 Welcome to Nebraska Union this afternoon for our Nebraska lecture, the first of our lecture series for the 2018 year. My name is Ronnie Green and I have the privilege of serving as the 20th Chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It's my pleasure to welcome you today. This lecture serves as a very important way to share our research and scholarship of the university with our community and stakeholders. And it's a great what we refer to often as town and gown kind of event for us involving partners across the city. The Nebraska Lectures are an interdisciplinary research lecture series designed to bring together our university community with the greater community and beyond to celebrate the intellectual life of our university. These presentations highlight our faculty's excellence in research, scholarship and creative activity across disciplines. This lecture series is sponsored by the University's Research Council in cooperation with the Chancellor's Office, the Office of Research and Economic Development and the OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute better known as ALI. I want to extend our thanks also especially to Humanities Nebraska and we happen to have the Executive Director Chris Sumerich. I think Chris is here by here. Thank you Chris and Humanities Nebraska for being a partner with us as well. Also want to give a warm big red welcome to campus today to members of the Willow-Cather Foundation who traveled from Red Cloud in South Central Nebraska for this lecture. We greatly appreciate your support and interest. So please give a round of applause to all these partners of our lecture. Today's lecture is being streamed live so I also want to thank everyone for joining us online for the opportunity and through Facebook Live. For social media users the hashtag for today's lecture is hashtag NEB lecture, NEB lecture. If you're joining us on any social media channels I encourage you to tell us which Willow-Cather novel made the biggest impact on you and why. A few words about today's format and housekeeping up front before we introduce our lecturer. After the lecture is concluded Dr. Mohammed Dahab from our College of Engineering, Chair of the University's Research Council will moderate a Q&A session with the audience and our lecturer. Afterwards you can please feel free to join us for a reception in the heritage room across the hallway here in the Union. Our Research Council deserves special recognition today. The Council involves faculty from a broad range of disciplines across the campus and one of their many roles is soliciting nominations for our Nebraska lecture series. Being selected as a speaker as a Nebraska lecturer is the highest recognition the Council can bestow on any individual faculty member in the university community and is awarded on the basis of major recent accomplishments and the speaker's ability to really communicate and to share her or his work. Now it's great pleasure for me today to introduce our first 2018 Nebraska lecturer, our distinguished speaker Andrew Jewel. Andy is a professor in the university libraries and a faculty member in our Acclaimed Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. He's a true modern scholar with the ability to present academic information in new and very exciting ways and formats. I'm excited about today's lecture because Andy is the leading expert on one of our very most famous alums, Willa Cather. Cather spent most of her childhood, as you know, in Red Cloud Nebraska that was mentioned earlier and graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895. She started her career as a journalist and was a successful editor for many years before she became a full-time author in mid-life, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize. One of her most well-known themes was the reality of life here on the Great Plains in this place, in this space that we think of as our home. This was a topic her peers hadn't explored, but she understood it very deeply and at a personal level. Andy has devoted his career to studying Cather's literary contributions. Because of his scholarship, we have a richer understanding of who Cather was as a person and why her work has stood the test of time. Many of the themes in Ms. Cather's work, including immigration, the environment, and women's issues, those sound familiar to you. Still very relevant today in our discussions and our dialogue. Andy joined the University as a faculty member in 2005 and is editor of the Willa Cather archive, a rich online resource of Cather's writing, plus images and other multimedia. The archive contains a comprehensive section of Cather's personal correspondence. Cather fans in the room are likely using this resource already, but if you're new to this topic, I encourage you to visit cather.unl.edu. In addition to editing the archive, Andy is co-editor of the selected letters of Willa Cather and the American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age. Andy earned his bachelor's degree from Hastings College, one of our sister universities here in the state, a master's from the University of Missouri at Columbia, and a doctorate from UNL. And if you read the UNL today, little piece on the lecture this morning, you might have picked up that he actually didn't read Cather, right? We've probably taken away some of your script here, but didn't read Cather as a high school student or a student here in Nebraska growing up in North Platte, or when he was at Hastings, it was until he went to Mizzou of all places that he was first exposed to Willa's writings. So it's now my honor to introduce our colleague Andy Jewel, who will present our Cather heritage. Please join me in welcoming him. Hi everybody. Thank you very much to the Research Council, to the Office of Research and Economic Development, and to Chancellor Green for the invitation and the kind introduction. And thank you to all of you who are here today or who are listening via the webcast and watching via the webcast. And I want to make special mention and thanks to four people who gave me encouragement and advice as I prepared this lecture. And thank you to Erica Defrain, to Kevin McMullen, to Emily Rao, and especially to Becca Jewel for their help. I am honored that you've invited me to speak to you about my work. And doing so, you're really complimenting a collaborative team of which I'm so proud to be a part, several teams. I'm lucky to have a lot of terrific colleagues, and I want to take a moment to thank, acknowledge, and name them. First, the team that creates the online Willa Cather archive, who lately have been heroically working on the ambitious complete letters