Jane Yang-D’Haene’s wheel-thrown vessels draw inspiration from traditional Korean pottery, but unexpected colors and textures make them entirely her own.
Raina Lee tests dozens of ceramic glazes to learn how the lustrous colors and unearthly textures that arise from her material experiments evoke feeling.
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Willa Cather wrote about the places she knew, including Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia. Often forgotten among these essential locations has been Pittsburgh. During the ten years Pittsburgh was her home (1896–1906), Cather worked as an editor, journalist, teacher, and freelance writer. She mixed with all sorts of people and formed friendships both ephemeral and lasting. She published extensively and not just profiles and reviews but also a collection of poetry,
April Twilights, and more than thirty short stories, including several collected in
The Troll Garden that are now considered masterpieces: “A Death in the Desert,” “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” “A Wagner Matinee,” and “Paul’s Case.” During extended working vacations through 1916, she finished four novels in Pittsburgh.
O Pioneers! (1913) and
My Ántonia (1918), two novels about Nebraska, where she attended school and spent much of her childhood. Her re-creation of what is now the Midwest is rooted in her own family’s experience moving west from the Shenandoah Valley in 1883, and her writing is preoccupied with the larger American experiment of uprooting and then re-establishing civilization. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel
One of Ours, about a Nebraska farmer’s son, but her settings are not limited to the Great Plains. Cather wrote memorably about New York City, where she worked as a writer and as managing editor for