On Writing

3:21am: Oh, hey, Willa. So we meet here again. I know you wouldn't appreciate me calling you Willa, but if you keep coming to me in the middle of the night and waking me up, that's how it's going to be.

Yesterday we discussed Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in my 20th Century American Lit class. I mostly tried to keep my mouth shut because I was afraid that if I started talking about Willa I might. never. stop. That only happened once, when my professor asked me if Willa did, indeed, write the novel at Mary Austin's home in New Mexico. Short answer: Yes, she wrote several chapters there, though she began to deny it after she and Mary Austin had a bit of a falling out. I'll spare you the long, rambling answer through which I made my classmates suffer.

Reading Death Comes was the perfect antidote for my stalling sickness. It's classic Cather: beautiful, poignant, multi-dimensional, heartbreaking. It is not, however, quite so gloomy as the two texts I've chosen to work with. She wrote it immediately after The Professor's House, and as I thought about this, I realized that maybe Willa had had enough gloom by this point, too. And if she could work her way out of the gloom, I can too.

Also yesterday, I met with my MA project director to discuss my Cather project. I am getting excited about finishing it up, but now that I am working on it again, I realize that the research I've done and the ideas I've developed are much too extensive for a 25 page final draft. How do I know what to say and what to leave out, I asked her. "I'd be happy to read the draft and give you suggestions," she said. There is no draft, yet- it's all in my head, I said. "Then I will tell you what I always tell you: You know you're finished when you've answered the question that began the project." This was helpful. So Willa came to me at 3:21, asking: What question will you focus this paper on? What is this iteration of the paper going to be about? Once you know that, you can begin working with me again.

In my meeting with my director, we scheduled my defense: April 14 at 11am. This means I'll need to submit the final draft of my paper before going to Cleveland for my conference, and I'll defend the paper after I return. A lot of my classmates are nervous about the defense, and I imagine I'll develop some anxiety about it as it approaches, too. At present, though, the idea of sitting in a room and having two of my favorite professors ask me questions about Willa for two hours sounds like fun. Sure, it will be nerve-wracking to know that this defense is what stands between me and my graduate degree... but it's hard for me to imagine them coming up with any question about Cather that I haven't already been asking myself. I've done the work. I'm prepared for the process. Now I just need to get through Zora Neale Hurston and Frederick Douglass so that my weekend will be free to figure out what question my paper is going to devote itself to answering. And when I'm sitting in that room I'll need to answer their questions with thoughtful responses rather than the word vomit that came out of me in class yesterday.

Once I had decided this, and I had tackled Oscar before he could flap his ears and wake Billy up at 5:25, I was back to sleep. 'Night, Willa. I'm happy to report to you that I'm back on my game now. See you again tomorrow.

(On Writing is a compilation of essays and letters that Cather wrote about the practice of writing as well as descriptions of what she was trying to accomplish in some of her own work.)