The Family Silver

The Paper back version will be out soon!

Writing

Over the twenty-five years I have been teaching at Dickinson, I've had the freedom to develop as a writer in ways I could not have anticipated when I came here in 1975, fresh out of Harvard graduate school, thinking that academic writing was linked inextricably to footnotes. Since then I have published—in addition to scholarly articles—two biographies of Willa Cather that reached both the general and the academic reader (one without footnotes, the other with); short stories; and personal essays. My current work-in-progress is a family memoir. "The journey, not the arrival matters," Willa Cather was fond of saying—this image of discovery characterizes both my writing career and the form the creative process takes. I like to not be quite sure where I am going when I begin writing so the words themselves take me to a destination I could not have imagined before. "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader" (Robert Frost). 

Click here to read my article from the October 2000 issue of Women and Wellness, Women and Depression

Books (Authored)

The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (Oxford University Press, 1987; rpt. Harvard University Press (1997) with a new preface
Willa Cather (Chelsea House, 1995)

Books (Edited)

The Library of America Willa Cather, Volumes I-III (Literary Classics of the United States, 1987, 1990 and 1992)
New Essays on My Antonia (Cambridge University Press, 1998)