It is late July 2021. I have driven my daughter an hour northwest to reach swathes of Minnesota sunflowers, the novelty of crowds of head-high plants taking our minds off the crowds of people we are still avoiding. We turn off the main road onto a rutted, grassy drive, where we pause more than once to watch small creamy butterflies dancing double helixes around each other. Once on foot, we can hear the fields before we can see the flowers. So many bees are feasting from the blooming yellow heads that the world has become a living hum. We make a contest of looking for the sunflower with the most bees on it at once (five). We marvel that there are not just bumblebees and honeybees, both of which we can identify, but also several otherbees, which we cannot. All going about their bee business, and each contributing one fizzing note to the chorus that vibrates on the wind.

Sunflowers reliably face east. As young plants, they shift their gaze over the course of a day to continue bathing their cheeks in direct light. But when they mature into impressive giants, their heads become too heavy to move. It feels vaguely sentient, their resolute turn to the rising sun. In an open prairie, all the other flowers appear lackadaisical by comparison.

When arrayed in farmed rows that spread over acres, every flower stands at attention, saluting the sun. Soldier-like symmetry in plants is a little disquieting, especially from the back where the flowers’ heads wear huge, spikey green cups that look oddly like helmets. But viewed from the front, the illusion of a battalion disappears. Broad leaves dissolve rigid spacing. The flowers’ pebbled centers — in fact hundreds of tiny blossoms — are ringed by densely overlapping petals that splay outward until each edge is differentiated by the sun. Ray florets, they are called. Because what else would you name such golden magnificence? As the light filters through, every flower gets its own halo.

We have had so little rain this summer that at least one of these farm fields has been allowed to die back, presumably to preserve water for the others. Stunted stalks tilt in the dusty soil, sharp contrast to the adjacent field that thrums with insects. I find myself wondering what the untouched prairie looks like right now. Are its sunflowers wilting before they can bloom? Or do ones that seed themselves naturally have roots impervious to short-term drought, roots that press deeper to locate small bits of sustaining moisture? I assume uncultivated plants are more resourceful because they have not been coddled — although perhaps that is anthropomorphizing and wrong. Possibly their seeds simply remain dormant, nestled into today’s too-dry earth, quietly waiting for a rainier summer. That, too, is a kind of resourcefulness.

~ 🌻 ~

It always seems to be winter when I pick up Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Even so, the scene I cling to is not the one where the family digs tunnels through snowdrifts to get to the barn for chores. Instead, I find myself beguiled by the moment her protagonist reminisces over his first immersion into sunflowers. Newly-orphaned at the age of ten, Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to his grandparents’ farm in Nebraska in the 1890s, which, as an adult narrator, he recalls exploring:

Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow.

Cather’s novel is redolent with the wonder of this young boy, fresh from the Virginia woodlands, learning to understand the prairie’s splendid, wide-open skies and appreciate its promised freedom of movement. I love how his fascination with sunflowers as route markers casts them in the familiar mold of fairy tale: they function like a magical trail of breadcrumbs, perpetually renewing themselves to guide successive seasons of settlers safely west. Fuchs’s cherished story has an added ring of truth, tapping as it does into sunflowers’ power as a directional sign. It must have reassured countless drivers of horses and wagons across the plains that as long as they headed towards those sunny faces, they were moving in the right direction. Jim’s rhapsody takes a turn, though, to end here:

I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake’s story but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

Despite the corrective that this is merely a legend, I find this last clause breath-taking. What a heady image — roads marked by towering flowers that proffer benediction over the movement of persecuted souls into a space where they could find religious freedom.

This passage mentions nothing of the people who were native to those plains. Of their relentless persecution. Of the incalculable damage those white settlers did in claiming land and displacing people and disrupting ecosystems and destroying long-established harmonies between humans and the earth. And yet, if read carefully, it admits to us that the flowers’ sanction of westward expansion is merely the stuff of legend, invented no doubt by white settlers. If read carefully, it might remind us that those roads were “bordered” by sunflowers because sunflowers were everywhere on those plains except where the roads, gashed through by wagons that scarred the land, prohibited the flowers’ growth.

