Red Cloud Weekend Set for High Plains: October 1-3, 2010by Dr. Susan Maher, Chair of English,
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Sigma Tau Delta chapters at Ft. Hays State University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha are co-sponsoring a service and educational weekend in Red Cloud, Nebraska, hometown of American author Willa Cather. The event begins Friday evening, October 1, 2010, and ends Sunday morning, October 3, 2010. Chapters across the High Plains (and other regions) are invited to participate. Friday evening participants will gather in the beautifully restored Opera House to meet each other and to discuss Cather’s great short story “Old Mrs. Harris.” We will meet our host families, who are opening their homes to Sigma Tau Delta students and chapter sponsors. A guest scholar or two will also be present to provide context for Cather’s biography and her story, “Old Mrs. Harris.” Saturday will be a full day that will include a town and country tour of Cather sites as well as a service project with the Cather Foundation (to be determined). The Red Cloud countryside, near the Nebraska/Kansas border and the Republican River, is particularly beautiful in October, when the tall grasses and deciduous trees redden and blaze. Saturday night, Sigma Tau Delta chapters will participate in a poetry read/slam that will be open to the public. We hope to include juniors and seniors at Red Cloud High School. After a full day of activities, chapter members and sponsors will return to their host families. On Sunday morning, we’ll gather for breakfast and bid farewell. Those chapters that have a little time are encouraged to walk on the prairie early Sunday morning and to imagine themselves back into the 19th century, before settlement began in Red Cloud. Please contact Susan Maher at UNO ASAP. Final numbers for this event must be set by September 1, 2010. Participant numbers may have to be capped at 30-35, so the sooner your chapter can reserve its spot, the better. Contact Dr. Maher at smaher@unomaha.edu or susan.marguerite@gmail.com. Her phone number is (402) 554-2772 or (402) 554-2635 after July 1. The co-sponsors are working with Sigma Tau Delta to make sure this event is inexpensive for participants. Students should anticipate a small fee (to be set later this year once the budget is completed).  Farmers' and Merchants' Bank Building in Red Cloud Willa Cather's Red Cloudby Dr. Steven Trout Chair of English, Fort Hays State UniversityFrom age 10 through 16, Willa Cather lived in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a community that she would later immortalize in some of the finest American writing of the twentieth century. In all, six of Cather’s novels—O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), A Lost Lady (1923), and Lucy Gayheart (1935)—use Red Cloud as a setting. To visit the town is to walk through the pages of these books, an experience like no other. Born in Back Creek, Virginia, in 1873, Cather moved with her parents and siblings to Webster County, Nebraska in 1884. After a year on the open prairie, the Cathers settled in Red Cloud (population: 2,500). Willa’s father, Charles, established a loan office downtown, and his large family took up residence in the small house that still stands, now preserved as a state historic site, at 3rd and Cedar. Cather would return to this house many times in her writing. Since the themes of mutability and loss play such powerful roles in Cather’s fiction, it is ironic just how much of her Red Cloud remains—as if frozen in time. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Foundation, founded more than fifty years ago by Red Cloud resident and Cather devotee Mildred Bennett, visitors today can enjoy what the Foundation calls “the largest living memorial to an author in the country.” Many of the buildings that Cather describes in her novels and short stories are still in Red Cloud to be explored—the Garber Bank Building (within which Neil Herbert lives in A Lost Lady), the train depot (where the body of Harvey Merrick is unloaded in “The Sculptor’s Funeral), the opera house (where a blind African-American pianist performed in the 1880s, thereby inspiring Cather to create the character of “Blind d’Arnault” in My Ántonia), the two-story Victorian house originally owned by the Miner family (the Harling house in My Ántonia), and, of course, Cather’s childhood home (a place of magic and memory in two of the writer’s finest stories, “Old Mrs. Harris” and “The Best Years”).  Photograph taken by Michelle Webb in the countryside of Red Cloud |
Nebraska Celebrates Willa Cather at Weekend in Red Cloud |