Willa Cather photographed by Carl Van Vechten, January 22, 1936. From Library of Congress Carl Van Vechten collection.

Happy Birthday to Willa Cather, who was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, 136 years ago today. In May 1925, Cather traveled to Brunswick, Maine, to present a lecture as part of Bowdoin College’s “Institute of Modern Literature.” As reported in the evening edition of  the Boston Globe, here’s an excerpt of the author’s thoughts on technique and the novel. (If you’re interested in reading more of Cather’s speeches, public letters, and interviews, browse the Willa Cather archives hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.)

“Technique, as it applies to a novel, is full of faults, as nearly all great novels have great blemishes from the standpoint of technique. Novels live by their plusses, not by their minuses. They live because of what they have, not because of what they lack. You cannot improve on the technique of a great writer, because his faults are necessary. Laboratory methods are best in science, but have no place in art.”

Learn more about Willa Cather and My Antonia from The Big Read educational materials.

Portrait of Willa Cather by Carl Van Vechten, 1936. From Library of Congress collection

Betty Kort is the former executive director of the Willa Cather Foundation. Based in Red Cloud, Nebraska, the foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the understanding and appreciation of the life, time, settings, and work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Kort is also the photographer-curator of Willa Cather and Material Culture, a traveling photography exhibition of select objects important in Cather’s life and work. In this interview excerpt, Kort talks about Cather’s  development as a novelist.

The. . . thing I would say about My Ántonia was that everything was an experiment. With O Pioneers! she took a big step in writing about immigrant populations, and no one was doing that. When [Cather] started out, I believe that she thought she probably had to write novels like people on the east coast were writing novels. And they were writing about sophisticated people in sophisticated settings.  Her first novel was a novel like that, Alexander’s Bridge, and it was not a particularly successful novel, at least in Cather’s eyes.  She had to come home to her roots, to what she knew best, and then she had to have the courage to write about common, ordinary people working the soil, and that took some time.  That took some courage. And she also had to figure out a way to do it that would be successful and would compete against what was being written at the time.

Hear more from Kort and others on Willa Cather and her work on The Big Read radio show for My Ántonia. Visit The Big Read calendar to find out where a Big Read celebration of My Ántonia is taking place near you.

Nebraska prairie by jasminedelilah from Flickr

Given his tenure as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2004-2006,  it’s fair to surmise that Ted Kooser knows a thing or two about inspiration. In Kooser’s case, much of that inspiration comes from Nebraska where he’s lived for more than 40 years. Here are some thoughts from the poet on Willa Cather, who also took great inspiration from the Cornhusker State. (Check out the audio guide  to hear more from Ted Kooser on Willa Cather and My Antonia.)

Well, [Willa Cather] really wanted to be a kind of Henry James, in a way. She went east , turning her back on [Nebraska]and got there and wrote some things and was fairly successful in that more elite place and way of writing and so on. Then the prairie books come along and, she has discovered this source of material from her experience. I think it was Flannery O’Connor who said once that you’ve had enough experience by the time you’re eight years old to write for the rest of your life, you know? So that, in a way, is what’s happening here. [Cather's] going back and looking at all that experience she had as a girl, and it’s become valuable to her in a way. It must have made her quite exotic among those people, you know, who were in Manhattan and so on.

Yesterday, the Arts Endowment announced 11 new NEA National Heritage Fellows , the best of the best of the nation’s artists working in the folk and traditional arts. Tradition is at the heart of many of the Big Read titles, from the rigid etiquette of “Old New York” in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Henry James’s Washington Square to the immigrant traditions that permeate Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. In the following literary moment, 2006 NEA National Heritage Fellow Charles M. Carrillo, a New Mexican anthropologist and santero (a carver and painter of images of saints), discusses one of the many traditional beliefs at the heart of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.

Whenever somebody tells me a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes me so mad I want to spit. This bastard canard has more than a thousand fathers, but the most interesting share of the blame lands on two men who should’ve known better. A sentence reading “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book” appears in the novel Fathers and Sons by, of all people, the great writer Ivan Turgenev. But we owe the first appearance of the foul phrase in its present form to one Arthur Brisbane. A newspaper editor from Buffalo, Brisbane worked for yellow journalism tycoon William Randolph Hearst, which already explains a lot. In March of 1911, in a speech before the Syracuse Advertising Men’s Club, Brisbane advised his listeners to “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”

Katie Richardson’s Big Read poster for Weatherford, Texas., has a majesty almost, but not quite, beyond words.

