- Willa Cather was here, was queer, get used to it.Why is it so hard for some people to let Willa Cather be queer, both to herself and the world? In Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather (2023), Benjamin Taylor treats Cather’s sexuality as an enigma. On Cather’s sexuality during her years as a student at the University of Nebraska, for example, he …
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- A tribute to Simon the HoundSimon the Hound came into my life in January 2015. My first basset hound, Helen the Hound, had died in September 2014, leaving Laci Basset, adopted in 2011. Simon’s age at the time I adopted him was estimated at 10 to 12 years old. He had been surrendered to the humane society in Muscatine, Iowa, …
- Things I missed, part 2I tormented myself by searching digital newspapers (more and more keep becoming available) and found two new items documenting Edith Lewis’s college years. First, I often wondered what Edith Lewis did on her vacations in college (traveling back to Nebraska would have been very expensive and time consuming), and lo and behold! There she is …
- So many cats and dogs in your acknowledgments.Yes there are. I’ve mostly had four cats and two dogs during all the time I was working on The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, and I’ve adopted several old dogs, which means lots of turnover. Let me introduce them in order of their adoption. Isobel, adopted 1988, …
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- Things I missedI may be able to correct the small factual errors and typos, but there are also things that I failed to incorporate that I wish I had. Nothing that changes anything important about the story I tell, just additional detail I wish I had incorporated. Edith Lewis’s Smith College Commencement weekend, June 1902 On p. …
Literary Historian and Biographer
