My Willa.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia but spent her formative years on the plains of Nebraska where the drama of the landscape and the pragmatism of prairie life mingled in her mind. She set out to become a physician, an unusual pursuit for a young woman at the turn of the last century, but her gifts as a writer were obvious at a young age and she switched her major to English at the University of Nebraska. After moving back east, she wrote for journals, newspapers, and magazines for ten years in Pittsburgh, PA, home to my favorite female authors, before moving and settling for the rest of her life in NYC, in Greenwich Village at the age of thirty-three. Here she wrote her masterpieces, Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, much of it on Bank Street where you can still see her home. Her work is full of wistful romanticism flavored with an unusual economy, the hallmarks of her life in Nebraska, and while she produced quite a bit of verse, it is the free-form flowing prose-poetry I highlight here, a bit of wonder from My Antonia.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.