of Willa Cather digital edition. Melissa Homestead, Professor of English, whose diligent research skills and insightful, critical perspectives provide a high standard for all of us. And Kari Ronning, Research Professor of English, whose depth of knowledge and commitment has dramatically enriched both this project and the whole of Cather scholarship. And Emily Rao, the assistant editor of the Cather archive, who has quickly grown to become a leader on the project and who brings her intelligence, dedication, and good naturedness to all aspects of our work. Graduate research assistants Gabby Kiriloff, Jess Cattibo, and Katerina Bernardini have offered creativity, experience, skill, and energy that has enabled this product to take shape. And undergraduate researchers like Samantha Greenfield, Lori Nevely, and Emma Himes have been crucial contributors, gamely providing support and assistance in a wide variety of ways. All of these people have made my professional life richer and more satisfying through their labor and their friendship. The Cather archive is supported by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, and I also want to thank the creative, innovative work of that team, particularly Karen Darzell, Jessica Desalt, and Greg Tunnick. Their work is a model of productive collaboration. Their experience and expertise building digital projects deeply informs what the Cather archive and our complete letters project becomes. We bring different perspectives to our collaboration, and we learn from one another to create a new publication that is better, more powerful, and more resilient than it would be if we had worked independently. I have such gratitude to be able to work with thoughtful, imaginative people, and I deeply appreciate the support of the Center co-directors, Catherine Walter and Kenneth Price, the support they have given to the Willa Cather archive. And finally, I want to acknowledge the University Libraries, my home at UNL. I'm honored to be a faculty member in the libraries, where there is a deep commitment to the university mission and a diverse, multidisciplinary community. Its campus-wide support of teaching and research, of access to the cultural record, and of innovative publications and services is something I deeply admire. My work depends upon an institution that supports both preservation of unique materials and creative efforts to make those materials available and meaningful to a broader audience. The University Libraries is that institution, and it provides a core intellectual infrastructure that allows my work and the work of most faculty, staff, and students on campus to come into being. Our Cather Heritage. The idea and title for this lecture comes from something that happened in Red Cloud, Nebraska in 1962. John Nyhart, the poet laureate of the state, was invited to dedicate the new Willa Cather Museum in the Garber Bank building on Webster Street. He said in his dedication, quote, It is usual, I believe, to regard such ceremonies as being concerned with honor paid to the dead, and yet those whom we call the dead can eat nothing that we who linger here a little while can give. He continued, quote, It is for us, the living, and for the living who shall follow us, generation after generation, that we set this Willa Cather Memorial against the flowing years, lest we forget the precious heritage that is ours through her. I first read this dedication a few years ago as I was preparing to talk about my work editing Willa Cather's letters at the 2015 Nyhart Conference in Bancroft, Nebraska. Almost immediately I thought, at some level this is what my work is all about. My colleagues and I worked to edit and publish Cather's correspondence because we believe there is something in it for the living that is worth knowing, worth remembering. But in making this connection I was left with a question. What is, to quote Nyhart, the precious heritage that is ours through her? What are we inheriting? What is worth knowing? This lecture is my personal response to this question. As to why I feel the life and work of Willa Cather deserves the years of attention I and others have given to it. I hope too that what I have to say underscores another point. Scholarship that focuses on an individual life need not be a narrowing of vision, but can be, and should be, a way to expand one's vision. This is especially true when the life is a creative one that leaves behind a body of work which broadly considers the human condition. Through close study of the life and work there is revelation of nuance and connection and detail of the complex cultures and histories that form our experience and our values. The more I learn about Cather the more I realize how much I do not know and can perhaps never know. In this way her life is like each human life, formed in a complicated system of expectations and evaluations, responsive to particular experiences and predilections, and lived both in the privacy of the mind and in the exposure of relationship. But another way, Willa Cather is exceptional. A woman of incredible gifts who has created works of meaning for a huge number of readers across a broad span of time. These works, Maya Antonia, The Professor's House, Death Comes to the Archbishop, Old Mrs. Harris, and so many more, are still living and resonating creations. Her life story too is a narrative that connects with many people as it contains elements that speak to different audiences at different times. Born in Virginia in 1873 she moved with her family to South Central Nebraska when she was nine years old. Initially devastated by the move and the bewildering landscape, she grew to love the people and the prairie that surrounded them, befriending neighbors that had come to Nebraska from a variety of states and countries. Intellectually gifted and independently minded, she refused the trappings of late 19th century femininity, cut her hair short, studied Latin and Greek, and planned to become a doctor. At the University of Nebraska, she discovered her vocation as a writer, writing fiction, poetry, and reviews for student publications and a local newspaper. After graduation in 1895, she soon started her first career as a journalist moving to Pittsburgh and later New York to work on newspapers and magazines as an editor and writer. In 1912, soon after her first novel was published, she left her well-paying job at McClure's magazine to be a professional writer. She was 38 years old. For most of her adult life, Willa Cather lived in New York with her partner Edith Lewis, who was an advertising and editor in advertising copywriter. From that home base, she traveled the country and the world, often