How can we admire these breath-taking lines while doing justice to the truth that some people gained freedom by denying it to others? Where, in this complexity, does that leave the flowers? What is our relationship to the adulation and the promise, to the sheer joy of the beaming sunflower in its own right? Can we disentangle that from human history? Should we try?

~ 🌻 ~

May and June are normally rainy, plant-greening months in Minnesota. Grasses wake up. The monochrome of winter becomes variegated, lush. The state’s abundant water — 10,000 lakes! — is the stuff of legend, but it is also the winter snowpack, high water table, and abundant spring rains that makes Minnesota a promising location for the inevitable flood of climate refugees we know time will produce. Those living through years of devastating droughts to our west have periodically argued for the right to siphon off some Great Lakes’ water to slake their regions’ thirst. There are profound ironies in proposals to send natural resources west, as people contemplate fleeing east across North America seeking a more hospitable bit of earth.

But for the second summer in a row, Minnesota’s lot seems cast with the burning western half of the United States. In early July, grassy boulevards were simply tufts of brown. As I sit writing in August 2022, St. Paul, MN, is almost 7” below its normal year-to-date precipitation accumulation. Last year at this time it was even worse: some 80% of the state was marked Severe, Extreme, or Exceptional Drought.

My lilac hedge, some fifteen feet high and fifty feet long, droops. The soil is so dry, so deep, that any water you offer to flower gardens seeps far away from the roots before plants can slurp up enough to sustain themselves. Things I have never had to water — the rose that’s taller than my garage, for instance — are suffering. Small trees look pinched. Today I drove by several adolescent maples, not mere saplings, whose leaves were browning around the edges. Next year, they may be skeletons. If this landscape were a Dickens character, it would be described with a narrow face and pursed lips and a perpetually pained expression.

The perilousness of our situation feels ominous. A gossamer thread binds us together over our shared craving for water sources whose perpetuation we cannot command. I sense myself wilting too, these hot summer afternoons, under the weight of that concern.

~ 🌻 ~

By mid-August, none of us can recall accurately the last time it rained. One night, I dream that someone is outside throwing dried beans onto my roof. I awake in the dark, confused. Bags and bags and bags of beans clatter down, and I cannot figure out where they are coming from. Drowsily, I realize I am hearing the rattle of raindrops. I am nonetheless still baffled by the sound. When I wake up more fully, I register a deep sadness: it has taken just a few months to turn the sound of rain into a stranger.

Later that morning, I find myself holding my breath, afraid somehow to jinx the rain and make it stop if I celebrate too much. And yet I am ecstatic. I want to dance. It is raining. Not just a few half-hearted drops. But a persistent soaking that produces a smell lightly metallic and earthy — petrichor, it is beautifully named — a breeze wet with a wetness you can taste through an open window. It rains for hours before it clears. Miniature pools glisten on broad leaves in my garden, and I can breathe deeply once more.

The next night, it rains again, and I wake to a morning gloom that feels like celebration, a dawn overcast and damp. The heat has finally broken.

Out of town, driving through a downpour the following day, I get the giddy news from a friend: there has been a third night of rain! “Everything is saturated,” she writes. I do a little jig in my seat as I think of my trees, my roses, my enormous hedge, finally having their thirst quenched. I imagine them restored to a green as triumphant as the hills I am driving through: Wisconsin, the national map tells me, has experienced only Moderate Drought in one very tiny corner this year. I do not know how the drought knows where the state lines are.

~ 🌻 ~

I have quipped more than once, since moving to Minnesota, that I am grateful not to live in a sod house on the prairie when the winter winds come shrilling around the eaves and the snow mounts. But as I think about sunflowers and drought in this third summer of curtailed human connection, I find myself realizing how we are all tied to the land, even if we no longer live in shelters composed of it. We bear witness to the slow suffering of giant trees whose canopies become strangely translucent as leaves begin to shrivel. When rainless days extend to rainless weeks, we feel the tension in the air, the need palpable and parched, even if we do not consciously register it.

It only gives way when the rain comes, often in a powerful combination of disorientation and relief. I, too, was less wilted for a few days. The land was less gasping, the strain in people’s voices quieted itself a little.

