The death of James Joyce’s only grandson has revealed the contempt with which the Joyce family viewed scholars, critics, and would-be biographers. The New York Times story about Stephen Joyce quotes his famous grandfather saying of such novels as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that he had been determined to “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

Having just published my 40-year contemplation on Willa Cather’s “enigmas and puzzles,” I can say with confidence that her own mysterious ways with future biographers in mind did not reflect a contempt for scholarship or a desire to insure her own notoriety. Joyce’s family had good reasons for wanting to keep his correspondence from being widely read. His letters are filthy. Cather’s are not.

Indeed, Willa Cather did not have a vulgar bone in her body. She hoped for "decorum" as part of her afterlife, thus the man she chose to write her “authorized” biography was E.K. Brown, English professor at the University of Chicago, a most decorous Canadian who had come to her attention after writing a scholarly homage in celebration of her 70th birthday for the Yale Review. Her feeling that Professor Brown understood her literary legacy did not mean that she wanted her executor and lifelong partner, Edith Lewis, to give him carte blanche when it came to delving into what she might have meant when she referred to "the thing not named."

Though she did once state the opinion that it always takes at least a century after an author’s death for their legacy, if any, to be fully known, Cather’s reluctance to have her letters published or quoted was not a shell game she was playing (although Edith Lewis, perhaps unwittingly, turned it into that). I have come to believe that Willa Cather had a sincere wish to protect her remaining siblings as well as her nieces and nephews from having questions posed to them that she knew they could not answer. These were not questions about her personal life but about her biological and medical realities. Most questions about what had happened to her at birth or during her early years she would have been hard-pressed to answer herself, since so much of her medical history was likely hidden in silence or confusion. 

Long Road from Red Cloud: Life Lessons from Willa Cather explores untold reasons for the secrecy that surrounded Willa Cather. Of two early researchers, Mildred Bennett and Bernice Slote, who studied her extensively enough to grasp the magnitude of her story, only Bennett tried to (gingerly) publish what she knew in a book. Slote shared her astute analysis of Willa Cather in the occasional paper read at a conference, or in editorial comments and introductions to collections of Cather’s work,  although she had hoped to write a full biography, since Bennett’s covered only Cather’s childhood, and E.K. Brown died before he could finish his.

A great many other books have been written about Willa Cather in the meantime, but the “definitive” biography has yet to be done. If Doris Grumbach had been allowed to complete hers, a more realistic view of Cather might have emerged, much sooner. But by then Edith Lewis had died, in 1972 (and Bernice Slote, in 1983), and a general panic had taken hold that Cather might be “outed” if Grumbach were allowed to write a full biography. It had, after all, been Willa Cather's only option in life, to live as what appeared to be a "garden variety lesbian," although the full story of her identity is much more complicated than that.

As it turned out, Grumbach herself was “outed” as  a lesbian in Cather circles, and her hope of finishing the project faded quickly. She told me in 1986 that she had given up trying to “crack the code” in Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather’s home town, although Grumbach understood the necessity of Cather’s own coded language, living as a pseudo-closeted lesbian in Greenwich Village during the era of Comstock Laws that impounded Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness the minute it arrived in New York Harbor. The reality of Cather’s life was much grimmer than most literary scholars would grasp for generations to come, owing to the narrowness of most academic research, and to Cather’s own determination that any lasting fame must be from her worth as an author, not as the "morpheedite" that her home town seemed determined to reveal her to be.

I was barely out of graduate school in 1979 when I made the first of a decade-long series of research trips to Nebraska and Mildred Bennett decided she could trust me with details she had discovered in her research but could not publish. Mildred and I could talk about the "Pound Letters" that revealed Cather's first love affair with a woman, but we never talked about the deeper secret in Cather's life, although Mildred made sure I would hear about it from a trusted relative of a Cather childhood friend. A great deal of medical and gender-related research was required, on my part, before I could approach the possibility that the local lore might be true. It is a subject still verboten in Cather Studies and in Red Cloud. Although the now-accepted term "intersex" is perfectly respectable, the most frequent Google search since my book launched two months ago is “Willa Cather as hermaphrodite.”

So we still have a way to go before the “ghosts” Mildred Bennett discovered in Willa Cather’s psyche can be put to rest. As Cather once said, with ironic humor, “It is well that the dead sleep soundly.” She knew, as she made her journeys to the Mayo Clinic, seeking out the mysteries hidden in her body, she would someday have to make peace with her own "intimations of immortality."