coming back for extended periods to be with her family in red cloud Nebraska and produced a dozen novels and a few collections of short fiction and essays. She took the time she needed to create the book she envisioned, and she created a body of work that is remarkable for its consistent high quality. By the end of her life in 1947, she was widely celebrated as one of the most important and influential writers in the United States. And in a decade since her death, her stature has continued to grow. I am an advocate for the stature, for the value Cather and her work offers us today. I think as Nye Hart noted, there is a precious heritage that is ours through her. I have identified five categories, values or realizations that have been learned or reinforced by my study of Willa Cather, which express core elements of that heritage as I understand it today. And for the rest of this lecture, I want to consider these five inheritances that we all can receive from the life and work of Willa Cather. Number one, diverse cultural practices enrich our lives. Willa Cather lived in and advocated for a world where multiple cultural traditions coexisted in close proximity. Living and working in decades that witnessed an enormous influx of immigrants from Europe and other parts of the world, Cather actively resisted the efforts in some circles to standardize American identity. She did not want a melting pot where multiple traditions are dissolved into a characterless mass, but a transnational country, to use Randolph-Born's term. Her transnational vision meant she advocated for the preservation of cultures, including and perhaps especially those cultures that originated outside the United States. She saw in the multiplicity of cultural identity in American society that would be richer, deeper and more meaningful to all, and she connected this vision to her own role as a creative artist. In the fall of 1921, Cather visited Nebraska and while here she lectured on standardization and art in Omaha, underscoring the preservation and celebration of diverse cultural practices as key to creating rich artistic work. She specifically called out the Nebraska legislature for prohibiting the instruction of foreign languages for young children. The newspapers quoted her, will it make a boy or girl any less American to know one or two other languages? She asked, art can find no place in such an atmosphere as these laws create. Art must have freedom. She continued, the Americanization committee worker who persuades an old Bohemian housewife that it is better for her to feed her family out of tin cans instead of cooking them a steaming goose for dinner is committing a crime against art. Cather's art recreates this transnational vision on the page repeatedly throughout her career. Her novels set in the Midwest unfold in cosmopolitan communities. Swedes, Bohemians, French Canadians, Danes, Russians, Mexicans, Germans, Norwegians and Virginians all populate Cather's Great Plains and each of them proudly bring with them ways of life established in different lands. As an example, consider this brief late scene in her book My Antonia. The narrator, Jim Burden, now in middle age, has returned to Nebraska to reconnect with friends of his past, especially Antonia Schumerda-Kuzak. While touring her fruit seller, Jim has this exchanged with one of her children. Show him the spice plums, mother. Americans don't have those, said one of the older boys. Mother uses them to make kalachis, he added. Leo, in a low voice, tossed off some scornful remark in Bohemian. I turned to him. You think I don't know kalachis? I don't know what kalachis are, eh? You're mistaken, young man. I've eaten your mother's kalachis long before that Easter day when you were born. The Kuzak boys, speaking in this passage, born in Nebraska, identify as Czech and see Jim Burden as an American who doesn't know their culture and food ways. Jim Burden, though, declares kalachi part of his own heritage. Schooling the boys at his heritage is not only the Anglo-Americanism of the Burden family, but the cosmopolitan transnational reality of the Nebraska prairie in the 1880s. There is a context to the seemingly minor scene in the novel that underscores Cather's commitment to cultural pluralism. Cather started writing My Antonia in 1916 and finished it in 1918, the year it was published. The novel was created in the context of a world war in the public anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner mood that followed it in the United States. Lawmakers forbid foreign language instruction. People perceive to be foreign or sympathetic to foreigners, lost their jobs. There are public demonstrations against specific immigrant communities, especially German-Americans and prominent politicians denounced Americans who found part of their identity in their family's country of origin. There was an effort by some to Americanize our diverse nation, what Cather defined as trying to turn immigrant communities into, quote, stupid replicas of smug American citizens. This passion for Americanizing everything and everybody, she said, is a deadly disease with us. Into this context she created a narrative that valued and celebrated a variety of transported cultural traditions and especially the way those different perspectives and practices enriched the lives of the community. When Jim Burden proudly claims his knowledge of Kalachi, Cather makes a claim too. According to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English, this scene is the introduction of the word Kalachi into the English language. And choosing the precise Czech word rather than a vague description as she had in O Pioneers a few years before, she argues for presence. Antonia and her family's specific traditions are part of the 20th century American life, even as they simultaneously echo life in 19th century Bohemia. As Cather and her work matured, her commitment to cultural pluralism broadened to include more than European traditions. Her novel Death Comes to the Archbishop published in 1927 is set in the American Southwest the 19th century among intersecting Native American, Mexican and European American communities. In one scene, the central character, Bishop Jean Latour, is on a journey with Jacinto, a Pico's man who served as his guide. Around a campfire they talk about a number of things, including the different names each of their cultures used for the stars above their heads. Cather writes, The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them. A blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary maces cutting into the firmament. The bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or