And so, sunflowers. Reminders of our earthly obligation to coexist. They serve as map and guide, as exuberant marker and sober memento. We cannot command the rain, but we can be more conscious of that collective feeling of reprieve carried on the damp wind. We must take practical steps to combat drought in our children’s lifetimes. We also should lean more fully into the things that connect us despite a burning world. Morning sun on our faces, the relief of rain. The bees, the sunflowers, the wonder of seeing it all for the first time through our daughters’ eyes.

Read this in print by ordering The New Territory Issue 14 or get a PDF copy.

The post On Sunflowers, and Hope, in Times of Drought appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

The Mesa
Taos, New Mexico

By Tracy Tucker

I am an American pilgrim. I’ve visited a hundred holy sites trying to find my way, seeking an intercession, hoping to meet my gods in the air. I’ve found myself at Walden Pond, naturally, and the stone wall at Robert Frost’s farm, but there are many stations on this journey: the American Gothic house, Steinbeck’s “Mother Road,” First Avenue in Minneapolis, and a spot on the side of a Missouri highway where Ira Louvin died.

But by profession, as a writer, as an archivist, I hold one figure above them all — Willa Cather. I’ve traveled where she traveled, slept where she slept, and chased the horizons that populate her novels and short stories. From her birth house in Gore, Virginia, to her grave in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and so many places she wandered in between, I’ve been there, trailing after her spirit, looking for my own.

Cather wrote in a 1912 letter that, for the first time, she was glad to be away from New Mexico and Arizona; though she enjoyed the summer, she “was ready to leave when the time came.  … The country,” she continued, “is wonderful, fabulous; but after all, ‘dans le desert,’ as Balzac said, ‘il y a tout, et il n’y a rien; Dieu sans les hommes.’” The desert is everything and nothing. God without men.

And so I am in Taos, seeing the sights, but it’s the desert that calls me. For days, I let myself be led and, while I keep in mind a place to sleep, the roads just run.  I think of Cather’s letter quoting Balzac. I see everything and nothing.

On the mesa west of town, the road runs out but I walk on, the scent of chamiso pardo and rabbitbrush rising like prayers as I brush by. I breathe in their incense. Cactus spikes whisper against my pack. I have visions. I try to fathom Cather in this land. She rides through at a distance, but I can barely make her out. Between us are other figures, but they might be mirages. Smoke and sand. Wind shaking the wild oats.

A dried fruit of a tree cholla clings to the back of my coat. I don’t discover it until I’m back in Nebraska, and I tuck it away in the console with other relics: sea glass from Nantucket Harbor and limestone from my family’s farm and corroded buttons found buried in the dirt of an abandoned Colorado soddy.

At home I look at Cather’s letter again. After she quotes Balzac, she writes, “You see, you get so lonely (I mean your soul gets lonely) in a land which has had only a geological history. Your spirit can’t find anything to hang on by!” But it can, I think, and mine has hung on to that mesa, returning again and again, a lost traveler walking in circles in the only place that feels real, independent of man.

Back in Cather’s Nebraska, the cholla fruit, dense and desiccated, splits its skin, and its seeds pour out, tiny miracles. Their prickles are everywhere I touch, snagging. When I think I’m rid of them, I notice tiny cholla growing in the sand at the edge of the yard. I tease them out, nurture them, but I don’t think they need me. The desert is real. I’m the mirage.

Tracy Tucker is the Education Director and Archivist at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and an Affiliate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Tucker’s research, writing, and photography focuses on the Plains and has appeared in Old Northwest Review, Midwestern Gothic, Whirlwind, Open Mic, Prairie Fire, the Willa Cather Review, and others. A forthcoming chapter comparing the work of Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Sanora Babb will be published in Unknown No More: Essays on Sanora Babb (Oklahoma University Press, 2021).

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Taos, New Mexico appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Pavelka Farmstead
Red Cloud, Nebraska

By Christine Pivovar

Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) contains the first written use of the word “kolaches” in English, according to the OED. It comes in at the end of the novel, when the narrator, Jim, visits his childhood friend Ántonia at her “wide farm-house, with a red barn and an ash grove,” and meets her brood of boisterous children. The sweet, fruit-filled Czech pastries they serve him are still commonplace in bakeries throughout Nebraska today, but I’d never expected to find such a small, prosaic piece of our culture appear in one of the twentieth century’s great American novels. I’ve made kolaches myself, using my grandma’s recipe, which can’t be much different from the one Ántonia’s daughters used. Reading that scene, I had a powerful sense of seeing myself in a novel in a different way than I ever had before. Ántonia could have been my own great-grandmother.

