Kristin Sanner, Associate Professor of English at Mansfield University and a resident of Dimock, wrote a wonderful essay for this project about the relevance of the novel to our present-day lives in Susquehanna County. Thank you, Dr. Sanner! Click "Read More" to view the essay.

Most people assume that nostalgia and change are at odds with one another, but in actuality, as Willa Cather's early twentieth century novel, My Àntonia demonstrates, nostalgia occurs when change threatens a cherished past. For Cather's characters, nostalgia becomes a way of coping with changes that might otherwise overwhelm and disappoint us. In Susquehanna County we see evidence of this almost everywhere. Turbulent economic times have resulted in many personal changes as residents scale back on purchases, realize significant cuts in social services and in the worst cases, deal with job loss. We also see changes to the countryside as natural gas drilling expands and leaves tracts of cleared land for pipelines and a ragged crop of well heads. Perhaps surprisingly, reading and discussing Susquehanna County Reads's selection for this year's community reading program will leave participants with a better understanding of the way nostalgia for the past can actually help shape and offer comfort in our present times.

Cather's exploration of change amidst a determined holding on to the past ironically brings her novel out of late nineteenth-century Nebraska, a time of wagons, mass immigration and westward expansion, and places it in the present. The questions raised in My Àntonia resonate with a twenty-first century audience precisely because they deal with universal issues that we still struggle with and experience today. We have all been faced with change, whether welcomed or resisted. We have all felt nostalgic for a former time or place. We may even have been guilty of treating "outsiders" who represent change unkindly or may have been treated unkindly by "insiders." We wonder what it means to form a community and ponder its importance during times of change. We celebrate our beloved, Endless Mountains landscape and wonder, right along with the novel's protagonist, what happens to a relatively wild and untamed place during times of expansion. Finally, we wonder how to reconcile change with nostalgia.

One of Cather's answers to the last question rests in her characterization of the book's title character, Antonia Shimerda, a young female immigrant who experiences multiple hardships but whose resilience and autonomy lead readers and the book's narrator to identify with her, no matter our differences. As one of my colleagues, Judith Sornberger, recently noted, Cather elevates Antonia to a mythical level, and in doing so she demonstrates the universality and importance of hard work, honesty and faithfulness. Despite the adversities Antonia faces, she maintains a purity that the novel's narrator, Jim Burden, finds admirable even after years of changes have separated them geographically, economically and socially. When Jim visits Antonia after a twenty year absence, he (and we) realize that his nostalgia for the person he remembers is justified. Though she has changed, she continues to represent the core values he grew to admire in her during their shared childhood.

Ultimately, Cather's novel leaves readers with the almost impossible realization that even times of difficult, unwelcome change may provide both fodder for nostalgia in the future and solace for the loss we feel in the present. As Jim Burden reflects, "In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." Perhaps, suggests Cather, the personal revelations that define our human existence occur as we bring memory together with change to rewrite a present that would otherwise leave us feeling empty.