belief. He didn't think it polite and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience which no language could translate to him. There is embedded in this passage the twin values that are crucial to Cather's embrace of cultural pluralism, respect and humility. The respect is present both for one's own cultural history and identity, for the richness of those practices but also for others' identities which cannot be easily perceived. The humility comes from the recognition and acceptance that we do not and cannot fully know the experiences of another and that despite that lack of access we can value it and can believe in it. We demonstrate respect in part by acknowledging our own ignorance, by humbly accepting that we have very much to learn and that we can never know at all. Our differences are real but we can be comfortable with them. We can connect across them. Number two, our lives are embedded in communities. For several years now I've been actively working as one of the editors in Willa Cather's Letters. This past January we began the publication of the Complete Letters of Willa Cather, a digital scholarly edition published on the Willa Cather archive website as you heard. As part of our approach to editing all 3,079 currently known letters available, we are among other things keeping track of all the people Cather mentioned and her correspondence. We're about halfway through the project right now and we've identified around 1,700 individuals mentioned. For each of these people our editorial team is writing a brief biographical annotation. Over 1,000 have been researched and created and some of the people referenced are of course relatively well known in the world, Winston Churchill, Mabel Dodge-Lewan, Charles Lindberg, Sarah Oran-Jewitt. But most of the people Cather mentions in her letters are not famous people with Wikipedia entries. They are family members, neighbors, and friends. The short biographies written by the editorial team, a group effort led by my colleagues Melissa Homestead and Kari Ronning, will be in most cases the only widely available information about these people. The work is making invisible lives from the past visible again at least in glimpses. These references to people in her letters suggest the huge volume of individual connections that filled Cather's life. The correspondence documents thousands of social interactions both in person and via letters that shaped Cather's experiences and perspectives. The vision of Cather one gets through editing her letters is a vision of a woman always living in relationship to another. Her choices and behaviors, her very ways of thinking and writing are responses to other people who populated her lived experience. This vision is especially striking when one considers that the characterization of Cather that has dominated in the past several decades has been one of an extremely private woman who sacrificed her personal life and service to her art. Influenced by the relative inaccessibility of her correspondence and a private life that did not conform to heteronormative expectations, biographers often have seen her as aloof and isolated. Such a view seems impossible to me now. Our research into Cather's associations reveal life that is embedded simultaneously in multiple communities. Even in her last decade when Cather had significant emotional struggles and desire for a life that was uninterrupted by unwelcome intrusions, she was not alone. She was with her partner Edith Lewis. She was with her nieces and nephews and friends. She was visiting the library and traveling to Maine. She was going to concerts and writing letters to dozens of different people, and sometimes she was in a quiet room by herself writing fiction that reflected the meaning of her relationships to different people in her life. To study Willa Cather is not to look narrowly at only one person, but to use an individual life as a point of orientation when considering a web of associations and interactions. Cather's works of fiction underscore this point. Though several books present strong central characters that dominate our memories of them, they are not for the most part meditations on isolated psychologies, but narratives of people in relationship. Cather's 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, for example, is on one hand Cather's most traditional narrative of a single character, Thea Cronborg, growing up and developing into a major artist. Cather's way of telling it though is to highlight the way Cronborg's community actively supported, provoked and enabled her growth. And in the final scenes of the singer's triumph, Cather populates the audience of people who have helped her in different ways along the path. Her point? Thea Cronborg didn't do this alone. Her seeming isolation in the artist's life is a smoke screen for the rich interplay of relationship that is the more foundational reality. The editing of Willa Cather's letters is an exploration of hundreds of lives that form and shape Cather's life. Lives like Albert Donovan's. He was a student of Cather's when she taught high school in Pittsburgh in 1904, who stayed in touch and then introduced her to fellow soldiers when he returned home from World War I, introductions that informed her book One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize. And who in the 1930s lived around the corner from Cather on the Upper East Side of New York with his partner Hugh Clark and even hosted a wedding reception for Cather's niece. Or lives like Lucille Gurney Guy's. She was a young woman in Red Cloud, Nebraska, the daughter of farmers who worked in a lawyer's office and later helped care for that lawyer when he was paralyzed and widowed. She married a young man in 1940 when she was 22 years old and then died soon after from an appendix operation. Cather knew her as a lovely girl who would help her when she wanted to send flowers to old friends in town. Or consider Peoriana Elizabeth Bogartis-Sill, an educated woman who studied art and music in Europe in the 19th century and then moved to Nebraska, eventually ending up in Red Cloud where she taught music lessons and directed Willa Cather in a production of Beauty and the Beast. When Cather was 15, she wrote that she liked to spend a lot of time with Mrs. Still as she was, quote, at least an imitation of the things I most lack. She wished to see Europe like Mrs. Sill. She admitted, but, quote, when I return, I don't want my whole life to be a European souvenir. It is true that Cather valued quiet days and time to herself to reflect, work, and just be. She did not always want to go to parties or give lectures. It is simultaneously true that she