Let’s take a minute here to consider this publisher’s audience: namely, a room full of admen. He’s exhorting them to emphasize pictures over words in their advertising. Could it possibly have escaped this newshound’s attention that pictures, in addition to their putative thousand words’ worth, also tend to require more column inches to do them justice than print ads do? I’m inclined to doubt it. As a newspaperman, in other words, Brisbane had every reason — except the truth, that is — to want a room full of advertisers to go tell their clients that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” What he really meant, though, was “a picture is worth a thousand dollars.”

I bring all this up not just because I no longer have a newspaper editor of my own urging me to get to the point quicker, but also because I’ve just returned from Weatherford, Texas, where the poster art by local designer Katie Richardson accompanied all materials for a stylish, just-concluded Big Read of Cather’s My Ántonia. Is that gorgeous or what?

But it all would have gone for naught, save for the Herculean efforts of principal grantee Weatherford College’s Linda Bagwell. From the look of her, Linda couldn’t decide whether to celebrate, cry, or pass out from happy exhaustion at Wednesday’s finale, and she more or less split the difference among the three.

Linda didn’t pull off a successful Big Read alone; no grantee ever does. Spirited volunteers had spent the afternoon squiring me through the Doss Heritage and Cultural Center, an impressive, appropriately barnlike new museum of the West, lately hosting Cather expert Betty Kort’s traveling photo show “Willa Cather and Material Culture.”

I also lucked into a tour of the Douglas Chandor Gardens, a botanical wonderland landscaped by a 20th-century British portraitist to both the great — Roosevelt, Churchill — and the merely solvent. As I understand it, Chandor had followed his Titian-haired socialite bride home to her native Weatherford to settle, right after the necessary divorces became final. My only regret is that I had just missed The Big Read party there, and with it the shade of Cather presiding silently under the wisteria arbor.

Dozens more partners had pitched in all month, including everybody from the Weatherford Independent School District to Tesky Western Wear — all to make Linda’s job a little easier. By the dozens she invited them up on the stage of the college’s capacious Alkek Fine Arts Center for a commemorative final picture, until it almost might’ve seemed more sensible to leave them in the audience after all, and invite the photographer on stage instead.

Practically last but nowhere near least was Katie Richardson, shyly accepting a deserved and unreserved ovation for her spectacular poster. It wasn’t worth a thousand words, but it had helped rope most of Parker County into an unforgettable April and May with My Ántonia. That’s a miracle beyond counting.

Things ain’t what they used to be. Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. The Dodgers leaving Vero Beach. Warren Zevon dead. Reading down. The list goes on.

There’s a word for this type of melancholy, and it isn’t griping. It’s elegy, from the Greek elegos, meaning a poem lamenting a bygone era or someone lost. For as long as there have been people to say it, there have been people saying how soft we all used to have it — back when publishing was a gentleman’s profession, when ballplayers didn’t juice, when fire didn’t make the cave walls all sooty. Not many people know this, but right after the Big Bang, guys said to a bartender, “Sure was nicer when all matter was compressed into a single point no larger than this shotglass.”

The Big Read author John Steinbeck interrogated the impulse to lazy elegy in his other triple-decker classic besides The Grapes of Wrath, the elegiacally named East of Eden. In it the sheriff’s deputy and his boss are riding across the valley to grill Steinbeck’s hero, Adam Trask, about how his monstrous wife, Cathy, happened to shoot him in the shoulder. The deputy looks out at the land and says — with Steinbeck’s great ear picking up every last word — “Christ, I wish they hadn’t killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty my grandfather killed one up by Pleyto weighed eighteen hundred pounds.”

Steinbeck’s gift is to put into the deputy’s mouth a nostalgia that most of us feel at one time or another, and then to undercut it immediately. Sure, Julius misses the now-extinct California grizzly — but maybe if his own family hadn’t been so quick with a Remington, there might still be one or two left. Steinbeck doesn’t ridicule our elegiac reflex, but he’s far too smart not to point out the hypocrisy that often thrums under it like an aquifer.

Then again.

For almost as long as folks have been saying how soft we all used to have it way back when, there have been others who’ll say that’s a crock. They insist that everybody always thinks we’re living in, to invoke Thomas Pynchon, “the spilled, the broken world.” They like to write opinion pieces with elegiac quotes about how the automobile has ruined everything, or how insipid television is, and then – whoa, Nelly! – try to make you feel like an idiot for not guessing that the quote in question was written in 1910 or 1940, respectively. In other words, the world can’t be getting worse because folks thought the world was getting worse even when it was better, so how bad can it be?

