What is the Middle Ground?

My name is Betty Kort and I am the executive director of the Cather Foundation, an international literary organization headquartered in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Today I am posting an introductory blog that will set the course for what I am calling the Middle Ground. I want to begin by talking about Red Cloud. Because famed American writer Willa Cather made Red Cloud the setting for six of her novels and because of the tremendous influence this small, frontier town had on Cather’s body of writing, Red Cloud has become one of the most famous small towns in America. The Cather Foundation, founded in 1955 in the town of Red Cloud, seeks to encourage the reading of Cather’s fiction and preserve the artifacts and sites of the Red Cloud of the 1880s that so influenced Cather as a writer. We are thus both a literary organization and a historic museum—and that would be enough—but we are so much more. And this ill-defined more is part of what this weekly blog will be about.

It was Cindy Bruneteau, our new Education Director, who suggested that I start this blog for the willacather.org website. (She is shaking things up just a bit at the Cather Center.) As I rolled my eyes and walked away, she threw out the added taunt that I name my weekly blog. Though I immediately dismissed the whole idea, I woke up the next morning knowing that there is a tremendous amount of middle ground within the Cather Foundation that is not readily apparent. And so the Middle Ground begins . . .

Landscapes and Seeing. We count on artists and writers to help us see details that we might otherwise skim over or perhaps altogether miss. Willa Cather was an especially keen observer, catching and recording the details that make her writing come alive. I like to think that she came perilously close to being a visual artist in the traditional sense. Over time I have learned that not everyone consciously sees the world in the same way. Some of us need to have the details pointed out. This was brought home to me over and over again by my high school students during twenty-plus years of teaching.

My annual fall fieldtrip to the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie required that my eleventh grade English students explore the landscape of the Prairie. I asked them to draw something close by and then, on another sheet of paper, concentrate hard while drawing a line that represented the contour of the distant horizon of the prairie. (The students almost universally thought that their single line across the sheet of paper representing the horizon was, to put it mildly, a waste of paper.) The key to their experience, however, was that the students had to do their assignments while sitting quietly for a considerable length of time in the middle ground—that space out on the prairie between the fence next to the highway that contains the Prairie and that elusive, distant horizon line to the west. This middle ground is thrilling—and their journals made this clear. Out in the middle, there is action—lots to see and hear and feel and write about. Most of the students had never had the experience of sitting out in the middle of a desolate landscape, forbidden to talk or move around or do anything at all except observe, draw, and write. For most of them, it was an epiphany.

Middle Ground. I would guess that most of us familiar with the Nebraska prairies would admit that while driving down a road, be it the Interstate, a country road, or even on Highway 281 next to the Cather Memorial Prairie, we tend to notice the fences and the ditches along the highways and byways, and we have a sense of the horizon line off in the distance. It is easy and convenient to skip the middle ground. We need to be reminded that there is always a foreground, a middle ground, and a background and that we need to slow down and consciously take in that all-important middle ground if we want to know what is happening. I like to think that this middle ground is the road that Cather was speaking of in her short story, “Old Mrs. Harris,” as opposed to the end, be it a fence or the horizon line of our lives: “The road is all,” according to Cather.

It is the middle ground of the Cather Foundation that I will explore in this blog. I want to emphasize that this is NOT just the middle ground of the Cather Prairie or Nebraska or the Midwest. The fingers of the Cather Foundation—and Willa Cather’s writing—extend around the globe. The landscape of the Cather Foundation canvas is indeed large—in fact, global—and the middle ground of the Cather Foundation landscape is filled with details that I want to bring to our readers’ attention. Thus, as you read this blog, you will see postings about the Foundation with settings in places such as France, China, India, Afghanistan, Washington, DC, Omaha, and, yes, Red Cloud too. The Cather Foundation is enormously multifaceted, and our members and friends do not always have the opportunity to realize the full scope of activities that are underway during any given season in any give location—the middle ground of the Cather Foundation starts with Red Cloud and ends somewhere on the other side of the world.