recordings for all our sessions going back to when we first started in January 2009. We do all sorts of things here, presentations, interviews, excuse me, many training sessions. Basically, if it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We are not very picky. And this morning, we bring in guest speakers sometimes, and we have Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes. This morning, we have a mixture of people here. This morning, we're going to be talking about Oak Pioneers by Willa Cather, the 2013 One Book, One Nebraska choice. And I'm just going to hand over to Mary Jo Ryan here from the Library Commission, and she's going to introduce everything and get us going for this morning. Thanks, Krista. As you know, I'm Mary Jo Ryan, and I have had the pleasure over the past few years of working with One Book, One Nebraska. We've read some amazing books, and many of you across the state are reading these books with your book groups or with your classrooms, and we really appreciate your support and how much fun you've had doing this, too. I'd like to have our guest today just introduce himself. Rob, would you start? Good morning, Rob Wagner, Nebraska Library Commission. Hi, I'm Andy Jewel, and I'm a guest here today. I am an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Cather Scholar and the co-editor of the Selected Letters of Willa Cather. And the Selected Letters of Willa Cather has been getting a lot of buzz, Andy. It has. I've been very pleased about the buzz. Yeah, many times. It's been really fun. I'm Molly Fisher, and I'm retired, and I'm on the Nebraska Center for the Book Board, and I'm also a state library commissioner. Thanks, Molly. I would just like to maybe introduce this session by just giving you a little orientation to some of the resources that are available for all of you that are doing O-Pioneers, one book on Nebraska activities, and then I think Molly and Rob would like to have a little discussion with Andy about the book O-Pioneers, but also about the book that he's co-edited about Willa Cather's letters. And I just wanted to mention before I forget that Andy is available through the Humanities Nebraska Speakers Bureau, which is a fabulous resource to libraries across the state to have Andy come out and talk to your groups after they've read the book and do programs. So that's just another thing to remember. If you want more details on that, that's on this website, which you're looking at right now. This is the One Book One Nebraska official O-Pioneers website. It's got information about the book, of course, about Willa Cather. It's got some information here about how to get involved, which I think is pretty interesting, and I've heard from some of you that it's been useful to you. We have a resource guide. We have information about the Facebook community. We have information about how to get the book. You can get a set of books, a book club kit for your whole reading group and maybe your whole classroom. I don't know, it depends on how big your classroom is, but we do have many copies of the book in our kits. And this resource kit can be very useful. You get a copy of the book, you get discussion questions, you get evaluation materials, a list of links. It's a very useful thing if you've got a group of people wanting to read the book and have fun reading it together. My book book, by the way, just read this book. It was a really good book for discussion. I guarantee you there will be lots of discussion. We also have information that you can use to promote the fact that you're doing this at your library. But one thing that I wanted to mention is somewhere in here we have information about how to work with Humanities of Nebraska to get Andy to come out and do a program. And as you can see, some people are doing this. There's a bunch of programs already scheduled. So that just gets you a little bit of an idea what's available on this website. And then I want to go to the next one, which is, this is the website put together especially for this year by the Willa Catter Foundation because this is the 100th anniversary of O-Pioneers. It was published in September of 1913. I was going to say that can't be right, but it was September of 1913. And the Willa Catter Foundation has got a lot of good resources on here. The other thing I wanted to mention is that if you're on Facebook, we do have a Facebook page just for One Book One Nebraska. And there's been a lot of sharing on this page. This is about the book discussion we're having, of course. And other book discussions across the state. So this is just another resource, another way to keep up on what's going on with One Book One Nebraska. So I can move on here. Do I want to move on to Andy's PowerPoint? There she is. Isn't she adorable? I think she is. Ron Molly, do you have any questions or ideas for Andy to get started thinking about with us about, not just about O-Pioneers, but about his book that he has co-edited on the Letters of Willa Catter? Well, I have one right away. Following publication of the book reading before, you've been interviewed. You've been traveling all over. How's that gone? It's been great. And I've had an attitude all along that I would enjoy whatever happened. And much more has happened, frankly, than I anticipated. And so the risk of being a little obnoxious, I'll tell some people what has happened. So the book came out this spring, and we were very pleased and very surprised to have a lot of national press on it. And the New York Times front page did a new story on it. And the front page of the New York Times book review had a positive review. Both of those are great. More in the addition, an NPR interviewed me. The Chronicle of Higher Ed did a very nice piece on it. And many other reviews and things. And we've been able, my co-editor, Jan Estout, and I have been able to go to New York. And I've been to Pittsburgh and Denver and Seattle and there's Southwest coming up. And so it's been wonderful. That's in addition to all the maybe the most satisfying events which have been here in Nebraska. You've had some celebrations here that have been wonderful. So I've enjoyed it. Well, I don't know if I want to... I guess related to that, I would ask, did the letters inform you about old pioneers? Yes, and a lot of ways they did. And I think the letters book is in some ways caters life story in her own words. And one of the really important moments of her life is the writing and publication of old pioneers. And just to sort of recap for people, she had been working as a journalist for a number of years before she became a professional novelist. And by a decade in Pittsburgh and then quite a few years in New York, she worked as a magazine and newspaper editor and writer and in New York she was the managing editor of McClure's magazine. Quite a wonderful job. But it was a kind of job