A Willa Cather scholar of some renown told me recently, "Yours is a book I wish I'd had the courage to write. But only you could have written it." 

This is true of any book we pour ourselves into. Authenticity depends upon years of research and analysis, still more research, and live interviews when we can get them. I am lucky to have started my Cather research in the late 1970s, when some of her relatives and close friends were still alive and somewhat willing to talk. 

My own category of "Books I Wish I'd Written" has always been eclectic. I have former President Barack Obama to thank for the most recent addition: Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. Although Obama didn't say he ranked them in any order, it turned up third on his Favorite Books of 2019. 

Watching the video of Casey Cep's reading at Politics and Prose soon after her first book started to hit the bestseller lists, I was first struck by how young she is, to have done four years of research on a book only tangentially about Harper Lee, but absolutely about Alabama, and to have grasped, from the get-go, that it was all about Alabama, just as my big book (which I hope to finish in 2020) must be all about Florida.

Selection of material is crucial when you've got a story to tell. It's the historic details Casey Cep chose that make her book shine. For example, she tells us that Harper Lee inscribed a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird for First Lady Roslyn Carter in 1978 by quoting a verse from one of the Hymns to Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace." 

I was destined to fall in love with Furious Hours, not only because Obama loved it, but because it mentions three of my favorite southern women: Harper Lee, Roslyn Carter, and Zora Neale Hurston. Finally back at work on my 20-year project, examining the Florida Journeys of twelve women authors, I am soaking up every new detail published about Hurston, and there have been a lot, in recent years.

Despite her claims about being born in the all-black town of  Eatonville, most Zora Neale Hurston fans know by now that she was born in Alabama, not Florida. That's why I can include her in a book about women transported to the Sunshine State, most in adulthood, but three as children. Hurston fits that category, along with Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Rose Wilder Lane. 

As Casey Cep shows, Zora Neale Hurston had Alabama in her bones, although her family moved to Eatonville when Zora was too young to remember much about her actual birthplace of Notasulga. But she knew instinctively, if she wanted to learn anything about voodoo without going all the way to Haiti, she had to go back to Alabama. 

Cep's book is ostensibly about a voodoo preacher named Willie Maxwell, who created mayhem for many, and the brave man who shot him. It was the murder trial that brought Harper Lee to Alexander City, Alabama, researching what she thought would be her next book, perhaps her last book.
Casey Cep tells the story as well as any good novelist would do, except it's not fiction. Thus the reason for my admiration, bordering on envy, for the way she brings it all to life. 

Not all of my "Books I Wish I'd Written" fall into this category. One of the very first to inhabit the list, more than forty years ago, was a little red book called When Found, Make A Verse Of  by Helen Bevington.

I had no idea back in pre-internet days who Helen Bevington was, and I sill don't. It has never occurred to me to Google her until now. Her little red book has stayed on my list, regardless, but it turns out she wrote other books considered more important than my favorite. One of her novels was even short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. That same book, Charley Smith's Girl, was banned by the library in Bevington's hometown of Worcester, New York, because it told the story of a Methodist minister's wife divorcing him for adultery, and Bevington happened to be that very minister's daughter.

I don't know if I'll get to read this marvelous writer's novel, or any of her other books. My time here grows short. But I do like knowing that she taught one of my other favorite writers, Reynolds Price, who credited her poetry class at Duke with teaching him "that poetry was the prime means by which the English language took to purify and communicate itself most eloquently."  I'd say her little red book did the same thing.

Perhaps every writer, when we're lucky, gets to write the one book they were meant to write in their lifetime. Willa Cather considered that book, out of her twelve novels, to be My Antonia.

I have some more books in me, but I may not get them finished. If I do or I don't, I think I shall always feel that the one book I was meant to write is the one my kind colleague said only I could have written:  Long Road from Red Cloud. Its Life Lessons from Willa Cather makes the closest to poetry of her situation that I could come.  There's an audio I recorded myself (with a how-to on audio books soon to come), an e-book, a paperback, and next a hardcover edition for libraries and collectors. We are compiling a list of independent bookstores throughout the U.S. which will be serving as brick-and-mortor distributors for this book and those to come. If my strength returns and I am able eventually to do a bit of a reading tour, they will be my first stops, along with a few of the hundreds of libraries and museums where I've done Chautauqua-style portrayals of wonderful women authors over the years. If you're a bookseller or a librarian who would like to get in on that, let us know.

