Why I (Almost) Live at the P.O.

I keep thinking of a favorite story by Eudora Welty as I stand in line this holiday season, trying (usually in vain) to send copies of my new book, Letters to Bolivar, to friends and relatives. Last year, when I was much better able to stand for reasonable periods of time, I sent very few copies of Long Road from Red Cloud. Everybody I know, it seems, is eager to read my book of newspaper columns, although most of them were written almost 40 years ago. Not so many people clamored to read Long Road, even diehard Cather fans and scholars, because frankly, it deals with a subject few people want to think about, much less read about: those born with one or more intersex conditions, also known as DSDs (differences or disorders in sex development).
I am grateful that six months after the book's publication, the judges of Book Fest's International Book Awards awarded it first place in Biography, so the book will eventually get read more and more, and perhaps even taught and talked about. I doubt that I'll live long enough to ever be invited to hold forth on my theories about Willa Cather's gender dysphoria (I could have done it easily via Zoom in the the era of COVID-19), but I do have more to say on the subject because I continue to educate myself about DSD, a new term being bandied about just in the past year, including this article in the  Scientific American: Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes is Overly Simplistic. 
I continue to be fascinated by the approach/avoidance techniques practiced by the Cather community. A vintage Christmas card signed "Willie" (a lifelong habit when she was writing to old friends and family) appears briefly, then disappears. There will always be fleeting glimpses of who she was, or might have been. Of course, the most important thing is who she became. But for me, her story is made ever richer by studying all the myriad ways  she found of expressing herself, at different ages and to different people - strangers as well as familiars. These photos are from her seeking period - seeking the Willa she must become from the Willie she had been.