that took a lot of her energy, a lot of her time, a lot of her attention, and the whole time she really wanted to be a professional writer. And she had been publishing stories. She had published a small book of poetry and a book of short fiction. But she hadn't been a novelist yet and she wanted to be. In 1912 she published her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. And that's probably the least read cabin novel, in part because it is the least like-cathered. It's a fairly conventional love triangle set in Boston in London with some heavy-handed symbolism. And she said later that, well, I'll just read what she said because it's too good to not quote it precisely. I can find it. She said it was a kind of novel that she would rather leave behind her. That it felt like... She said, in old pioneers there was no arranging or inventing everything was spontaneous and took its own place right or wrong. It was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way and a fine morning when you felt like riding. The other, or Alexander's Bridge, was like riding in a park with someone not altogether congenial to whom you had to be talking all the time. Which I love. So she had had... The old pioneers would publish the next year was her first big success. And to get back to your question, what do the letters tell us about this? Well, it documents that year. And what you really feel in it is not a single moment where it was an aha moment, this gradual growth and confidence and this excitement and this decision that, I think, to her felt like a rather risky one to ride about in Nebraska and to make her own life and the environment she knew, the subject of her fiction, rather than London and Boston and all those more conventional places for knuckles. She decided to do that. And during that time, she had taken a leave of absence from McClure's magazine. She had went to the Southwest and was amazed by what she was experiencing in the Southwest. And she came back from that trip and wrote Earl Boss, SS McClure, I feel as if my brain has been washed and ironed and is ready for a new life. And I think that's a great line to get into the confidence that led her to put together O-Pioneers. And the letters also have many interactions, especially with her friend Elizabeth Sheppley Sargent or Elsie Sargent, about the act of writing that book. And during Christmas of 1912, she said she's been working hard. And I'm sorry for those of you who haven't read the book, as this might spoil something about the ending, but I hope you haven't read it. She says she's been working hard on the murders in her story. She said I've been three mortal days of killing them. And her sense of humor about it is really wonderful. And then she sends the proofs before the book was published, she had it in proof form as it was being designed and she could read it and edit it. She sent that to France to her friend Elsie who was there and who Elsie shared with her friends. And they gave her some encouragement and she said thank you so much. She said I was in the trough of the wave about it. But now I began to, she felt poorly, but she's now began to get my confidence up again that you say it's good. So it's one of the most, one of the things that would psychologize her that she took to writing that book is document quite well of her letters. Because she was telling her friend Elsie all about it and Elsie saved the letters. Yeah, Elsie. Well, and maybe you would want to share a little bit about the controversy around sharing these letters in France. Yes, and so Cather died 66 years ago and it's, as a woman about author for a stature, it's very unusual that no letters of hers have been published before. And the reason for that is because she forbid the publication of them in her will. She says she didn't want them published at all. And that was a request that was respected and honored for many, many decades and rightfully so. But she also left a clause in her will that said she left it to the sole and uncontrolled discretion of her executor and trustee to decide finally what to do. And with the death of her nephew Charles in 2011, the original trust that she established in the will, and forgive me for those who might know more legally about these things than I do. I'm telling what the lawyers have told me so this is what I understand. But the trust has originally established in her will and the kind of way the parameters of that trust expired. And though her stuff is still protected by copyrights, the new executors who are the trust, which is a partnership between the University of Nebraska Foundation and the Willa Cather Foundation and some of Cather's family all agreed that they're no longer restricted by that request and that their job is to best be the best stewards of Cather's legacy in her works as possible. And to them that meant making the letters available to stimulate interest in Cather. But also, I think as educational institutions they thought the scholarship and readers generally need to know about these wonderful letters. 3,000 of Cather's letters have survived. This book has 566 in it. It's a selection of letters that is a book designed to be readable by anybody. It's not designed solely for specialists by any means. We hope specialists can feel confident about using it and that it's suitable for scholars. But really Janice and I put together wanted to be a book people could sit down and read and enjoy as the story of Cather's life in her own words. And for those who have long time been readers of Cather it'll be a wonderful revelation I think about who this woman is. We have this sort of stereotype of her people looking at this little girl like maybe I will move on to other pictures of her. There's a lot of pictures of her and she's young. I love that one. You just went past the bicycles. How cool is that? This picture I fit with what I was just about to say. We have this stereotype of her of this grouchy old lady who was sort of a hermit who didn't have anything to do with anybody who burned all of her letters. That kind of story as we repeated in print biographies and documentary films. But when you read the letters it's hard for me to believe that anyone could see her that way anymore because she's very vivacious, she's very funny she has many diverse loving relationships that lasted into her life. She's active in the world. It's true that in the last decade of her life that was hard. She had a difficult older age that some of the decisions she made like banning the publication of her letters were made in those days and those decisions have colored how people see her generally but I think this picture here of Kather with her brother and a close friend and red-bowed, Ryan a bike wearing a tie looking kind of independent and smug. I smugged it out the right word but she was a fascinating woman and a strong-minded