Scholars from around the world will walk the same paths as world-renowned author Willa Cather during the 15th International Cather Seminar.
Events begin June 5 in Red Cloud and continue at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln June 8-12. This year’s seminar, “Fragments of Desire: Cather and the Arts,” will focus on Cather’s love of the arts. Seminar participants will explore Cather’s relationship with music, performance and the visual arts through paper presentations, panel discussions, tours of historic sites and social events.
Guy Reynolds, co-director of the seminar, said this year’s conference presents an opportunity for the 88 registered scholars to gather in the places Cather spent time and experience some of the same works that inspired the Nebraska author.
In particular, an exhibition at the Sheldon Museum of Art, “Visual Cather: The Writer’s Pictorial Imagination,” will allow scholars to view works of fine art that inspired Cather. The exhibition’s centerpiece is “The Song of the Lark,” a painting by Jules Breton, which directly inspired Cather’s novel of the same name. Other works of art that Cather enjoyed will be displayed, along with portraits of Cather.
Reynolds said the exhibition is just steps away from where Cather spent much of her time as a student at the university.
“This is really where Cather was spending her time as a teenager and as a young woman,” Reynolds said. “Architecture Hall was once the University of Nebraska library, where Cather spent many hours as a student, so the exhibition of these works that Cather encountered is only 600 feet from where Cather spent her days writing and reading at the library. That’s quite compelling.”
A keynote address by Terese Svoboda at 6 p.m. June 10 in the Center for Great Plains Studies, 1155 Q St., is free and open to the public. Svoboda, a Nebraska native and author of 16 prize-winning books of poetry, prose, biography and memoir, will speak on “The Lark, and Those Who Escape.”
“My talk will concern my relationship with Cather as a fellow Nebraskan who moved to New York City to pursue literary success,” Svoboda said. “My escape from the small town of Ogallala allows me to discuss Thea in ‘Song of the Lark,’ who leaves her small town to become an opera star, and since I had an opera performed at Disney Hall (in Los Angeles), I can also discuss the book from the vantage of contemporary performance.”
Drawing from her own heritage and expertise as a TV producer who helped produce the NET documentary “The Quilted Conscience,” Svoboda will also talk about the immigrants who populated Cather’s most famous stories and how their stories parallel those of Nebraska’s newest immigrants, especially Sudanese, Laotian, Cambodian, Somalis and others who have escaped difficult circumstances to live as far west as Lexington.
Additional public events include:
Exhibit tour and gallery talk by “Visual Cather: The Writer’s Pictorial Imagination” co-curator Lindsey Andrews, at 3 and 4 p.m. June 11 in the Sheldon Museum of Art, 12th and R streets. The 4 p.m. talk will be followed by a reception. Admission is free.
Performance of “The Fine Things of Youth,” at 7:30 p.m. June 11 in the Temple Building, 12th and R streets. It is a musical performance adapted from the novel “Lucy Gayheart.” Tickets are available at the door for $25.
The Cather seminar is a biennial event held in cities all over the world. The Willa Cather Foundation and UNL’s Cather Project, a UNL Project of Excellence that supports research and teaching that focuses on Cather’s life and work, are coordinating this year’s event.