Has it really been six years since I let this old website go to pasture? Time to revive, so I'm told, to let people know that I'm still here, for a bit longer, and finally the books are starting to be birthed, one by one, or two by two, being the Gemini that I am. Just sorting out 40 years of research materials is mind-boggling enough. I really did make my first Cather trip to Nebraska in 1979, by train from DC to Hastings. Vi Borton met me at the station in the wee hours to take me on to Red Cloud. Last fall I did my final research pilgrimage to Cather country in the same way: first to Red Cloud, then circling back to Lincoln. What happened there is all in the book. I am as astonished as anyone. 
On March 30, 2018, the results of an ultrasound revealed that I had a mass growing in my lymph system that had already metastasized, so more tumors would follow. I decided because of the location(s) that I would not spend the rest of the spring and summer in and out of hospitals, trying to recover from the treatment itself. I had been working for many years on a book requested by the editors of University Press of Florida's History and Culture Series, but not being an academic with a regular paycheck, I had to pay the bills on the Chautauqua circuit for as long as I could. Now it was time to dip into my small reserves, finish as many manuscripts as possible, and get them out into the world. Many people have helped, in many ways. The Cather book is almost ready, teaching many lessons in its gestation process, making the way smoother for Florida Journeys. Feel free to chime in, join the the mailing list, or otherwise stay in touch. 

Amazon is egalitarian, as a book marketplace.  Call it the great equalizer.  Take the book above, for example, from a university press, written in thoroughly academic language. Few will ever read it, although it is deserving of the bestseller list.  Dr. Heather Russell has something to say about America and race; something valuable, timely and timeless.
I met her a couple of months ago in her role as lead scholar for the Zora Neale Hurston teacher seminar funded by the NEH at Teaching Florida, an umbrella group of the Florida Humanities Council.  She is a brilliant thinker, and she's written an important book.

I do my part to help get the word out by reviewing it on Amazon, by showing it here, and by being very glad that at least its publisher had the good sense to give it a Kindle edition, reasonably priced, although well over the norm of $9.99.   The very readers who should have access to it - students of history and literature - probably won't download it at $14.72, unless it is required reading.  But at least Heather Russell's many years of work is available to an increasingly wide audience of shameless e-readers - people who read books primarily on their Kindles, Nooks, smart phones, and tablets.

On the other hand, here is another book that almost everyone who cares at all about Florida will probably read, and if they believe it, will come away feeling horrible about the place.  T.D. Allman does quite a number on his home state.  The only comfort is that much of it is not "The True History of the Sunshine State, " as his subtitle claims.

If you hear him speak before you read the book, you will know that he did not do one speck of primary research.  He just put together ten years' worth of internet browsing, from his residences in Paris and New York.  It shows in his notes - all secondary sources - many of them shoddy.  Any middle school or high school student would be held to higher standards on a history project or term paper.

If you only read his misinformation on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - you'll  get a belly full of malarkey.  He misquotes Stowe and misses altogether her most important writings on Florida.  He makes wildly inaccurate claims about Rawlings in a variety of arenas, seeming not to know that she wrote anything  more than The Yearling.  Click on his cover to read my very watered-down review (if you missed it up above).  Amazon will not allow much in-depth criticism, but if you want to read my two earlier and very meaty drafts, let me know.

As you'll see, facts never get in the way of Allman's determination to make Florida seem like a hot mess.  Just remember the boast he made on WLRN in Miami, when asked how and where he went about discovering the so-called "True History of the Sunshine State" -   

"I'm proud to say, I did no primary research for this book."   Enough said. 

This is a vintage column from my once-weekly efforts for the Bolivar Herald-Free Press, first published on October 14, 1984, after the Bush-Ferraro V.P. debate.  Thanks to the Missouri Historical Society, which keeps old newspapers in its archives, these dated but sometimes historically interesting jottings will be available in book/ebook form soon.

Of all collegiate contact sports, the one most likely to lead to law school is Argumentation & Debate.  Few call it "argumentation" because most strive for the more refined art of "debating." What the political candidates are doing this year, however, is easy to recognize.  It is as my mother used to say about a place in town called the So-and-So Bar & Grill.

