Description: Written back and forth in dialogue between Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Philip Davis, this innovative book explores the many ways that Willa Cather's radical originality is quietly manifest, without fanfare or explanation. Nearing middle age when she began her life as a novelist, Willa Cather thought of lives as long arcs of change, in which success and failure are equally fraught, and one might shift quickly into the feeling of the other.
Working within her own terms, In Conversation with Willa Cather puts the odd shapes and silences of her books in conversation with her letters, interviews, and other writings about the art of fiction.Review Quotes: "These responses to and readings of Cather's work brought me back-powerfully, emotionally-to the time of my first discovery of Cather's fiction. I think the glow and joy I feel at reading this book is due, in large part, for its embrace of communicating a fresh encounter with a great writer. Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Philip Davis's thinking is charged with the thrill of discovery." -- Andrew Jewell, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
"Reading In Conversation with Willa Cather is like an academic acolyte's dream. We get to listen in as two emerita faculty, speaking with the authority and ease of those who have spent whole lives thinking insightfully about literature, have a private conversation about a writer they love. The book unfolds like a series of episodes in which Bodenheimer and Davis, literary sleuths, dive deep into the texts of different novels in order to elucidate that elusive 'thing not named' which continually hovers under the surface of Cather's words and makes her such an original novelist." -- Debra Gettelman, College of the Holy Cross