woman and an open-hearted person and it's a wonderful personality to be around in the letters I find. So I really feel to go back to the original question about the controversy, I really feel that that it was right to honor her wishes for many, many years while all those she wrote about survived but now they're all gone and we don't know for sure why she banned the publication of her letters. It's true. She was interested in her works being the way she was represented to the public for sure and her mature works and so she didn't ban the re-publication and she couldn't probably have the re-publication of her early short-fiction or journalism but she certainly didn't want people to know about that either. She wanted people to know her as the mature writer who from like O-Pioneers on basically was so as after she was 40 when O-Pioneers came out, not 40 so she didn't want people to get into her personal life but now whatever those concerns were I think are no longer relevant in the way they were in her own time because she is now part of our shared cultural history and in a very simple way I think her letters are so good and she has so much to offer us in them that publishing them now enriches the world a little bit it gets people access to these texts and to me that makes it absolutely worth it and overwhelms any misgivings that I might have. I was going to say too that the letters that she wrote to her family and at the end of her life after her brother who died, I just found them so moving and she wrote to Hermesis and they're just full of love and heart and they're absolutely beautiful I think and I don't think you have seen that so much from her but I mean what it led me to think about is how many of us write to our family members I think that one lesson I have from that book, I have a friend who has three daughters in college and he writes to them almost at least once a week and they have stacks of his letters but what do we have today that will in any way tell that kind of story to commit what you have Yeah, you know that a lot of people have asked me about in this age of email and texts there are relationships that we communicate through writing in those kind of ways is there any way to have anything like this for future writers and part of it is well know this specific thing these kinds of writing was a product of its time and letter writing but I also feel like that someday it might not seem crazy to have a book of people's emails to one another that might exist and it might seem natural because that was the technology of our time, you know so it's about the content not the container people may be writing these same types of letters and heartfelt things but in an email to their daughter or to their son or to their grandmother and hopefully those are being saved somewhere and not just whether or not those survive or if they just haven't lived long enough to know what is going to survive and what isn't I mean there's of course lots of dangerous paper things surviving and many of Kather's letters we can say pretty confidently haven't survived because we don't have them now if they have survived we don't know where they are likewise we don't know what will survive from our current tech culture but you know we've captured Facebook threads for example that are so revealing and you know it's just such a neat thing to see these people go back and forth and learn and discuss things and so we capture those sometimes when we see them and I know they'll be there around or not but they're captured now yeah well that's good I mean that's one of the I think this is happening with lots of libraries across the world is realizing that our culture now communicates and determines and lets figure out ways to save that for the future yeah Has the book in the publicity led to any other letters coming forward? In little bits here and there I know big dramatic revelations yeah but I have been encouraged that a few people I won't go into details but have contact with me and have acknowledged they are aware of some letters and they have one or two and that's great and I applaud those people for starting to bring these things to light and that's frankly one thing we hoped would happen was that after this book was published people would realize the value of maybe something they have they didn't realize was of interest to others necessarily you know that's true or one thing that often happens some big repositories are actually just unprocessed collections and bigger repositories and libraries and they can still be discovered by the librarians themselves one time I was writing to Dartmouth University and asking about what turned out to be a fairly minor Catholic letter they had there but the archivist wrote back and said oh and we recently found we have two letters from Catholic to Robert Frost would you be interested in seeing those and I said oh yes thank you those would be great that's a case where those had probably been there for a while but for very understandable reasons and I work in a library I understand this that you get so much material it can't all be understood and catalogued and processed immediately so I'm hoping for multiple ways through people's attics or through libraries themselves that more things would come to light well one thing I noticed about just reading this in fact I'm just overwhelmed how you could even narrow the thousand down to this many is you categorize them pretty much by the chronological life of Cather but you do such a good job of giving us little signals about this happened during such and such that really was very helpful I thought good and that's something we really wanted to do we knew that to tell a kind of narrative of her life there aren't letters that give every little detail so you have to fill it in so we've tried to arrange it at the beginning of each of the 12 chapters of 12 sections in between letters we have some of our own words that kind of tell people what's going on in her life when who these people are that she's talking about inside the text of letters sometimes we'll have little bracketed identifications so you know if she mentions West Virginia Cather you know who lived in the West and posted her nice Mary Virginia all who lived in red cloud you know so just things that you wouldn't know as a casual reader you can explain to you and I've said before that our goal could be there's two things we want to accomplish that as a reader reads this book that they're struck and what they experience is little Cather's voice and they're not interrupted all the time editorial voice and sort of interrupting Cather at the same time I don't want people to feel confused so if we can get that balance right where we have enough editorial information so people feel comfortable and like they know what's happening and not so much that it interrupts that's what we really went for