The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work.

This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Suzanne Ohlmann, two writers with Nebraska roots who explore the world in order to learn more about their place in it, will be part of an engaging conversation about Nebraska memoir. If you are interested in the same “human stories” Willa Cather illuminated in her own work, you will enjoy this free author series event!

Blending lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, Montgomery’s book Halfway from Home examines contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. Halfway from Home grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home.

In Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life, Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America’s Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann’s eyes. Through incarnations as a musician, arts manager, and registered nurse, Ohlmann finally lands in Texas, buys a house, and gets a dog. But her house is haunted, and so is she. With honesty, compassion, and a sense of humor, Ohlmann recounts her tenacious search into the shadows of her life.