Alas, there’s a logical flaw in this anti-elegy argument that wants exposing. Isn’t it just possible that the world has always been getting worse? That things seemed worse a hundred years ago because they really were, but that things seem worse now because they’re even worse than they were?

To which anyone might be forgiven for saying, “Thanks, and you have a nice day too.” I’m arguing no particular brief for either side. But it’s interesting to note that of the 21 fine novels to date on the Big Read list, elegies are conspicuous by their near absence.

Poetry may lend itself to elegy more than novels do, or than good novels do. As I look down the Big Read list, I see a lot more stories about what lousier lives we used to lead. A Lesson Before Dying, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Shawl, The Age of Innocence – not a lot of nostalgia there. Only the pretty happy childhoods in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and My Ántonia’s sweet prairie eventually plowed under – have a look at it now, Willa, and see what “plowed under” really looks like – sound like wistful sighs over yesteryear.

In a weird way, Fahrenheit 451 is the most elegiac book on the list. It warns us of a dystopian future without books, a future whose roots could already be glimpsed when Bradbury wrote it half a century ago. If anything, Montag’s story aches with a kind of nostalgia for the present — a useful phrase, into which my preliminary provenance inquiries have proven inconclusive.

Dubious speculation about this expression, or about all things elegiac, are most emphatically welcome at kipend@arts.gov. And now, this post isn’t what it used to be. It used to be unfinished…

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me…” — A Farewell to Arms

Having recently joined the Big Read team, I had some catching up to do — re-reading old favorites like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Death of Ivan Ilych; cracking open known but hitherto unread classics like The Age of Innocence and A Farewell to Arms; and diving into titles unfamiliar to me, Bless Me, Ultima and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Reading this material in rapid succession, your mind makes connections that it might not otherwise. One that sticks out to me is the proliferation of the card game bridge. In addition to the two quotes above, there was reference to bridge in another Big Read book that escapes me now (The Shawl? A Lesson Before Dying?).

I’ve never played bridge. None of my friends play bridge. My parents don’t play bridge. Maybe my Aunt Rosemarie plays bridge? If so, she’s my only connection to the game. What struck me was the casual way bridge is talked about in these books, woven into the background fabric of life. So much so that it is supposed to be the simplifying half of the metaphor for Catherine and Henry’s complex love affair. Bridge is assumed to be universal. Maybe today a writer would reference Sudoku or video games or another soon-to-be anachronistic entertainment.

[Disclaimer: I realize that bridge remains popular in some circle so, bridge players of America, please don’t flood David’s inbox with letters of protest, it’s merely that bridge has escaped my sphere.]

The prevalence of bridge in these great books begs question of how people spend their leisure time. As Reading at Risk showed, they’re not reading, and in my experience, they’re not playing bridge. It has been suggested that they are watching television, consuming digital media, and/or otherwise technologically occupied. This might be the case, but there are other considerations as well. Ivan is an aristocrat, Henry a wounded solider — they had plenty of time on their hands.

The thing about leisure time is that it’s a finite resource. We work most of the day, get home, have dinner, and then spend our 3 to 4 unclaimed waking hours decompressing with TV or with friends, going to the gym, or for some of us, reading. How can we persuade people they should spend more of their precious leisure time reading? It seems there are two modes of thinking on this. First, the Eat Your Vegetables school — reading is good for you — and second, the Reading is Rad school — My Ántonia is totally as much fun as Grand Theft Auto, dude. The trick, and what the Big Read is attempting to do, is to combine these two methods and take it a step further. Not only is reading good for you and fun, it goes beyond just you the reader. Reading can be a community event.

Bridge, unlike Solitaire, is a social game. It takes at least four people to play. Reading is more flexible. It’s for players 1 – 1 million. However you spend your leisure time, there are few activities that span millennia as popular choices. Reading is one; perhaps the only one that is timeless, good for you, good for others, and, in every sense, radical.

When I was in graduate school at San Diego State University, I took a seminar in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather that changed my life. The course changed me because it provided the chance to concentrate on the best novels of two truly exceptional writers; to compare their controversial lives and literary themes; and to do it with an excellent teacher and enthusiastic classmates — what could be better for a “Literature Specialist” like me?

But there was something missing. As a child growing up in North Hollywood, California, the childhood places of Willa Cather (Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley) and Edith Wharton (New York City, Italy, and France) seemed fascinating and exotic. Cather’s family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was ten, and Wharton bought land in Lenox, Massachusetts, to build her home, The Mount. Red Cloud and Lenox seemed as far away as Uganda or Switzerland to a young girl like me who traveled often in the realms of gold, but never on planes or trains. Yet because of the sensual, vivid way these writers described the plains of Nebraska, the valleys of Virginia, the bustle of New York, and the hills of Western Massachusetts in their fiction, all these unfamiliar places felt familiar through my imagination.

