2013 Spring Conference

"We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while."

These words ring as true today as they did the day Cather penned them, 100 years ago. Our spring conference will celebrate the centennial of Cather's breakthrough novel O Pioneers! in which she "hit the home pasture." The novel celebrates the transformation of the American prairies by European settlers and marks Cather's emergence as a major novelist. Two contemporary American creative artists, Dan O'Brien, rancher and author of Buffalo for the Broken Heart, and filmmaker Charles Fairbanks will talk about how Cather's novel and the Great Plains have inspired their own work. Cather scholars will explore O Pioneers!, Cather's relationship with her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett (to whom Cather dedicated the the novel), and Cather's letters, a selected volume of which is being published this year. Rowdy string-band MAW will entertain in the Opera House, and award-winning cowboy poet, storyteller, and celebrity chuckwagon cook Kent Rollins will serve dinner on the Cather Prairie.