you do a big job well one of the things that struck me is I saw an exhibit at the Nebraska State Historical Society last year of Cather's fashion and it wasn't just her clothes it was also accessories and a lot of that I mean she was quite a fashionista yes especially you know she and it's a combination I love that, isn't that great I'll tell you about that picture in a second but it was a fashionista she had this fashion sense that it was pretty simple one of the things she's most well known is like the midi blouse that sort of looks like a sailor shirt little tie she's very famously photographed in that and I loved that same display they showed that that was an amber crombie and fit which I didn't know had been around so long that she just bought it a story I mean it was a nice thing but she like plain sensible clothing but then she would indulge herself with some for it the occasional for a collar and a coat or a lovely green jacket which is a beautiful jacket that they have in red clouds it's all embroidered it looks sort of south-western although I believe the story is that her publisher Blanche Knopf, Alfred Knopf's wife who was a partner in the publishing house bought it for her in France so it's really quite nice so she did love nice clothing in this picture let me tell you one thing that's kind of fun this has been in many people it's one of their favorite new pictures of Cather and it's been her first trip to Europe in 1902 she lived in Pittsburgh then she went with her friend Isabel McClam it was a really important moment in Cather's life and this great picture is a tiny little picture on the front of a scrapbook that came to the University of Nebraska Lincoln libraries about a decade ago through Cather's family Helen Cather Southwick Cather's niece who donated it and it was a scrapbook that I believe looking at the evidence that probably either she made or her friend Isabel on a trip with her maid and gave to her and it's full of photographs this candid snapshot from the trip and postcards and Cather wrote articles for the Nebraska State Journal Watches on this trip and Melvin are going to telegraph them back or meld them back to Lincoln where they're published and those articles are cut out and wasted in the scrapbook so it's a wonderful document of Cather's life wow it's such a great look on her face and a great hat we encourage anybody out there who'd like to type in a question about anything relating to O-Pioneers or the letters book to go ahead and do so I thought it might be fun to read a couple of letters that have to do with O-Pioneers some of the things I was referencing earlier to give you a sense of that time of her life where so many things happened and I'll just read a few bits here and if there's a question that comes up feel free to just speak up or do it I love that hat I love her hats she's a woman of many wonderful hats that's true that she wrote to her friend Elsie Sargent mentioned earlier and this is when she just arrived she just took that leave of absence from the Clarice magazine and this is the month that would see the birth of O-Pioneers as a novel and you can see in this first letter I think something about her hesitancy writing about Nebraska she says dear Elsie, I've been tramping about the west for two weeks now and have just reached my mail which is all forwarded to Winslow that's in Arizona that paralyzes me a little when I'm away from it, I remember only the tang on the tongue but when I come back I always feel a little the fright I felt when I was a child I always feel afraid of losing something I don't at least know what it is it's real enough to make a tightness in my chest even now and when I was little it was even stronger I can never entirely let myself go with the current I always fight it just a little just as people who can't swim fight it when they are dropped into water feeling that there are so many miles wait until you travel them between you and anything and partly the feeling of the everlasting wind make you contented and put you to sleep I used to always be sure that I'd never get out that I would die in a cornfield now I know I will get out again but I still get a tax of fright I wish I didn't I somehow feel that if one were really a fit person to write about a country I wouldn't feel that Elsie must have got over that a little bit and this is this is also a part of the letter I mentioned before to her boss who is now killing her old boss SS McClure the founder of McClure's magazine and she wrote this from Red Cloud Nebraska in June of 1912 after she had come back from her spring in the Arizona area she said I have not written a line since I left New York but I have such a head full of stories that I dream about them at night I've written and driven hundreds of miles you would not know me I'm so dark skinned and good-humored oh please forget how cranky I used to be when I was tired I can't bear to have you remember me like that it all seems so foolish now such an adieu about nothing I'm never gonna get fussy like that again I've never been so happy since I was a youngster as I have been this summer back in my own country with my own people those weeks off in the desert with my big handsome brother six feet four he is and there's a wild pals they never forget they took all the kinks and crumples out I feel as if my mind had been freshly washed and ironed and were ready for a new life I feel somehow confident feel as if I'd got my second win it would never torture myself about little things like the art department again that's in the magazine I feel like that's so important that what it really took Cather to produce O-Pioneers and now look back and see as a really classic and important statement in literature and about this area of the world too is that confidence that's so important and that's not uncommon with writers I remember once seen when John Steinbeck was writing Grapes with Wrath he had been struggling with other works but then he started writing that and he wrote in his journal I've got my confidence on and I love that phrase it's a temporary feeling but it wasn't necessary to get the project off the ground to have the confidence to do it okay I was going to see something else that I wanted to share with you okay so this is after O-Pioneers has been written and her friend Elsie has read it and she's responding to it and for those of you who have read it you'll know that well maybe more than some Cather books there's a kind of book that has a typical kind of plot and there's lots of little episodes that happen it's sort of a cyclical plot in some ways kind of following the weather and there is some melodrama with the murders and that kind of thing but it also has a different sort of tone then you might think of the typical 19th century plot where someone starts out as a child grows up and gets married makes a fortune