“This place of ours is really beautiful… the stillness, the greenness, the exuberance of my flowers, the perfume of my hemlock woods, & above all the moonlight nights on my big terrace, overlooking the lake…” –Edith Wharton in a letter to Bernard Berenson, August 6, 1911 Photo by Erika Koss

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, but for 2007 it was time to make the journey to Cather’s beloved prairie and Wharton’s first real home. My work on the Big Read materials for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence fueled this abiding desire to travel to Red Cloud and Lenox. But for reasons more personal than professional, I suddenly needed to physically inhabit these places that transformed two of my favorite writers — if only for a couple days.

Reader, imagine my joy to travel from Washington, DC, to Red Cloud, Nebraska, in March, where Betty Kort, Executive Director of the Cather Foundation, and I took a walk through Cather’s prairie. Then imagine my delight to travel to Lenox, Massachusetts, in July with Betty, where we met Stephanie Copeland, the President and CEO of the Mount, and ate lunch on that “big terrace” that faces Wharton’s splendidly restored gardens, under her unconventional green and white awning, which protected us from the unexpected rain. Imagine my excitement, when the wonderful Mount librarian, Molly McPhee, took Betty and me for a private tour into Wharton’s restored library, where I was allowed to hold her copy of the French translation of The Age of Innocence — bound by Wharton in green and yellow with “EW” inscribed on its leather cover! Imagine my pleasure when I slept for two nights in a beautiful home set in the quiet forest not far from the Mount, finally understanding why Wharton left her fashionable New York City and Newport homes to design, build, and decorate an isolated country estate of her own creation.

“If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land…I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven.” — from Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia Photo by Erika Koss

I hope Big Read organizers for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence will consider such a pilgrimage, and that high school teachers anywhere near Red Cloud or Lenox can afford to tackle the frustrating tasks of buses, chaperones, permission slips, and classroom time missed on required exams to give their students a first-hand experience with the sites that shaped these great American writers.

For although my passport now holds stamps from countries as far as Uganda and Switzerland, two places that I love best are right here in America.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery is to Canada what Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder are to the United States. And I have just returned from communing with her. As well as with Anne Shirely, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, and of course, Gilbert Blythe. I have been to Avonlea. I have been to Green Gables.

Somewhere in my growing up between Little Women and Little Men, and The Little House on the Prairie there was the little red-haired girl from Prince Edward Island (PEI) known to millions of girls around the world as Anne of Green Gables.

Anne Shirley was the creation of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who as a very little girl was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Cavendish, PEI, Canada following the death of her mother. Cavendish, and the nearby farmhouse of her elderly cousins, David and Margaret Macneill, became her models for the imaginary town of Avonlea and for Green Gables.

My husband, who can tell you anything you want to know about any character created by Ian Fleming, was happy to accompany me, and came away curious enough to want to read Anne of Green Gables. (He’s also happy to come shopping with me and he does the dishes. Can you say “Prince”? But I digress.)

What’s gratifying about a trip to Cavendish is that for the 12-year old girl in all of us (yes, all of us.), it’s all there, just as you imagined it. You can hike through the Haunted Woods, stroll down Lovers’ Lane, and walk through Green Gables admiring the tidy kitchen, the spartan bedrooms (people not only were shorter then, they had much less closet space and nothing so tacky as a home entertainment center.) and the well-appointed sewing room. The gardens are in full bloom, the barn is equipped to house a cow and make turnip mash — don’t ask — and the hayloft is stocked for winter.

Down the path through the Haunted Woods lies the actual home site of Lucy Maud Montgomery. The house is gone, but the foundation is there, as are the gardens and interpretive installations detailing her life there. (Anne of Green Gables isn’t on the Big Read list of selections, but wouldn’t it make an excellent young readers’ companion to My Antonia , which is?)

Green Gables in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Photo by Towle Tompkins

As a member of the NEA’s Big Read Team (I’m the one who talks to books and the characters in them, remember?), it was exciting to see so many people from across Canada and the United States flocking to this literary landmark. The license plates in the parking lot were from as far away as Manitoba and British Columbia and as near as PEI and Maine. (That one was ours.) We at the NEA often talk about the transformative power of literature. Here’s a wonderful example of just that. People who read a book, most of them years ago, were moved and excited enough by that book to travel to the ends of the continent to connect with its origins and its author.

And to my knowledge, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne Shirley achieved this fame without ever checking into rehab for multiple DUIs.