was perpetually experiencing life in the midst of a relationship with others. From birth to death, her whole life was formed by the context of its communities and the tension and pressures of that context. And she knew it. In an essay on the author, Catherine Mansfield, first published in 1925, Cather wrote, one realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life, the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor's household and underneath another, secret and passionate and intense, which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives characters to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind, each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net with circumstances and his own affections has woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life. They can never be wholly satisfactory that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day. Number three, beauty and meaning are there if only we can see it. Well, I grew up in North Platte, Nebraska and received my bachelor's degree from Hastings College. I can't pass only an hour's drive from where Cather grew up. I know you've heard part of this story now, but I'm going forward with it anyway. I majored in English, but I had no interest in reading Willa Cather. I thought all that pioneer stuff was deadly boring. I had no idea what her works were really like and I had a stack of assumptions and stereotypes that have been in me from learning. Wrapped up in those assumptions that I had when I was a fairly foolish young man was the belief that any art that was to be taken seriously, I mean really seriously, had to come from France or Ireland or New York or at least Chicago. I mean, it sure as hell couldn't come from Nebraska where I was from, right? When I was working on my master's degree at the University of Missouri Columbia, I was assigned to read a Willa Cather short story in an American literature class. It was neighbor Rossicky, sometimes pronounced neighbor Vizicci, but I'll say Rossicky. A story set among farming people in 1920s Nebraska. This story hit me hard. The lives of these obscure people are presented with vitality and complexity. Their simple kindnesses are made profound, not through flowery language, but through subtle evocation of emotion and a basic respect for their dignity and importance as people. Let me share a passage from early in the story where Anton Rossicky, an aging farmer, is driving his wagon home and stops to look at the graveyard that is at the edge of his land. It was a nice graveyard, Rossicky reflected, sort of snug and home-like, not cramped or mournful, a big sweep all around it. A man could lie down in a long grass and see the complete arch of the sky over him. Here the wagons go by and some were the mowing machine rattled right up to the wire fence and it was so near home. Over there across the corn stalks, his own roof and windmill looked so good to him that he promised himself to mine the doctor and take care of himself. He was awfully fond of his place, he admitted. He wasn't anxious to leave it and it was a comfort to think that he would never have to go farther than the edge of his own hay field. The snow falling over his barnyard and the graveyard seemed to draw things together like. And they were all old neighbors in the graveyard, most of them friends. There was nothing to feel awkward or embarrassed about. After reading this story I soon read other works and I discovered that Kather's unironic appreciation of human lives, of the impulses and affections and fears that shaped them as one of her greatest gifts as an artist. Though her books often feature remarkable people their distinction is typically found to their ability to accept their own true selves. Anton Rossicky's farm we learn in this story is not that big or profitable. His family does not get on as fast as some neighbors. They consume their cream instead of selling it for profit. They decide to have a picnic when they realize the heat has ruined their corn crop. They're kind to one another and unconcerned about their lack of wealth. Maybe the local doctor reflects quote, people as generous and warm hearted and as affectionate as the Rossikis never got ahead much. Maybe you couldn't enjoy your life and put it into the bank too. It wasn't until Kather was nearly 40 years old that she really committed to narrative set in a place and among a community that she reflected was very unfashionable. The very name of Nebraska she wrote quote, throws the delicately attuned critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment. Beginning in earnest with her novel O Pioneers in 1913 Kather created books that defied this fashion and represented Nebraska in the great plains with depth, literary sophistication and an implicit insistence that life in Nebraska had as much drama, nuance and mythical weight as life anywhere on the planet. Of course Nebraska is a store house for literary material, she told an interviewer in 1921. Everywhere is a store house for literary material. If a true artist was born in a pig pen and raised in a stye he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see. Willa Kather had the eye to see and in representing that vision she empowered others to see as well. That interviewer in 1921 felt it. She writes quote, the longer Miss Kather talks the more one is filled with a conviction that life is a fascinating business and one's own experience more fascinating than one had ever suspected it of being. Number four, learn more or less all the time. In the fall of 1908 Willa Kather was the new managing editor at McClure's magazine one of the top magazines in the country. She had left the teaching job in Pittsburgh in order to move to New York and take a position with the magazine and ultimately the job helped her launch her professional writing career. It helped by putting her into contact with the literary world and by publishing her creative work but also by reinforcing for her the value of a life experience that makes ample space for growth and development what Kather called quote she wrote those words in a letter to the author Sarah Orne Jewett in December 1908. She had become friends with Jewett while she was in Boston working on a McClure's assignment one of those connections that helped her writing career and the long beautiful letter she wrote that December is one of Kather's fullest expressions of her desire to free herself from stimulating but shallow experiences in order to claim a life of meaning. She writes that to do her job she has to quote go at it with a sort of energy most people have to exert only on rare occasions consequently I lived just about as much