Part of why I could picture that scene so vividly is because I have been to the “wide farm-house” Cather describes. A few miles north of Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, it was the home of her friend Annie Pavelka, who became the inspiration for the character of Ántonia.

Situated near the geographical center of the continental U.S., Red Cloud is a town of brick streets, charming Victorian houses and a wide-open sky. It’s the kind of town where cowboys in full gear stroll into the Subway and two of the town’s three restaurants close for the weekend because of a family wedding. It was founded in 1871, and when the railroad came through in 1879 it brought settlers from all over Europe and the eastern United States. Born in Virginia, Cather moved to Nebraska with her family in 1883. She lived in and around Red Cloud until she left for college in Lincoln. Her memories of this place, in particular the hard but vibrant lives of the pioneer farmers, inspired many of her novels and stories.

Today the Pavelka Farmstead is one of the sites maintained by the Willa Cather Foundation, which provides guided tours of significant places in the author’s life and work. The tour guides can tell you which of Cather’s friends were the models for which characters, what living room a particular scene takes place in. Although their close reading can feel restrictive at times — the books are fiction, after all — there seems to be a kind of pragmatic Nebraskan mindset that looks for these concrete connections. Readers and tourists are used to hunting down literary settings in New York and Boston. Why shouldn’t they also do so in Red Cloud?

This year, the Foundation is restoring the farmhouse: upgrading the foundation, installing electricity, and returning it to its “period of significance.” As works of preservation, the farmhouse restoration and Cather’s books both allow the visitor to step into a world that’s passed out of firsthand memory. Taken together, the physical space can cement the fictional scenes in real experience. When I visited the Pavelka house, it was empty and gutted, but even from the building’s bones, from its sloping yard surrounded by head-high rows of corn, I could picture the lives lived there. I could imagine myself as one of Ántonia’s daughters, kneading the dough for kolaches.

Christine Pivovar is originally from Omaha and today lives near an old pioneer cemetery in Kansas City. She was a Durwood Fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she earned her MFA in creative writing and media arts. She has reviewed books for The Millions, The Rumpus and The Kansas City Star, and her fiction has been published in The Southeast Review and Hot Metal Bridge. She also works as a product designer at a software company.

Photo by Barb Kurdna, courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Red Cloud, Nebraska appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Glacier Creek Preserve
Omaha, Nebraska

By Conor Gearin

“The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.” One of Willa Cather’s most famous lines, from the 1918 novel My Ántonia, mainly refers to the color of little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), one of the key grasses of the mixed grass prairie where she grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The species has a bluish color in spring but matures to a copper-red in autumn that reflects the fire of a Great Plains sunset.

The first place I connected Cather’s words to little bluestem wasn’t in farm country but instead at Glacier Creek Preserve on the outskirts of Omaha. Years of restoration transformed terraced crop fields into a glimpse at the flora of mixed grass and tallgrass prairies accessible to city dwellers. In the Midwest, we’ve lost nearly all of our native grasslands to agriculture, meaning that if you grew up in a city like Omaha or St. Louis — my hometown — your first look at a grassland was probably a restored site down the road like Glacier Creek. This modest-sized preserve offers a glimpse of the most threatened type of ecosystem in the world.  As a biology teaching assistant, I would help lead university students at the preserve in collecting soil samples, estimating plant biomass, and identifying bird species.

When Cather was a student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in the 1890s, Omaha was a cultural destination, and she wrote incisive theater reviews to help establish herself as a writer. Her fiction reflects this early view of the big city. Especially in My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, Omaha looms as an urban hub, reachable by train for a cosmopolitan weekend outing, the place to go for fancy fabric and renowned actors. Cather’s careful depictions of small-town Nebraska take their meaning partly from the contrast she draws to these growing cities a few rail stops away.

Later in her career, Cather returned to Omaha on a brief Midwestern speaking tour. At a 1921 gathering of the Nebraska League of Women Voters in the tea room of the stately Brandeis department store in downtown Omaha, Cather advised the audience not to imitate other places. “It seems to me as I travel out through the great middle west, the people are trying to imitate New York,” she said, as quoted by the Omaha World-Herald. “Red Cloud and Hastings are trying to be like Omaha; Omaha and Chicago are trying to be like New York. One thing I like about New York is that there we wear the kinds of hats we like, we wear the kind of clothes that please us.”