and that's the end or the tragic version of that story that's not what O-Pioneers is like and here she's kind of I think referring to that quality of the novel in this April 1913 to her friend Elsie Sargent she says, my dear Elsie I feel such a sense of relief that you do like it you put your finger exactly on a weak spot when you say that the skeleton does not stand out enough but the country itself has no skeleton no rocks or ridges it's a fluid black soil that runs through your fingers composed not by the decay of big vegetation but of the light ashes of grass it's all soft and somehow that influences the mood in which one writes of it and so the very structure of the story I would like to do one with nice sharp lines like the mountains you now have behind you that I would Mr. Greenslitz the publisher at Houghton-Nissan rose to the occasion like a gentleman he was delightfully enthusiastic about the story and they're rushing it into type without delay he is very strong for Marie one of the characters in the book like the other gentleman I believe Frank satisfies me more than any of the people in it just now I'm in a trough with a wave about it having got it through in a ring for I can be honest with myself and admit that I really want to do a very different sort of thing goodbye W I think that letter gets a couple of revelations one is how all the gentlemen like you Marie that's no big surprise she's a very infectious character but that she feels frankest and most satisfying he's often a least like character in the book and so you might ask yourself satisfying in what way in some ways I think she means as a sort of creator that he feels right to her yeah it feels real to her you know and there are things about Frank that bother a lot of people about this novel and particularly the very end where Alexandra has that unusual to many readers reaction to Frank's killing of Emma Marie and that she wants to help him she wants to forgive him she feels somehow responsible all those things have perplexed a lot of readers and I think there are many different ways to read it and I'm not going to offer one answer I think different readers will have different conclusions about it but it is different and then she says she wants to something very different and those who've read her next novel, Song of the Lark will know it is quite different in a way it's the most like that 19th century plot I told you about but the young person who grows up and becomes successful but it's that story catarized you know it's more interesting than that in a lot of ways I wanted to ask a question about Alexandra because I grew up on a farm and I think never once did I consider being a farmer of course that's different from what a little bit from what Alexandra did but she's such a strong character and I think she really reflects on her brothers and she reflects on all the man in the novel and I wondered I don't know I can't remember anything I read in the letters but how did Cather get to Alexandra because she really is I mean she's forgiving, she's loving she loves the land she's smart as heck she's much better than the man she's really kind of the hero of us oh yes and she is I would say she's a brilliant woman in a lot of ways but brilliant for something specific like being a farmer I think it's interesting businesswoman the book kind of points out how she has a blindness about her too she doesn't see Emil and Marie's relationship coming so she doesn't understand everything about people which is actually fascinating about her character because she isn't just an infallible heroine there's something else about her and she waits forever for the love of her life so she isn't I mean that character I think is probably the most compelling thing about O'Pine but it's such a distinctive character she's undeniably a successful businesswoman that's pretty unusual in 1913 and within her own world she overcomes prejudices about her gender I think among some of the neighbors and her brothers and yet she seems to do so hardly even acknowledging them it doesn't seem to bother her she is so strong not unlike Heather herself Heather was a woman who was professional rose very high in journalism maybe the most powerful woman in journalism before she became a novelist then she was an independent novelist to do that took some grit and I think she liked other people have that and she gave that to her character there's no single prototype discovered to who Alexandra who's inspired the character of Alexandra the way there have been for many of Heather's later books there have been people in history who have been pointed to as inspiring Heather to write those characters so maybe there is a person that this hasn't been discovered yet who inspired Alexandra or maybe in a way she's a kind of a vision of a kind of person that Heather admired and saw around her I think she feels real to me I know that we have these ideas of 19th century farms being dominated by men there are many examples of women who filed homestead claims of women who were the ones running the places and that story hadn't been told very much before O'Pioneers so maybe she was in a way telling that story and I think it was just more interesting from a woman's perspective and as an earlier I saw letters later on that suggest too that she felt and this is something that she would soon abandon but as a woman novelist she felt early that she sort of had to write from a woman's perspective and my Antenna only a few years later she writes the whole story from a male's perspective and the first person narrator is Jim Burden the male and that she recognized you can tell from the letters that that was a risk she was taking but as now we look back and see my Antenna is maybe one of the great classics of our literature that it paid off to take that risk yeah do we have questions from no one? if anyone on the line does have any questions or comments or your thoughts on why she wrote some of these things or who some of these characters maybe were type them into your questions section and you know leave a microphone and I can unmute you and you can join us in the conversation so that's Alexandra huh from the publisher's point yeah it's Clarence Underwood later when it was first published Cally referred to her friend she said I must tell you about the sweet who posed for the frontispiece and so she was aware of somehow who this woman was who was the model for this but later only a few years later she told her publisher can we please take out this incongruous picture because it does it really I think we can a lot of us who readers of the book will say that isn't like Alexandra at all looks like a very prettified Gibson girl you know from the era but it's an interesting picture and of course you know having some kind of illustration was seen as good for marketing and you know and that's why it's here