this very concept has a lot of people running scared. I watch my friends in publishing, both those who write and those who put writing into print. I have long been fascinated with both. Perhaps it comes from being privy to conversations between Willa Cather and her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet. HM was her first publisher, up to One of Ours. She left them to take her chances with a totally new name on the scene in 1922: Alfred A. Knopf. One big reason for the change was that she didn't like the covers HM insisted on using for O Pioneers, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia. They were brown. She wanted green. Perhaps she was a tad sensitive about being pigeon-holed as the author of a new genre in American fiction, something sarcastic ex-patriots with names like Hemingway and Stein were already calling "the novel of the soil."
Cather’s era of publishing is long-gone and yet I covet those conversations about the covers she wanted for her books. Houghton Mifflin had lost her confidence because they insisted on making her books look like “big clods of dirt.” She pulled a joke on Greenslet when she first submitted what became her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours, and titled it Claude, the name she had decided to give her protagonist because it was the closest she could get to naming a book exactly how she thought it looked.
Book collectors these days can tell original Cather editions across the room at antiquarian book sales by whether they have the telltale brown covers of Houghton Mifflin or the spring green covers of the Knopf editions (hand-picked by the author). I have inherited Cather's foolish notion that an author should be able to choose how one's books will be presented.
More than a decade ago, I tried to convey this to my would-be acquisitions editor at a university press from which I had received a request for a book on women authors in Florida. She assured me that would never happen. (I wanted each of the eight or nine women in the book to be represented on the cover. She stated in no uncertain terms that they would use one image and one image only, and it wouldn't be of my choosing). I took two steps back and I've been stepping away ever since. Although it's meant a long delay in that book's birth process, I'm glad that Cather's independent spirit is still alive in me, for it caused me to carry it full term instead of giving in to a premature delivery, which works fine for babies but produces slightly less than admirable books.
Down through the years, I have lived a Parnassus-on-Wheels kind of life, carrying the best, most succinct, revealing words of dead authors in my head for the sake of revealing said author’s personality to audiences who still hang on their every word although they’ve been dead since 1947, in Cather’s case. I recite the poetry of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, supposedly dead since 1953, and realize from the looks on people’s faces that MKR is more alive than ever, as long as her poems sing.
Chautauqua is the most alive thing I know. And it has a chance of lasting for a bit, I think, with the advent of something called the enhanced e-book. As I have rounded the corner toward sixty, I have finally decided to commit my fiercely protected live performances of these authors to one shot at posterity. For remembrance, for my grandchildren Noah and Aria, for my great-nieces Amber Jo and Abigail and my great-nephew Joshua; for yet-unborn children of my niece Julia and the people in my audiences, usually men, who have whispered “I hope you live forever," I will leave behind, time permitting, one small captured moment of each character I have portrayed, along with some things she might have said on any given day in her one beautiful unique life.
For the first time in publishing history, it seems possible to have just the right cover, just the right selection of words and images into narrative, and something Willa Cather would never have agreed to – a recorded moment, in audio or video or both. This seems to be the wave of the near future. I hold my breath and cross my fingers and hope to be riding that wave, in my own offbeat way.
But first, The Woman’s Book of Psalms is in its birth throes. My dear friend Theresa Coley-Kuadio has taught me the best practice of midwifery: it takes the time it takes. You can step away, now and again, for a few minutes or even hours, but not too far away to get back at just the right moment, to be a guide, watching it through and cutting the umbilical cord to usher this new being into the world that awaits it.
Other midwives for this book – Campbell Welch, Ann Simas Schoenacher, Sally Roesch Wagner – thank you for the seeds of prayer, idea, and history that have nurtured it through to completion. Sisterhood is powerful.
Cather’s era of publishing is long-gone and yet I covet those conversations about the covers she wanted for her books. Houghton Mifflin had lost her confidence because they insisted on making her books look like “big clods of dirt.” She pulled a joke on Greenslet when she first submitted what became her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours, and titled it Claude, the name she had decided to give her protagonist because it was the closest she could get to naming a book exactly how she thought it looked.
Book collectors these days can tell original Cather editions across the room at antiquarian book sales by whether they have the telltale brown covers of Houghton Mifflin or the spring green covers of the Knopf editions (hand-picked by the author). I have inherited Cather's foolish notion that an author should be able to choose how one's books will be presented.
More than a decade ago, I tried to convey this to my would-be acquisitions editor at a university press from which I had received a request for a book on women authors in Florida. She assured me that would never happen. (I wanted each of the eight or nine women in the book to be represented on the cover. She stated in no uncertain terms that they would use one image and one image only, and it wouldn't be of my choosing). I took two steps back and I've been stepping away ever since. Although it's meant a long delay in that book's birth process, I'm glad that Cather's independent spirit is still alive in me, for it caused me to carry it full term instead of giving in to a premature delivery, which works fine for babies but produces slightly less than admirable books.
Down through the years, I have lived a Parnassus-on-Wheels kind of life, carrying the best, most succinct, revealing words of dead authors in my head for the sake of revealing said author’s personality to audiences who still hang on their every word although they’ve been dead since 1947, in Cather’s case. I recite the poetry of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, supposedly dead since 1953, and realize from the looks on people’s faces that MKR is more alive than ever, as long as her poems sing.
Chautauqua is the most alive thing I know. And it has a chance of lasting for a bit, I think, with the advent of something called the enhanced e-book. As I have rounded the corner toward sixty, I have finally decided to commit my fiercely protected live performances of these authors to one shot at posterity. For remembrance, for my grandchildren Noah and Aria, for my great-nieces Amber Jo and Abigail and my great-nephew Joshua; for yet-unborn children of my niece Julia and the people in my audiences, usually men, who have whispered “I hope you live forever," I will leave behind, time permitting, one small captured moment of each character I have portrayed, along with some things she might have said on any given day in her one beautiful unique life.
For the first time in publishing history, it seems possible to have just the right cover, just the right selection of words and images into narrative, and something Willa Cather would never have agreed to – a recorded moment, in audio or video or both. This seems to be the wave of the near future. I hold my breath and cross my fingers and hope to be riding that wave, in my own offbeat way.
But first, The Woman’s Book of Psalms is in its birth throes. My dear friend Theresa Coley-Kuadio has taught me the best practice of midwifery: it takes the time it takes. You can step away, now and again, for a few minutes or even hours, but not too far away to get back at just the right moment, to be a guide, watching it through and cutting the umbilical cord to usher this new being into the world that awaits it.
Other midwives for this book – Campbell Welch, Ann Simas Schoenacher, Sally Roesch Wagner – thank you for the seeds of prayer, idea, and history that have nurtured it through to completion. Sisterhood is powerful.
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