"More barring than grilling, " she would declare, crossing her arms grimly.  Following Mama's system of analysis, this election year we have more arguing than debating.

In order to have a debate, both parties have to agree to stick to the topic.  It also helps if debate participants have some kind of organizational pattern for the crib notes they wish to present as gospel.

Our esteemed debate coach, Bob Derryberry, called it the flow of the argument.  You had to be able to follow it by keeping a "flow chart."   Judges often agreed with rebuttals where you could hold up your legal pad and say, "My opponent had no substantive points to make.  Therefore, my flow chart is empty."

I dare you to try to keep a flow chart on the recent arguments being passed off as debates on national TV.  Not by paying rapt attention to the broadcast, nor by a close reading of the transcripts, is it possible to follow the candidates or the reporters who are in charge of whatever thinking might go on during the verbal jousting match.

That the American people seem willing to let their intelligence be trampled in this fashion is not the point.  No contest between politicians has ever been expected to be intelligent, or even digestible.  You might as well turn two country preachers loose on the subject of who killed Jesus.

So far, the presidential candidates have sounded more like evangelists than a nasal Norwegian and a badly cast Hollywood actor.   They can hardly be blamed, when they are forced to respond to questions about born-again Christianity and abortion as if these are valid government issues.

The vice presidential candidates at least looked as if they had had a good night's sleep, although President Reagan's complaint that the Democrats use an unfair degree of stage make-up must be taken seriously.   Can it be true that the gipper never got so much as a touch-up during all his years in the saddle?

Lies both cosmetic and statistical tend to glare under the debate spotlight.  Laugh them off, voters.  If we can't laugh at these bozos, the Moral Majority may well take over the rest of the government.  Whatever you do, avoid taking seriously most of what they say, especially when they sound as strident as George Bush sounded in his Thursday night hysterics.

True, he felt that he had to make up for Reagan's Sunday night stupor, but 90 minutes at the same pitch is too much for even die-hard Republicans.   Dr. D. would say, "That's why we take turns speaking.  Bless our hearts, we musn't wear out our welcome."

GOP authorities now protest that the President was in the odd position of knowing too much to be coherent.  From the sounds of it, the Vice President knew too little.

Anyone who has ever debated in a semi-final round, as the candidates are doing in front of millions this year, can empathize with them, to a degree.   Sometimes you know you have the better evidence, but it won't roll off your tongue.   You can't find where you put it, in your notes, or in the dark recesses of your mind.  

Geraldine Ferraro knew what she had to do.  She did not misplace one piece of evidence.  After all, a woman must be twice as good, when competing with men, to even stay in the contest.

For many Americans, Vice President Bush shamed himself when he refused to give the Congresswoman the dignity of her title.  Every time he began with, "Ms. Ferraro, let me help you understand, " women everywhere gritted our teeth, wanting her to have a come-back, but knowing that she risked being called "bitchy" if she said too much.

Congresswoman Ferraro pulled it off, with just the right touch.  She finally called him on his condescending tone, getting wild applause after  saying, mildly and calmly, "I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your  patronizing attitude."

Only minutes after the debate ended, the all-male panel declared Bush the winner.  He  swaggered around, bragging that he "kicked a little ass."  Historically speaking, those of us who will never forget that debate know that for us, it had a very different outcome.  

I wish you could have seen her, perched on the barnyard gate, cane pole in hand, making sure all the cows moved "dreckly along."  She was something to behold when she joined my brother and me for a game of softball in the pasture.   She could hit harder and throw farther than either of us.  My mother.

She would be embarrassed to know that I now quote her more often than Shakespeare, more often, even, than Flannery O'Connor.   She never thought much of herself.  That's the way with mothers.

She died in 1980, a fact that belies the strength of her presence.  Living 32 years without her has not diminished the 25 years in which she was a constant in my life, even after I moved away from Missouri.  She loved to hear them announce over the loud speaker in her nursing home "Mrs. Steinshouer - your daughter from Washington is calling."

Some things cannot be said over the telephone.  I had never had the  luxury of slow, leisurely conversation with my mother until she was hospitalized, wired to a heart monitor, and I flew in from DC to spend a week with her.  I spent every day there, feeding her special things and asking her questions about her life.   I was finally old enough to know what questions to ask.   I wanted to know what she had been told about the Trail of Tears, the route her mother's people had taken that ended with them in southwest Missouri instead of Tallequah, Oklahoma.  I wanted to know about her sister, my Aunt Ruby, who died mysteriously in 1946, her four children left at the mercy of foster care and finally adoption.  My Mom never got over the fact that she couldn't take and raise those kids.  She already had too many children of her own.