during the day as a trapeze performer does when he is on the bars it's catch the right bar at the right minute or into the net you go I feel all the time so dispossessed and bereft of myself of course there are interesting people interesting things in the day's work she continues but it's 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 that makes one dread to read and dread to think can't be good for one can it it can't be the kind of life one was meant to live I do think that kind of excitement does to my brain exactly what I have seen alcohol do to men's it seems to spread one's very brain cells apart so that they don't touch Kather observed that the constant stimulus of deadlines and office drama would not be sustaining to her and only a few years later after refreshing herself with a leave from McClure's and a trip west to Arizona Nebraska she left the magazine and published O pioneers the novel that wouldn't earn us begin her life as a professional creative writer what she was seeking she told Jewett in 1908 was a life that gave her intellectual space to think and to grow she knew that to be the she knew that to be the kind of writer she wanted to be she had to claim such a space she had been able to quote learn more or less all the time she said while teaching in Pittsburgh when she also produced important short stories like Paul's case in the sculptures funeral and she'd be able to do so again during her life as a novelist in ways big and little Kather's whole life can be seen as an effort to keep learning she was engaged she was curious she was reflective and she surrounded herself with other people who shared those qualities Thomas Lyne in his essay will a Kather learner writes that quote to learn in the sense that I'm outlining is not at all to gather knowledge or discrete facts but rather a continuing unsettlement and opening of the consciousness as a whole the power to relate to see inside to feel with another Kather resisted a hardening of thought and embraced expansion development she threw aside the habits that could lull one into complacency what in my antennae she called quote a life made up of evasions and negations and instead opened herself to new possibilities because Kather was not a hedonistic sensation collector like many from modernist contemporaries some casual observers I think have understood her as conservative they read her rather ordered life as a reflection of a settled mind instead I think her ordered life gave her space to unsettle her mind because she did not get consumed with affairs or drinking problems and social status she managed to produce novel after novel that artfully subtly reflected a profound consideration of human experience she grew as an artist and as a person this growth can be measured in multiple ways but I want to look at two examples that speak to the expansion of her perspective and sensitivities in 1915 Kather published the song of the lark which I've mentioned before a narrative of a woman's growth into a major artist Kather's focus early in her career is on success it's on greatness the whole of the novel builds to achievement and the central character musician Taya Cromberg is a dynamo of strength will and talent it's a beautiful book about tremendous artistic accomplishment one that takes Cromberg from a small midwestern town to Chicago and eventually the metropolitan opera in New York 20 years later Kather published Lucy Gayheart this book is also about a young talented motivated woman from a small midwestern town that goes to Chicago to study music however Kather's sense of what this skeletal narrative means has greatly changed or to put it another way Kather has returned to familiar ground to demonstrate an alternative view of the story Lucy Gayheart is in some ways about plans going unfulfilled and it is centered on a woman that lacks Taya Cromberg's focus and energy as Kather developed she became interested in human frailty and the subtle way strength manifests itself in our lives Lucy Gayheart does not end with achievement but with a meditation on living day to day and full awareness of one's own humility Harry Gordon a character who has been reflecting on the last time he saw Lucy Gayheart looks up at the stars these things he had been remembering mattered very little when one looked up there at eternity and even on this earth time had almost ceased to exist the future had suddenly telescoped out of the past so there was actually no present kingdoms had gone down and all beliefs of men had been shattered since that day when he refused Lucy Gayheart a courtesy he wouldn't have refused the most worthless old loafer in town the world in which she had been cruel to her no longer existed Kather's unsettling of an early narrative art shows us her expanding sense of human experience and where to locate the meaning of that experience and to give a second and final example of Kather's capacity for growth I want to briefly compare two efforts to create characters with life experiences outside of Kather's own Kather's 1918 novel My Antenna contains a brief scene of an African American musician performing in a local hotel the character blind are no is a sympathetic one but Kather's language describing him indulges an essentialist racist rhetoric common to the period he is depicted as a vital musician but somewhat simple minded as if his whole human self is manifest in his performance for a wide audience it's an ugly moment in a beautiful book 20 years later when Kather decided to write a novel based on her family history in Virginia she confronted her own ignorance of African American life the seed for this novel Sophia and the slave girl was a memory from childhood when Kather witnessed the reunion of Nancy a woman who had escaped slavery and her mother Matilda Jefferson to construct this narrative she delved into research on life in antebellum Virginia the underground railroad and the middle passage though she drew heavily upon her memories in constructing the novel her reading and maturing mind allowed her to reinterpret those memories with deeper empathy and humility the African American characters in this novel are not hollow stereotypes like blind are no but reflect Kather's attempt one that was of course not completely successful to fully imagine the lives of enslaved people as Toni Morrison wrote at the end of her consideration of Kather's novel quote and returning to her childhood at the end of her writing career Kather returns to a very personal indeed private experience at her last novel she works out and toward the meaning of female betrayal as it faces the void of racism she may not have arrived safely like Nancy but to