it might be worth pointing out another important thing that Heather dedicated this book to the writer Sarah Horne-Jewitt and those of you who have read Sarah Horne-Jewitt I will remember her because she's wonderful I hope and you'll you'll appreciate the connections between Heather's writing and Jewitt Jewitt was a 19th century writer she was from Maine and she wrote about her world in Maine all towns and the seasides her novel The Country of the Pointed Furs is a wonderful book I've taught it and I love it very much and in fact Heather said in the essay once that the three books that she thought have a very long life in American literature was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and Jewitt's The Country of the Pointed Furs and it is a really wonderful book and she dedicated to as you can see to the memory of Sarah Horne-Jewitt and the delicate work there is the perfection that endures and I thought if we have a moment here unless someone has a question I would share a little bit from a really remarkable letter certainly one of the favorite letters in the book that Heather wrote to Jewitt and they became friends in the last few months of Jewitt's life Jewitt they only about 16 months they know each other but in those were important time his Heather found this connection with another woman writer who gave her some really wonderful advice and was able to be a person Heather could tell certain things too and so there's a very long letter I won't read all of it because it's so long but there's a letter from 1908 when Heather was working at the magazine as she wrote to Jewitt that really lays bare I think some of the struggles that she was having and both being successful at the magazine but really wanting to be a novelist really having this other ambition for her life and I'll just read a little bit of this my dear dear Miss Jewitt such a kind and earnest and friendly letter as you sent me I've read it over many times I've been in deep perplexity these last few years in troubles that concern only one's habits of mind are such personal things they're hard to talk about you see I was not made to have to do with affairs what Mr. McClare calls men in measures if I get on in that kind of work this by looking at it with the sort of energy most people have to exert only on rare occasions consequently I live just about as much during the day as a trapeze performer does when he is on the bars it's catch the right bar the right minute or into the net you go I feel all the time so dispossessed and bereft of myself my mind is off doing trapeze work all day long and only comes back to me when it is dog tired and wants to creep into my body and sleep Mr. McClare tells me he does not think I'll ever be able to do much writing stories I'm a good executive I better let it go at that I sometimes indeed I very often think that he is right if I've been going forward at all in the last five years it has been progress of the head but not of the hand at 34 went off to have some sureness in their pinpoint in some facility in turning out a story in other matters things about the office I can usually do what I set out to do and I can learn by experience but when it comes to writing I'm a newborn baby every time always come into it naked and shivery and without any bones I never learn anything about it at all I sometimes wonder whether one can possibly be meant to do the thing which they are more blind and blundering at than anything else in the world but the question of work aside what has the right to live and reflect and feel a little when I was teaching I did I learned more or less all the time but now I have the feeling of standing still except for a certain kind of facility in getting the sort of material Mr. McClure wants it's stiff mental exercise but it's about as much food to live by as elaborate mental arithmetic would be of course there are interesting people and interesting things in the day's work but it felt all like going around the world in a railway train and never getting off to see anything closer now the kind of life that makes one feel empty and shallow and superficial and it's hard to read and dread the stink it can't be good for one can it it can't be the kind of life on was meant to live I do think that kind of excitement does to my brain exactly what I have seen alcohol do men's it seems to spread one's brain cells apart so they don't touch everything leaks out as the power does in a broken circuit so whether or not the chief is right about my never doing much writing I think one's immortal soul is to be considered a little he thrives on this perpetual debauch there's more of it will make me a fat, sour ill-tempered lady and plussy worst of all and assertive and all people who do feats on the flying trapeze and never think are as cocky as terriers after rats you know of all these things and many others I long to talk with you devotedly oh that is a great letter it is so great that's a good insight there to how all of that feels yeah I I love that letter the metaphor is alone and I think make it worth adding to the Canada American literature I think it's great frankly when reading letters like that and archives and thinking people need to see this people need to know this though I appreciate that some people have felt uncertain about publishing cabinet letters when she said she didn't want them published I don't feel worried about that I feel like the living gets so much out of them that that justifies it have you heard directly from people that oh yes I've got a little hate mail and the most common place to hear from people are the anonymous comments on media sites that have covered in articles then people are protected by the anonymity of the internet page that tend to say all sorts of things of course and there are a lot of people one of my favorites though and I will say is there is somebody who I don't even know who the person is but it's the same username or whatever who made their displeasure known a few times but then when one of the articles quoted from the letters they said well I don't like it but I don't like that you publish these letters but I do really like that quote you know that's right so and I think that it is true that there's been a little resistance but the support and the understanding has far outnumbered the resistance in my experience at least those are who is talking to me about it I think in understanding how it changed with who is in charge of her will and everything I think a lot of the things I've read that horrible headline but oh my god against your will, against your will well that's not the full story that's just a little snippet blurb that's not really understanding what actually happened in that it's actually now I mean that's right you know one line of like there was a scholar who did this article shortly after Cather died on literary wills