The remark feels strikingly contemporary. Reading it, I think of how today’s Midwestern communities often converge on a suburban sameness: small towns grasping for big box stores, larger cities sprawling out subdivisions into farm country. The result is a landscape that’s hard to distinguish from hundreds of others, their quirks of ecology smoothed over and refashioned with evenly distributed brand names. But I think, too, of the distinguishing features that remain: the grasses and herbs of eastern Nebraska I saw in the field and through the microscope; the improbably steep slopes of the Loess Hills across the Missouri River; all the different kinds of live music wafting out of bars in Omaha’s Benson neighborhood on a First Friday. I think of Omaha’s cultural legacies — the Indigenous peoples of the Oceti Sakowin; Black families that arrived in the Great Migration; generations of immigrants from throughout Europe, Asia, Mexico, Central America, and more recently Sudan, Nigeria, and other African nations — and how those legacies often appeared in the students of my commuter campus. Foregrounding these, it’s harder to write off the city as interchangeable with any other in the Corn Belt.

Historically, Omaha has looked to Cather’s words for help in establishing a sense of place. When I lived there, my local library was the Willa Cather Branch. There’s a Willa Cather elementary school and a Willa Cather playground. Despite living 200 miles from Red Cloud, many people in Omaha (like their fellow Nebraskans) have felt better represented in her fiction than in contemporary works like The Great Gatsby — where the Great Plains are a grim wasteland, a place to escape.

But it would be a mistake to portray Cather as some kind of saint of Midwestern culture. Her legacy is more complex than that. She left Nebraska for New York to make her way in the literary world. She also largely erased Native Americans in her writing and essentially celebrated white settlement on Indigenous lands. Her view of Midwestern uniqueness was hitched to pioneer exploitation.

We’re not beholden to that limited view. Instead, I see Cather’s work as a starting point that many writers have riffed on throughout the past century. The thread of her legacy that stands out to me now is the awakening of a Midwestern ecological consciousness, distinguishing the particularity of one place from another. That awareness offers another way to envision the future of a place, one away from evenly-spread amenities and toward a unique trajectory linked to local ecology and culture — a celebration of difference.

If I imagine standing at Glacier Creek Preserve now, I can look southeast toward downtown Omaha, north and west toward farmland, and south toward recently built subdivisions. Despite suburban sprawl, I wouldn’t mistake the view for St. Louis or Chicago. The sources of Omaha’s uniqueness haven’t been completely smothered. But the threats to grassland habitats are as dire as ever. Looking around at the little bluestem, switchgrass, and side-oats grama, I think about Cather’s hunch that if we could articulate the special character, the this–ness of a landscape, that might tell us something about how best to relate to that place. If writers and naturalists — myself included — could help more people see grasslands as vital, with inhabitants that have names and life histories, I wonder what new shape our communities might take.

Conor Gearin is a writer from St. Louis living in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Atlantic, The Millions, New Scientist, and The New Territory, where he is a contributing editor. He writes a newsletter called Possum Notes.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Omaha, Nebraska appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Old Burying Ground
Jaffrey, New Hampshire

By Catherine Seiberling Pond

In her first known correspondence from Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Willa Cather wrote to her brother Roscoe on a postcard from the Shattuck Inn, “I am working well in this lovely country.” It was 1917, and the acclaimed writer was 43 years old, mid-career, and making revisions to her novel, My Ántonia.

For her first few stays, Cather often wrote in a large canvas tent in the lower pasture of “High Mowing,” a nearby summer home. I first heard about Cather’s tent retreats and her association with the farm in the late 1970s from my best friend’s mother, an English professor and owner of the property for twenty-five years. I had recently read O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, both novels inspired by the Nebraska prairie and Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud, over 1,500 miles from Jaffrey.

Over the next three decades, Cather spent part of many years at “this quiet hotel in the woods,” as she described it in one letter, often with her partner, Edith Lewis. The sublime and solitary presence of Mount Monadnock loomed just to the west of the inn, and mornings of writing were followed by long walks in the afternoon. Cather’s time in Jaffrey was restorative and a needed place of “happy solitude” for her writing. Here she was able to work “in comfort and quiet” — something her busy and parallel life in New York seldom allowed.

