69th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference

Good evening. It is an honor to be here with you all for the 69th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference. Thank you to the National Willa Cather Center for the invitation and to all of you who have traveled far and wide.

Tonight, I’d like to talk about the pleasures of reading and how Willa Cather’s books have recently entered my life, giving me new language to understand both myself and the complexities within the role of the Writer.

In my life as an author, professor, former bookseller, English major, and all-around bibliophile, I have encountered many others like me, those who are always in the middle of a book, a hardback pile several inches deep on the nightstand, people who have formed vivid and crucial life memories tied to literature, and in many cases individuals who have devoted their entire lives to supporting and uplifting the world of books. I love book people. You are, in a sense, my people.  

In my past as a composition instructor, one of my favorite assignments was the Literacy Narrative in which students recount their earliest and most formative experiences with books and reading.

Recently, I gave a reading at La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado and spoke to a gymnasium filled with incarcerated women. “What have you been reading?” I asked a woman in sunglasses and a teal jumpsuit at my signing table. “So much,” she had said. “We have a book club. We are all waiting in line for the next Sara Maas book. You have to read her.” I smiled and said maybe soon. This reminded me that as a bookseller, many of my regular customers were the formerly incarnated. “That’s where I learned to love books,” a man once told me. “For six years, it was the only out of my cell.”

There are countless reasons why someone becomes a reader. Maybe it’s to seek entertainment, or the opportunity to learn, to travel, to dream, but for many of us book people there is a deeper phase to the reading life. When plotting a screenplay, the final section of the First Act is often referred to as the lock-in. This is the event that propels a character deeper into the world of adventure. Serious readers, the kind of readers you all are, often have a type of lock-in, a moment that pushes you further into the world of books. This is when you know that one day, you’ll be a writer, a scholar, a librarian, a teacher, an editor, a bookseller, a historian and on and on. In other words, you will do something, for the rest of your life, centered around books.

 For me, that lock-in came early enough. High school. Well, before I dropped out (a story for another day). But it was this moment when I knew I would write books and there was nothing else I so desired in the entire universe, and no one would stop me.

  “The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.” The Song of the Lark

 I am somewhat new to Willa Cather. It would happen gradually, then suddenly, as Hemingway might say, after being told for years by other book people and my Nebraskan father that I really ought to read her novels. But it wasn’t until late one night in 2020 when writing a draft of my short story “The Yellow Ranch” that my eyes drifted from the computer screen to the bookshelf, where I spotted an old, faded copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop.  In my 2023 Penguin Classics introduction to this masterpiece, I describe this instant as if the book and I were making eye contact. “It was a meeting,” I wrote, “destined to be.”

 At the time, I was also finishing my first novel, Woman of Light, set in Denver, Southern Colorado, and Northern New Mexico. The book is based on the oral traditional of my maternal line and details the lives of Indigenous and Chicano characters based on my ancestors. For this reason, it felt like divine intervention that I would come to Willa Cather’s novel exactly when I did.

In 2020, I was also adjusting to what I’ll call my New Life as a writer. In my Old Life as writer, my identity as an artist was marked mainly by rejection. I began writing seriously in my early twenties, and though I had some success with a handful of literary journals, those lucky breaks only came after meeting notable writers and editors in person. For a writer who has never lived even remotely near New York City, this is easier said than done. In my pursuit of finding both a way to write books and a means to support myself, I lived across the country, taking jobs, fellowships, and graduate positions in places as far flung as Key West, San Diego, South Carolina, Durango, and Laramie. When looking at my Submissions Manager from this time, out of those 85 submissions in eight years, I had two publication acceptances tracked on that website, both from the same journal, Southwestern American Literature. In my Old Life as a writer, I lived and breathed rejection.

