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The miracles in the artistic creation I have mentioned briefly before: groundedness and different rootedness in actuality of Place—its deeper truths, its reality—deeper than convention as Eudora Welty shows, miraculously delivering truth. The next is forms of delivery that get closer to the state of Being by moving away from ‘situation,’ plot, excessive detail, the ‘furniture,’ it opens the further dimension that it points to: it creates the setting, the atmosphere for it to appear. Willa saw these cultural deliveries in opera, legend, painting, religion, shifting from forcing action from words to the actual effect. There is also what is already potently known of the 'Old World' as in French literature. With these Willa could come closest to the delivery...

Willa Cather moved to the forms of art that would get to the actual transference and the true desire of art without those cultural or artistic boundaries—and in that the Being itself and the vitalness of the art would be the cultural structure, not by-passed in missed direction. Seeded in the strongest, most vital, individualistic earth, and grow her beyond the boundaries into Beingness was the ancient and the newly-realized complete strength and freedom of life itself.

  After Willa Cather published The Professor’s House in 1925 which contains her “Tom Outland’s Story” about the cultural grounding treasure (and not its surface monetary value) to be known of the realization of the feet upon the immense cliff rock at Mesa Verde—its ancientness, strength, and formidability undaunted by human thought, and wrote a letter back to F. Scott Fitzgerald about writing the ineffable cause internally of the feminine that had to be expressed, she knew she would take this to its realization, the embodiment—in herself and in creation to give solidity to Presence of what was not yet understood or even thought about the truer possibilities of American culture rooted in and from that feminine. In an interview...

At the time in NYC when Willa Cather was surrounded in a social and literary environment where the up and coming boys like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and perhaps even George Bernard Shaw after her “London Roses,” were freely taking her understated and ground-breaking words as their own and giving extremely-minimal-to-non-existent credit to her—she an accomplished novelist, poet and top magazine editor—and what after her passing Truman Capote would do to her in culling together Breakfast at Tiffany’s from her vision, characters, and stories and making it about his dark self instead of her extraordinary vision—intrepidly reinstated by Audrey Hepburn—Willa impelled herself further into deep, careful contemplation of how to take her revolutionary insight of the feminine and the possibilities of...

  Conservatives would like for us to learn the Hebrew Bible and abide by it as the rules for our lives. I grew up with it. My name is in Jacob's prophecy, "Until Shiloh comes.” I am female. I knew as a child they didn’t like females, and later I saw that the curse in Genesis occurs at a reference to my name, of course in a sacred grove. I dearly love the forest where I live, the Lincoln National Forest. The opening of Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop follows the path up with references to the Jornada del Muerto of a red rock terrain and which is near my home in New Mexico. It is the description...