her credit she did undertake the dangerous journey and number five have the courage to be honest and free at the end of January 1947 just a few months before she died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage Kather wrote a letter to the Canadian critic E.K. Brown who would later become her first biographer the letter is full of little details complaints about a new expurgated edition of Shakespeare memories of meeting Justice Louis Brandeis recalled conversations with the British critic William Archer and she ends the letter with this observation we learn a great deal from great people the mere information doesn't matter much but they somehow strike out the foolish platitudes that we have been taught to respect devoutly and give us courage to be honest and free free to rely on what we really feel and really love and that only of all we've inherited from Kather it's this vision that is for me one of the most important through her life and through many of her characters she demonstrates the power and joy and self-acceptance as the phrase in this letter indicates an honest reckoning of oneself takes a measure of courage and a good deal of practice but with acceptance comes liberation self-assuredness was present in Kather from an early age something she had access to because of the good luck of being born into a family that provided a reasonable degree of economic security and a generous amount of love and attention when she was 14 she signaled her difference from her peers when she noted in a friend's autograph album that her favorite amusement was vivisection and her her pet hobbies were snakes and Shakespeare later unlike most young women in Nebraska she went to the university this university and continued her learning while in Lincoln she also began to earn money in writing and journalism she financially supported herself and others with these skills for the rest of her life claiming to a friend while working in Pittsburgh quote oh I have grown enamored of liberty to be wholly free to really be of some use somewhere to do with one's money what one likes to help those who have helped me to pay the debts of one's love one's loves and one's hates Kather's romantic and sexual attachments her loves were women rather than men and surviving letters suggest she was open about this part of herself too she had three that she had bruises from quote deriving a certain fair maid this was Louise Pound on whom Kather had a crush in college over the country quote over the country of the one hand sometimes indeed with no hand at all as Kather matured she had no apparent habit of making explicit comments on her love life and letters but she did not try to hide it either her profound attachment to Edith Lewis for example with whom she lived for 38 years is present everywhere many friends and associates Edith Lewis is mentioned regularly and their intimacy is illustrated openly in simple gestures as when they together sent Kather's niece a wedding present though Kather suffered from self-doubt and insecurity like all of us she did not indulge it and she managed to live her life largely free from crippling neurosis she made a commitment to be honest and free and she brought into literature characters with humble backgrounds controlled by their ability to live an authentic life consider Antonia Schumer to Cusack from Kather's My Antonia the power of the character the achievement of Antonia is her full possession of herself at the end of the novel Jim Burden the narrator reflects on the indefinable quality within her that so moves him she was a battered woman now not a lovely girl but she still had that something which fires the imagination could still stop one's breath by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things she had only to stand in the orchard to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last all the strong things of her heart came out in her body that had been so tireless and serving generous emotions Kather's art lifts up human qualities that are simultaneously rare yet accessible to all of us our inheritance one we should acknowledge as sacred is Kather's vision of a meaningful a connected expansive, diverse and honest human life thank you very much sure we have a little time for Q&A this is Mohammed Dahab I'm in the Department of Civil Engineering and had the privilege to chair the University of Research Council this year and I looked forward to this presentation because it really is a truly fascinating look into the life and work of one of America's most noted citizens again on behalf of the Research Council thank you very much and thank you to Ronnie Green for taking the time out I know you can be in a lot of other places and I also thank you for continuing this program this is a wonderful program part of the Research Council is that we get to read all the all the material submitted and it's not easy to it's not easy to really come up to a conclusion sometimes but this time it was pretty easy this time we have a chance to interact with Andy with questions or comments if you have them because we have people on the cyberspace with us I think we need to use the microphone to the extent possible so if you would like to ask a question please raise your hand I'll be happy to bring you the microphone and I'll try to cover everyone and if I don't just yell at me or wave a little stronger thank you Andy thank you I'm sorry and we're done pesky engineers please everyone we would appreciate it if you introduce yourself to the rest of the audience thank you I'm Mark from the chemistry department thank you for a great talk giving us insight into what drove her and how her life is informing us today 100 years later but you may know that I have studied the history of the chemistry department at the university the first 25 years and I like turning everything into the history of the chemistry department go for it you did mention mariel gear who was willa cather's friend so I actually have two questions do you have a biology major or a biology major and then number two when did she start her friendship with mariel gear and I know she interacted with her a long time she wrote letters to her a long time is she her most common correspondence okay I'll try and there may be others in the room who might have something to say about this too but I I am mic'd I believe I think I have a lapel so when she came here I don't know if she declared a chemistry or biology I don't know that even she declared anything she pretty early on switched over to a different vocation mariel gear is one of the very important correspondence but not the most voluminous but one thing that is distinctive about mariel