But in my New Life as a writer, starting the year of my debut Sabrina & Corina, I had been marked by something greater than rejection—readers. It started slowly, no major reviews, no national TV or radio, no celebrity book club. No, my New Life as a writer began where my Old Life let off – in the land that I come from – the American West. Denver readers flocked to my book, telling others, pushing through word-of-mouth until eventually the rest of the country caught on (or the small faction who reads literary short stories). Ultimately, those readers led to one of the greatest honors of my life so far. In a rare and miraculous twist of fate, my rejection filled path morphed overnight when Sabrina & Corina was a named a Finalist for the National Book Award. The day before the news went public, I walked across the prairie near parents’ home in Arvada, Colorado. As I stood atop a plateau, gazing at the rippling grass, my friend Sebastian Doherty texted me: “It’s like your last day as a muggle before you go off to Hogwarts.”

 By the time 2020 rolled around, it was clear that I needed to widen my perception of myself as writer. I could no longer think of myself as someone who couldn’t catch a break. I had caught one, a big one, and oddly enough, this is also around the time when I first began reading Willa Cather.

 “A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.” The Professor’s House

 I am not surprised that I met Cather’s novels when I did. They arrived into my life under the most fortuitous circumstances. In her books, I found big-hearted Western characters with dreams and goals and passions. Characters like Jim Burden of My Ántonia whose deep intelligence and sensitivity is captivating, the brilliant and strong Alexandra of O Pioneers!, or the talented and precocious Thea Kronborg of The Song of the Lark. I devoured these novels, delighting in these eternal characters who contain the multitudes of a life, their stories giving guidance for ways to redefine and reshape the understanding of self.

 These characters with their hopes and desires gave me new language to look back on my writerly journey with reverence for the determination that allowed me to enter my New Life as a writer. And though I didn’t realize it yet, Cather’s novels were also widening my community of book people.

When I read first My Ántonia, I was at MacDowell in 2021, near Willa Cather’s grave in New Hampshire. It was October, New England lavish with trees that looked as if on fire. I had walked into town with my book and found a charming restaurant along the river. Someone had told me this river was special because it flowed north instead of south. There was a couple in the small dining room, possibly in their late 60s or early 70s. After some time, they asked what I was reading.

“My Ántonia,” I said, “By Willa Cather.”

They shared an excited glance. “We love Willa Cather,” they said.

“Oh,” I replied, “I’m just at the section with Pavel and the wolves. It’s the most harrowing thing I’ve ever read.”

The couple and I chatted about the wolves and Nebraska and Jim Burden and much more until it was time for them to go. Later, when the server retuned, I asked for my check. “No worries,” she had said, “that nice couple took care of it.”

I’ll never forget that. How special I felt that day. How special the entire world felt that day. All that connection thanks to Willa Cather. In the coming years, there would be other moments of connection. A historian at the Library of Congress who made me feel culturally seen and acknowledged as part of our American identity. I had a feeling she must also love Willa Cather’s books, and I was right. She gave me directions to her statue in the Capitol. Along the way, I met a congressional aide who gave me a tour, stopping to point out the corn etched into marble columns. “Do you want a picture with her?” he asked, and I thought, of course I do.  

I’ve traveled a long way to feel like a person of my background is a foundational part of the American story. Willa Cather helped me in that, too. 

 “Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields. Nevertheless, the underground stream was there…” O Pioneers!

 I have a memory of Nebraska in the thick summer heat with my father and six siblings. Usually, we visited my grandparents in Omaha around Thanksgiving, but on this trip, we drove in July, stopping to eat sandwiches and to swim in an alcove of the Platte River. I hadn’t been swimming in a river of that magnitude before. The water was brown, murky and the cottonwood trees along the banks released white like miniature clouds. I don’t know how it happened, but one moment I was splashing and playing in the cool-lip of the swimming hole and the next I was torn away from my family, engulfed by the larger stream. I can still see my father seconds before he jumped in after me, standing at the riverbank, tall and salt-and-pepper-haired, red swimming trunks, an eagle tattoo on his arm. “Don’t fight the current,” he hollered. “You have to go with the stream.”

