A celebration of author Willa Cather is being planned to take place in Jaffrey this fall to capture the spirit of Cather and her love of the Monadnock Region.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of her most famous novel “My Ántonia.”
Dubbed “Willa Cather’s Spirit Lives On!” the two-day nation-wide celebration of the 100th anniversary of the author’s best seller is planned to be held in Jaffrey on Oct. 19 and 20.
“We wanted this gathering to be a celebration. We didn’t want to make it an academic gathering,” said Lou Casagrande of Jaffrey. “We wanted to make it a town gathering and for people to come and share visits to places that inspired her.”
Lou Casagrande has long been a fan of Cather and said he was inspired to buy his Jaffrey farm when he learned it was located near the field where Cather wrote.
“You can walk through our back woods, half a mile, a quarter of a mile, and there’s the field where she worked” Casagrande said. “I feel her presence when I go back in our woods and I say ‘my goodness this is inspiring,’ especially on a fall morning, it’s special.”
Casagrande and Bruce Hill are co-chairs of the Jaffrey Cather Committee, a collaboration of six different groups in town that came together to organize the event. The Jaffrey sponsors are the Jaffrey Chamber of Commerce, Jaffrey Civic Center, Jaffrey Historical Society, Trustees and Friends of the Jaffrey Library, Jaffrey Center Village Improvement Society and the First Church in Jaffrey. The national sponsors of the event are The Willa Cather Foundation of Red Cloud, Nebraska and The MacDowell Colony of Peterborough.
Casagrande admits to being the “instigator” of the event.
“One day I was in the Jaffrey Public Library and they had a Willa Cather display up and I asked some of the kids there, ‘do you know Willa Cather,’ and they said, ‘no, never heard of her.’ Yet she’s buried here. She loved Jaffrey. She is one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. Her longtime companion is buried here,” Casagrande said.
So the seed was planted. Casagrande wanted to hold an event about Cather to raise awareness of her connection to Jaffrey and the region. Cather was also a MacDowell Colony fellow who wrote at the artist’s colony in Peterborough in the 1920s.
That’s when Casagrande realized the 100th anniversary of “My Ántonia” was near.
“‘My Ántonia,’ is her most famous novel,” Casagrande said. “It’s still selling. It’s still read in high schools across the country. And she wrote most of it here in Jaffrey.”
Cather was born in Virginia and raised in Nebraska, but it was her wish to be buried at the foot of Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey.
“My Ántonia,” “A Lost Lady” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop” were written in Jaffrey. Parts of “My Ántonia,” and the Pulitzer Prize winning “One of Ours” were written in a tent she put up in a field about a half mile away from her room at the Shattuck Inn, where she lived in the summer and fall months between 1917 and 1940.
“Her spirit still lives here,” Casagrande said, and the issues she raised 100 years ago are still relevant today including issues surrounding immigrants, women’s roles and class inequality.
In her writing Cather focused on events and places from her childhood in Nebraska, Casagrande said, and she often used the imagery of landscape in her work.
“Almost all of her writing has some monumental piece of landscape,” he said, and while she never wrote about Mount Monadnock, she did a great deal of her writing in a tent in a field at the foot of the mountain. “It was sort of a constant reminder of the power of landscape. … She wrote in letters about why she was so inspired and why she did her best work here.”
The celebration is planned to begin with a Friday night reception at the Jaffrey Civic Center on Oct. 19, followed by a full day of events on Saturday, Oct. 20.
Saturday events include guided morning tours of her Jaffrey gravesite near Jaffrey’s 1775 Meetinghouse where Cather was buried in 1947 and Edith Lewis, her lifelong companion and assistant, was buried 25 years later.
The nearby 1833 Melville Academy Museum currently has exhibits on Cather and Lewis.
Young actors from Jaffrey’s Project Shakespeare are to enact passages from “My Ántonia” at each site. A box lunch will be provided by the Shattuck Golf Club, which was once the Shattuck Inn.
In the afternoon, Ashley Olson, executive director of the Willa Cather Foundation, and Tracy Tucker, the director of education and archivist, are to make a presentation at the Meetinghouse on My Ántonia and the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud in Nebraska.
The afternoon continues with classical and ragtime pianist Virginia Eskin, who plans to give a lecture and recital on “How Willa Cather Played Music Into Her Writing” at the First Church in Jaffrey, across from the Meetinghouse.
Dinner at the Shattuck Golf Club and will feature dishes from the world of Cather’s immigrants.
Saturday ends with a performance of a musical play, “Kindness and Cruelty: Willa Cather in Jaffrey” written by Tom Dunn with music and lyrics by Will Ogmundson. It has been touring New Hampshire since last November.
The eight events of the Willa Cather Celebration are a unique national program in Jaffrey. Due to limited space only 140 tickets will be sold, on a first come-first served basis.
Tickets are $75 and include the Friday, Oct. 19, reception and the Saturday Oct. 20 events including four Saturday program events at places Willa knew, a box lunch, a piano recital/lecture, dinner and the concluding musical about Cather’s life.
Tickets can be purchased online at www.jaffreychamber.com.