gear's correspondence is the range of years it covers because it started when they were in college the correspondence was especially rich during those years and in the years when cather first went to Pittsburgh and wrote back to her friends in Lincoln seemed to correspond quite as much but it's a very important correspondence thanks I'm Cary Ronning and I just wanted to say that cather did take a class from Rachel Lloyd who was chemistry professor at the university in the 1890s so this is why I work with Cary I'm Chuck Schroeder with the Rural Futures Institute at the University which has actually nothing to do with my interest in cather exceptionally well done number two, thank you for legitimizing those of us who avoided cather as 17 and 18 year olds because we thought it was just the chronicles of the pioneers that we've heard since birth I thought you made a profoundly important statement in the interview actually leading up to this about discovering cather later and the fact is her work is for adults I'd like for you to talk about the potential for those of us adults in the world returning to the study of cather to really explore how do we take her out of the notion that she's a requisite for 18 year olds and actually a very legitimate subject for a study later in life the quick way to do that would be to read the book the professor's house it's to realize that her concerns were not restricted to one environment or one narrative that they went all over the place and the professor's house is definitely a book about many things but including about getting older and coming to terms with certain realizations in life it's not a book that will mean a lot I think to younger people there have been many conferences and things where cather's reflections on aging on mortality not that those are the only concerns of older people but she's very profound she kept thinking about these things kept writing about them and even if you returned now if someone has read my antenea when they're in high school and have a memory of it if you go back to now you'll think it's a different book than you did then even students I've had the experience of students who read it in high school and read it a few years later in college and they realize there is something they're connecting to an emotion within it inside a wisdom to it that they did not perceive when they were young the language is accessible but the themes, the emotions, the ideas are quite deep and they need some experience to fully realize I think so thank you for questioning for your comments hey Matthew Jockers Annie there's something bothering me oh good and you can take the 5th on this if you have to something you said in the talk you sort of, you didn't use the word profound but I think that's what you meant the profound change that reading the letters had on you and the way that you thought about Catherine and so the question is this Catherine as I understand it didn't want to have her letters published and so the persona that she created through her work was perhaps the persona that she wished to have persist into history and so now you've read the letters the letters are now public how do you deal with that is on the one hand I recognize as a scholar I want to see those letters I'll tell you how I do so I think it is true and for those who don't know this story I'll tell it briefly and Catherine's will which she made in 1943 in the last part of her life that was I think quite troubling, troubled for her she made a decision to restrict the publication of her letters and the adaptation of her works into other mediums and among other things but she never left an explanation for that but she did say she wanted people to know her through her published works that she had refined and thought through and polished when we decided to publish the letters I've thought about this before the reason is not unlike what John Nyhart says about the precious heritage that is ours to her the reason was to privilege the interests of the living over the interests of the dead really to think that there is something for those of us who are here and the future generations to get from these materials something positive something enriching and because of that alone they are worth doing and Catherine maybe wouldn't have liked it it doesn't really matter I mean it doesn't really matter no matter what no matter where she is now I don't think she cares but I do think she would appreciate that this has led people to a more nuanced and more accurate understanding of who she was and what she cared about because she did care about accuracy Was there a question over there? Hi I'm Dorothy Anderson and I just want to take a moment to thank Andy for all the classes he has taught for Ali I have been the coordinator for a number of the classes Pusher Lifelong Learning Institute and he is a very popular instructor for us and again we just confirm what a lot of people have said most of us had bred Willa Catherine as high school and college students but when we re-read it 50 and 60 years later of a lot of us we just find a lot more in it so thank you again Andy and thank you to the University for letting Andy teach Ali classes I hope to do another one soon My name is Marsha Morel and I'm an amateur golfer in Nebraska and I'm interested in Willa Catherine's relationship to Louise Pound because in my historic information in Nebraska women's golf Louise Pound was our first Nebraska women's champion Did Willa Catherine in your life herself experience sport Not a golf that I'm aware of she did ride a bicycle and she did enjoy that and she her preferred sports I think personally were hiking and biking and sort of being an outdoors person and riding and missing any she didn't play competitive sports ever but she did Louise Pound is an excellent example oh and she ice skated that's right Dorothy Anderson again and you're forgetting to mention she was also a sports writer while she was in college she has a wonderful review of the bug eaters playing she did ride about football when she was in college that's right among other things well thank you very much for your interactions I just a quick information I was told by Mary Greer the research office that we have 16 nominations this year for next year's lectures so look forward to a very very exciting program and this time I guess I'll give the microphone to the chancellor well first of all please join me in congratulating Andy for a wonderful lecture and as is our tradition in the Nebraska lectures there is a framed print here for you of the poster for today's lecture for you to remember this and I'm sure if Ms. Gather was here today she would say well done