In the years since I’ve started reading Cather, I have thought more about my relationship to Nebraska. One of the only short stories I wrote during graduate school that wasn’t included in my thesis or later Sabrina & Corina is entitled “The Good Life,” in honor of the state. Cather has brought about a broadening of my scope, her novels urging me to go back to that stream, allowing for more possibilities of setting, character, an expansion of the entire canvas. Cather has reminded me that like her characters, I am a woman worthy of multitudes, and so, too, is my writing.

 “To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that." Death Comes for the Archbishop

Before I leave you tonight, I’d like to make one last stop, this time in the dreamworld. In 2022, months before I published my debut novel Woman of Light, my publishing team asked, “What is your biggest dream for this book?” I think they wanted me to say something like Oprah’s Book Club or to appear on Late-Night, but instead what I most wanted was critical attention. I know that writers of color, writers of mixed backgrounds, writers of the American West, women writers, writers like me in more ways than one, we have historically been overlooked in critical spaces or very few of us have been let through the doors. And, so, I told my team: “I would like a review in the New York Times.” The consensus was, of course the book will be reviewed. Why wouldn’t it be?  

It was here at Red Cloud, weeks before the publication that I had a bad feeling. I remember walking the hallways of the Cathers’ Second Home, looking up at her portrait in the sitting room. I wrote my publisher from the kitchen table, pleading with them to keep pitching reviewers. I was told not to worry. The book would be reviewed. But it never was. Woman of Light was never reviewed in The New York Times. There she was again, my Old Life as a writer, coming back to meet me in the New.

I’m embarrassed to say that this sent me into a depression. I felt ashamed, like I had let my readers and my various communities down. If I couldn’t get the paper-of-record to print the words “Indigenous Chicano,” what impact did I even have as a writer? The only thing that made me feel better during this time were my events, where over the course of a year I met droves of readers who were moved and changed by Woman of Light. But still, in the back of my mind, in that underground stream that controls so much of our thoughts and perceptions, I felt like a failure. Then one night, a quarter to 3, I awoke from a dream.

        November 28th, 2022 at 2:42 am

          I was at an event for my book and someone said Willa Cather was still alive and that she wanted to speak with me. She said she enjoyed Woman of Light and compared it to Steinbeck. She was very old and we got to walk together for a moment.

 Do I believe this dream was a message directly from Willa Cather in the spirit world? Maybe. Probably not. Who can say? But what I can say is that this dream calmed me. It made me feel nurtured and mentored and though it was only in the dreamworld, a writer that I admired cared enough to not only read my work, but to walk with me in this life.

What this dream also showed me is how profoundly Cather’s works and her life as a writer had entered my subconscious. Cather had become to me, as she has to so many others, an icon. What she symbolizes can change, depending on the reader. To some, she is a Feminist Icon, a Queer Icon, a Western Icon, a Midwestern Icon, an American Icon. To me, she is a guide, a type of mentor icon. 

My novel would be fine. It would go on to be a national bestseller, receive full page reviews in the UK and Italy, win awards, including the WILLA for Historical Fiction, and it would bring even more book people into my life. My relationship to Cather’s books has also propelled me deeper into her letters and lectures, where I have uncovered a rare and visionary type of business savvy. At the end of a long career, I doubt many will remember the bad reviews, the reviews not written, or even the raves printed in papers across the world. What is remembered are the stories and their characters and how they make us feel. Perhaps the single greatest gift that reading Willa Cather’s novels has given me is an understanding that books are bigger than we are.

At the end of a life, who among us won’t take pleasure in remembering the first time we opened the pages of My Ántonia or O Pioneers!? Or the divine in making eye contact with Death Comes for the Archbishop across the room? Who among us won’t remember the beauty of walking with Cather’s characters through the prairies and red deserts of our imaginations?

 Thank you, Willa Cather, for gifting us these stories—for connecting to us as readers in what should be an impossible feat, spanning the universe of our hearts and minds through time and space. And, of course, thank you to all of you and readers everywhere who keep her stories alive.

Thank you.

June 7, 2024

Red Cloud, Nebraska