and literary executives and he had read Cather's will as in the early 50s and he said Miss Cather understood that the future must make its own decisions she would just put the future off as long as possible and I think, yeah we've lived until then we're in the future we do have one question from the audience Susie Dunn from our Southeast Community College here in Nebraska she says, I know the author Rose Wilder Lane was about 13 years younger but did Cather and Lane ever interact or meet I think of both of them as trailblazers and independent women I have wondered that myself before and I don't know much about Rose Wilder Lane but I know she is the daughter of Laura Engels Wilder and see she likely helped really construct those books, those Wilder books she also did many other things and was a very important woman in her own right I have looked in vain for connection between them and hoping that there would be one I have never found a connection there was once a mention of a Miss Wilder that got me excited but I found it was Thornton Wilder's sister it wasn't Rose Wilder Lane who she was talking about so no I don't know of any connection between them there are still things left to discover of course but in the evidence so far there hasn't been anything another person who many might be interested to know the connection between Cather is Mari Sandos and Cather many people have asked about that there's only one minor connection between them that I can see Sandos in the early 30s wrote Cather a fan letter for Shadows in the Rock and Cather responded with a thank you and that's about all and that's in the Sandos papers I haven't seen any other connection or any time they ever met or even that Cather was aware of her works that started coming out at the end of Cather's life so I would like to find out more about that it seems like they probably could have made a connection later on one of the things that I'm interested in is just the mechanics of putting together a book like this I know you and your co-editor worked on this for many years yes so in a lot of ways that Janis Stout when she started off the important work of collecting all the transcriptions of letters many many years ago before I was she started with that I think and was doing it for another project she was writing a cultural biography of Cather and just thought she'd to go into the archives and find these things and she found a bunch of letters and in 2002 when the was still very much in effect put out a book called a calendar of the letters and that calendar are basically a summary of a very brief thumbnail sketch of what's in the letters and just a record of where they are and that's a very useful sort of reference book. When I started my job at the University of Libraries in 2004 one of the first thing they wanted to do was take some of our new collections that come in and expand that calendar of letters digitally and so Janis and I started working on a digital edition with more letters and then begins a few years of working on letters together until I'll get to your question this is a long story until she asked me very generously about 2007 or so, 2008 maybe that she said if you will agree to try to do a book of letters whether I'm living or not I'll give you all of my transcriptions and I'll be the co-editor of that book because she did a ton of work that she was feared would get lost and I said well Janis I would love to do that project I certainly hope that we can do it while you're still here and we can do it together and frankly that's what happened we got to do it together so we spent a few years doing the preparation work and we saw the likelihood that the executive shift would change and then we are all set so once we knew we had permission, we also had a publishing contract and I had a six month faculty development research leave to work on it and we spent a couple of years just putting it together in the nuts and bolts way wow and it's been a real pleasure to work with Janis it was great and I just saw her last weekend and I'll see her in a couple of weeks and so it's funny we did the whole work on the book via email pretty much she was in Texas and I was in Lincoln and we were able to do it all that way and we saw each other just before we just started that real intensive work in 2011 and then down the day of publication this is the next time we saw each other in person though we exchange emails several times a day in most days and now I've had a wonderful chance one of the greatest things about this book coming out and the attention is we've got to see each other a lot more and it's no one out of families a little bit and that's been great we can get the band together now in two or three that's right exactly oh that's great well it must have really been I mean to select from so many others I guess yeah I should answer that part of the question yes so that was hard what we did is we read all the letters all we could find in order in chronological order more or less to try to figure out what a selection the best section represent all the different sides of a personality all the different relationships the different qualities of her work her comments on her creative work etc and then we made independently selections and then kept having to revise those selections and sometimes adding things in but most of the time taking things out because we had a very helpful but in a way it's a painful word limit you know the publisher said you can't make the book too big it'll be too expensive and no one will ever buy it right and it won't be very good it won't be a very good book if it's too big so this is a generous size book I think it's 700 pages or so but we kept having to narrow down and I think that process was a very helpful one and we could really think about what was crucial to keep in there and what would be important in order to represent the gather and also ones that we just felt as editors were best letters the most heartfelt, the most articulate funniest there are some letters in there and they're only because we think they're funny I doubt that and we rarely disagreed a couple of times we had different perspectives but we're able to resolve those quite easily that's my version of it anybody else have any questions almost at the end of our hour here anybody have any questions, comments thoughts you want to share or Andy if you'd like to share any other slides well one thing here's a picture of Janice I want you to be able to see her and you can also see in that picture Canada's Pinmanship and I'll show you a little more one of the challenges of making this book was transcribing the originals and a pinmanship that is very challenging for those not used to looking at it it gets less challenging when you spend more time with it as you would expect we really felt at the beginning because of her lack of care over making