In a 1945 letter to her brother Roscoe, Cather compared her rooms at a Maine inn where she was staying that summer with her teenage bedroom, still preserved in the Willa Cather Childhood Home in Red Cloud today, along with its original “rose bower” wallpaper. The room was also similar to her preferred third floor rooms at the Shattuck Inn:

“I have a funny little room in the attic here, with a sloping ceiling, like my ‘rose bower’ in our old first house. Do you remember? I can always work best in a low room under the roof. All my best books were written in Jaffrey N.H. in a little room where I could almost touch the ceiling with my hand.”

Cather wrote to Eleanor Shattuck Austermann only three months before her death, in January 1947. She had not been to Jaffrey for many years because of family illness and loss, but hoped to “drift back to the Shattuck Inn again,” which was not to be: “But I have never found any place where I could work in such peace and happiness as in the little rooms up in the top of the Shattuck Inn,” she wrote, “and I have often wished I were there…”

Cather once described being “homesick for New England” in the autumn, a trait that I share. Having spent much of my life in the region, it’s not hard to picture Jaffrey’s stunning foliage, or the invigorating air and azure skies of fall in New Hampshire — and the best sleeping weather of the year. Still, not everything is the same. The original Shattuck Inn has been torn down, though the Annex remains, now refurbished into condominiums.

A few years before Cather died, she wrote to a childhood friend that she was traveling to her “old resting place in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.” It would, indeed, become just that. After her death in 1947, she was buried at the Old Burying Ground behind the historic Jaffrey Meetinghouse. With availability always a question in the Colonial cemetery, her innkeeper friends, George and Eleanor Austermann, arranged for a plot near their own. No one knows exactly why Cather chose Jaffrey over Red Cloud, to where she often returned to visit dear family and friends, but I believe that her own letters reveal much of that answer. In 1972, Edith Lewis was buried alongside her — while she outlived Cather by twenty-five years, they had been together for almost forty.

The gravesite in the southwest corner is framed by white pines and an old stone wall. It is a place of pilgrimage for Cather enthusiasts — and for me, whenever I can return. Since we moved to Kentucky in 2008, I have often been homesick for my grandparents’ old Jaffrey farm, for the people and places of my childhood, and for the landscapes of New England. The Old Burying Ground, with its adjacent meetinghouse and classic village setting, provides sturdy mooring. Many family friends are also buried there, so visiting is now its own kind of homecoming.

The last time I stopped by Cather’s grave, I was on my way to visit my mother for what would be the last time before her death. It was autumn and the leaves were glowing, the air clear and intoxicating, and Mount Monadnock a comforting fixture against the bluest sky. Later I would learn that this was also Willa Cather’s favorite time to be in Jaffrey.

Other visitors leave small stones, flowers, even jewelry, and ponder the words on her granite headstone: “The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.” Cather’s writing is deeply connected to both the people she loved and the places where she lived and wrote. For me, it will forever illuminate the wonder of our collective human experience, starting with my first reading of My Ántonia and continuing into the cosmos with a quotation from it inscribed near the base of her headstone: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

We can only speculate, but the answer may be in the very passage from the novel that Cather edited on her first visit to Jaffrey thirty years before. Perhaps she just wanted to be buried in the place where she felt she had done her best work.

Catherine Seiberling Pond has written for Old-House Interiors, Victoria, Yankee, Literary Hub, and Rethink:Rural. She earned her master’s in historic preservation studies from Boston University and has been marketing coordinator for the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, since 2018, the centenary celebration of My Ántonia. She works remotely from her farm in Kentucky and is writing a memoir about family farms and homeplaces. After the past year, she will again welcome semi-annual trips across the prairie to Red Cloud and hopefully another pilgrimage to New Hampshire.

