In Conversation with Willa Cather

Abstract Willa Cather’s art is famously uncategorizable; her novels do not behave quite like other novels. Written back and forth in dialogue between the two authors, this book explores the many ways her radical originality is quietly manifest, with no fanfare or explanation on her part. She is not much interested in plots; rather she works by juxtaposition, leaving it up to the reader to feel the vibrations between one situation and another. Nor is she interested in creating consistent character in the usual sense; her people are quite fluid as they appear and reappear in different phases of their stories. But she is deeply interested in the long-term trajectory of lives. Nearing middle age when she began her life as a novelist, Cather thought of lives as long arcs of change, in which success and failure are equally fraught, and one might shift quickly into the feeling of the other. The authors discover and celebrate Willa Cather’s subtle shifts of mood and perspective as they appear in Cather’s numinous landscapes of light and in her characters’ minds. Working from within her own terms, they put the odd shapes and silences of her books in conversation with her letters, interviews, and other writings about the art of fiction. The book was written both for Cather specialists and for the many readers who remember and love her work, an audience increased after the 150th anniversary celebrations in 2023 of Cather’s birth.