each letter in a word that we would probably have many cases in the book with transcriptions we couldn't resolve we didn't know what the letter said and I was very pleased at the end to sort of look and realize only a couple of those remained a couple of our names or something like that where we just couldn't be 100% confident but we always had a reading unless there's one or two cases where a piece of a letter was missing otherwise we had a guess and so we're able to make pretty clean transcriptions and so it should be one should be able to read through her letters without being interrupted by sloppiness that's one of the things we wanted although we did try to retain her original spelling and for those who read it when you start the book you'll think oh my goodness this woman couldn't spell at all because the early letters when she was 14 15 16 she was a terrible speller just to make it up that she goes along apparently and we did leave that as it was but she in college it looked like she learned to spell and the rest of her life that wasn't such a problem these are some letters from the University of Nebraska Lincoln archives a really wonderful collection most of these are from is the Roscoe and made a Catholic collection of the letters to her brother Roscoe and his family and that only came to lie a few years ago thanks to the wonderful generosity of the Catholic family who had it and it was one of the great days of my working life when they walked in we knew they were coming but they walked in with bags full of letters and we opened them up and just 400 new letters from Catholic there and at that point we got 2,000 that existed so 400 was a significant increase and they're wonderful letters and at the end of the book we did not make any decisions on what to include based upon what repository owned them we didn't want to have a... do we think about that really just about the content but at the end I needed to go and check every transcription against the originals and each where the repository was the table that showed where everything was and I looked at what repository we picked from the most and it was UNL which wasn't surprising because it had the biggest collection but in what collection it was the Roscoe made a Catholic collection and that also wasn't too surprising to me because those letters are so remarkable I mean they're really wonderful and heartfelt letters to her brother and are those digitized in the Willow-Cather archives available the letters are not yet we got permission to do this book we have an ambition of doing something more with the letters even broader access to the letters in the future like maybe an exhibit or something on the archives exhibit or even access I mean this is still the earliest of dream stages in some way well we'll be on that but after a few years we'll have the permission I believe to be able to put up all of Cather's letters online that would be something we'd like to do that would be an enormous amount of work which is what we want to so we have to work out how that's going to happen but we have an agreement with Cather Trust and with the publisher that we won't do that immediately we'll let this book be out for a couple of years first great wow that would be a huge project yes oh yes yeah here she is at Mesa Verde yeah always a hat and that's the midi boss I was referring to earlier and that's taken in the field where she pitched a tent and it's probably the tent behind her where she would go and write my antimia in New Hampshire near where she is buried today in Jaffa New Hampshire this picture which is on the cover of the book is one of my favorite pictures of Cather and it's just a tiny little snapshot like two inches by three inches that came in with the Southwick material the same people who donated that from one of the scrapbook and it had to my knowledge I don't think it had been published before except on something I had done for the digital project the Willa Cather Archive which I edit we shared it, Janice and I with the publishers and the designers of the book along with several others and I was so pleased that they picked this for the cover I feel like it's a very nice picture to have on the cover this is one later in life maybe that's the last slide well if there are no other questions from the audience I want to thank you all especially you Andy this has just been a great show we had a great time and this will be archived so if you have friends that were unable to view it live there are more than welcome to check in Christa will be sending out a note with all the information about where to get it yes and if I'm on Humanities Nebraska as a speaker too and I enjoy talking about Cather around the state and so if anyone is interested come to your library or any place else you can find me to Humanities Nebraska Speakers Bureau thank you all okay thank you let's see okay I'm going to drag the microphone this way hey thank you everyone for attending and thank you very much Molly and Andy, Rod and Mary Jo for being here today to ask questions in chat this is very cool I think we have a comment just saying very interesting thanks a lot which I agree definitely so as I just said it's been recorded I've captured all of the websites and URLs and some of the interviews that you mentioned that you did in the Commission's Delicious Accounts those will be available for you when we're done and the PowerPoint with those great photos will be also included as well when we get the recording up so that will wrap it up for today's Encompass Live but I hope you'll join us next week we have our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers normally he does this the last month but he's pumped it up a couple of weeks we're having joining him is Aaron Tay who is the Senior Librarian and East Services Facilitator at the National University of Singapore he will be joining Michael from Singapore I don't know what time it will be there but it won't be 10am it will still be at 10am I haven't done the math on that to talk about using how libraries can work with and use Wikipedia linking from things with Wikipedia out to your library because we know people go there and then using Wikipedia to help enhance what you do at your library so he is going to be joining Michael next week so I hope you'll join us for that Encompass Live is also on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user please do go ahead and go there login and like our page and you'll get announcements of when things are happening when a new session is coming up and recordings are available we'll all be posted on our Facebook page so if you are a big Facebook user definitely go there and like us on Facebook other than that we are wrapped up for today thank you very much everyone for being here this morning and thank everyone for attending and we'll see you next week thank you Chris