Up until then, Mama had kept me at the kind of fond arm's length so typical of a reticent country woman.  When she knew she was dying, something seemed to let go in her, and she could tell me the truth of Ruby's death from a back alley abortion.  Even while we acknowledged that talking had never come easily to us, that our lives had never meshed very well, she spoke with ease and clarity, although her voice was weak with illness.

It was amazing to hear her say "I love you" for the first time, and to hold her hand, also  for the first time.  That was the last time I saw her.

I spent most of my high school years being ashamed of my mother because she had a very limited education, seldom wore shoes, and said "shore instead of "sure."  Somewhere in college, I began to appreciate who she really was - tough as nails with a keen wit and a yen for a lively spat.   She could also be gentle as summer rain, when she needed to, when my father or uncle went on a Bible rant and all she could do was look at her children, ordered to be seen and not heard. 

I remember so well the smile in my mother's eyes, at those times when she was also forbidden to speak, but wanted to let us know that it would soon be over, and we would be alone again, offspring of an itinerant preacher who was often not at home.  All the tools for survival I would have, I learned during those times when she could teach us medicine ways with nature (oh the bitter brews she concocted, digging up roots to boil for various ailments), and how to fancy-dance with the radio.

When I graduated in 1973, last of her seven daughters, the FHA Chapter of Pleasant Hope High School held a special evening in honor of the mother of all those future homemakers.  By that time, she had to use a cane to get around.  In a few more years, it was a walker, and finally she just sat on the edge of the bed most of the time, needing a wheel chair in order to go the bathroom.   But she never lost the desire to get up and cook a pot of beans, and she never forgot how to milk a cow or throw a softball.

She never saw Paris or Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., but she was thrilled that I had.  On this Mother's Day, I wish I could bring her an orchid.  I wish I could give my mother a few more years and a little less corn to hoe.


(excerpted from Letters to Bolivar:  Columns in the Bolivar Herald-Free Press, 1981-84, soon available as an e-book.)

Like revisiting old friends (and in some case, friends with whom I no longer have anything in common), I have recently gone through two volumes of old poems, throwing out what I could not bear to put back in circulation and completely rewriting others.  A few were still good enough to be left intact - a very few.

I think it's called "building a platform," this releasing of old writings to pave the way for new ones.  So far it's been fun, albeit sometimes  poignant to read things written for or about people who were very much alive and now aren't.

I'm writing this from The Villages, where I did Chautauqua last night, combining two of my most popular characters for snowbird season in Florida:  Laura Ingalls Wilder and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.  The Lifelong Learning College actually made money on me, with nearly 200 paying customers.  My groupies were there to fill up the first couple of rows and take me to dinner.  Many thanks to Beth Willoughby and her "On the Go Girls" for always making me feel like a celebrity.  As usual the "cast party" after the show was full of lively conversation and delicious food.

Much appreciation to Dawn Tripp, who has been bringing me to The Villages for years, always with good humor and patience, since I nearly always get lost.  The population up here has grown to 85,000.  It's bigger than Ocala, fronting on three counties.  I can't explain it - all I can say is that people sure seem happy here - not a bad way to sprint into the dying of the light.  Might as well, eh?  (Nice to see some Canadian friends in the audience last night, too.)

Now waiting in my room for a reporter from Sarasota to call for an interview about the world premiere of "Marjory and Marjorie," coming up at the end of the month.  Or is he calling about "America at War," also in Sarasota, next week?  I guess I'll find out.

Life is such a mix, of darkness and light, sunshine and rain.  The drive up here last night was arduous, through slippery rain and winter traffic which produced a couple of serious accidents and made a two-hour drive last closer to five hours - lots of rehearsal time.  I always run lines in the car, glad to no longer get strange looks from other drivers.  I just put my earpiece on and they think I'm talking on the phone.

I've enjoyed having my hair a little longer, especially when I was in Omaha recently for the planning of the Free Land Chautauqua, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Homestead National Monument.  But now it's make way for Gertrude Stein and people calling me "sir" at the checkout.  I must remember to pack the dangling earrings.