Photo courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Jaffrey, New Hampshire appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

The Fine Arts Building
Chicago, Illinois

By Jesse Raber

Chicago isn’t an iconic setting for Willa Cather, the great novelist of the prairies. Yet, in a sense, during Cather’s time Chicago writing was prairie writing. When H.L. Mencken crowned Chicago “The Literary Capital of the United States” in 1920, he credited the city’s literature to the “remote wheat-towns and far-flung railway junctions” of its hinterland. “The newcomers who pour in from the wheat lands,” he wrote, full of “elemental curiosity” and “prairie energy,” seek in the city’s cultural scene “some imaginative equivalent for the stupendous activity they were bred to.” Mencken’s description of country talent “pour[ing] in” to the city seems to imagine Chicago writing as a river fed by the vast “Middle Empire that has Chicago for its capital.”

But where Mencken, the consummate urbanite, saw brain drain, Cather sees back-and-forth circulation between country and city. Chicago drummers teach the townsfolk the latest songs in My Ántonia, and the South Dakota grande dame in A Lost Lady often entertains Chicago friends. The Chicago voice teacher Madison Bowers, in The Song of the Lark, trains soloists from across the Midwest and takes “long journeys to hear and instruct a chorus.” The closing paragraph of The Song of the Lark sums up the dynamic:

The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.

The prairie towns aren’t unsoiled streams flowing into the urban river; they are points in a “network” that regularly communicates, through Chicago, with a wider world.

Cather’s Chicago itself is a symbol of hypercirculation, a “blur of smoke and wind and noise” whose disorienting flux creates eddies of creativity. “In little towns,” Cather writes in Lucy Gayheart, “lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.” By contrast Chicago, with its uncaring crowds, allows Cather’s prairie-bred artists to make themselves secret nests. Rather than exposing them to a wider swath of humanity, the city helps them find themselves and their own kind.

The most memorable of these artistic aeries is the singer Clement Sebastian’s studio in the Fine Arts Building. Practicing there, Lucy Gayheart feels “it was as if they were on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist. They saw no one … heard no one; the city below was blotted out.” Located a few blocks south of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the Fine Arts Building has cultivated artistic tenants since 1898. A ten-story structure in the Richardsonian Romanesque style of rusticated stones and stately arches, in Lucy’s day it was the city’s literary epicenter, and many of its greatest occupants presented themselves as obscure “little” niches in the big boisterous city. There was the Little Room, an aesthetic society featuring Hamlin Garland and Harriet Monroe (among many others); Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, which faced obscenity charges for publishing parts of Ulysses; and Ellen von Volkenburg and Maurice Browne’s movement-launching Little Theater.

Today the Fine Arts Building still has some of that cloistral spirit. When I first went inside, during an open studio night, it was like stepping between worlds. Lush Art Deco murals cover the lobby walls, and the antique elevators have human operators. The upper floors are all dark wood trim and muted white paint, like the outside of a Tudor house. That evening, drifting between studios, each its own aesthetic universe, I bought a postcard-sized watercolor of Colorado pines, painted at the western fringe of Chicago’s old railroad kingdom.

Years later I returned to visit the new Dial Bookshop, named for the old magazine and decorated with portraits of Chicago writers, including fellow Fine Arts tenant L. Frank Baum. The store was lovely, but I wondered if this veneration of the building’s past meant that creativity had lapsed into nostalgia.  This question bothered me as I thought about what the Fine Arts Building represents today.

One evening, as I was brainstorming this vignette, I joined a six-foot-spaced circle around a fire pit on my friends’ lawn. “Does anybody happen to have any stories,” I asked, “about the Fine Arts Building?” It turned out they did. I heard about a filmmaker with an office there, working for years on a documentary about feuding martial artists. Another friend recalled her amazement at wandering into a violin-maker’s workshop — a luthier’s shop, she insists — while looking for a replacement guitar string. (The luthiers were unhelpful.) A third reminisced about how the old movie theater there casually mixed art house and mainstream films. Some of that old spirit of hidden wonders lives on, it seems. My favorite story, though, was a little older — about one friend’s dad who used to take the Greyhound there to see films that didn’t play in his hometown. He sometimes had to leave the movie early to catch the bus back to DeKalb, Illinois, way out in Chicago’s Middle Empire.

Jesse Raber is an Instructor at the Harvard Extension School and has also taught literature courses at several Chicago universities (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago). He is the co-creator of the Chicago Writing gallery at the American Writers Museum and is currently working on a literary history of Chicago.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Chicago, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.