In the response post for last month’s story, I mentioned we were going to switch up our reading order a bit. Our story for May was supposed to be “The Elopement of Allen Poole,” but after learning that Cather reworked some of the material from last month’s story, “A Son of the Celestial” (1893), into “The Conversion of Sum Loo” (1900), I thought it would be interesting to read these two stories back to back.

So, our story for May is “The Conversion of Sum Loo.” The link will take you to the full text at the Willa Cather Archive. There’s some accompanying artwork from the story that is included in the WCA’s full text. Don’t forget that at the top of the story’s webpage you can click on the rectangle button on the top right that has the text, “page breaks & image links on/off” to see a scan of the story in the original publication.

“The Conversion of Sum Loo” was published in the August 11,1900 edition of The Library. I’m sorry I don’t have any interesting facts to share about this story. A quick search didn’t reveal much but after the semester ends on May 18th, I plan to dig in and see what I can find.

Also, I am going back to sending out the reminder post on the second Wednesday of the month. Posting the reminder on the first Wednesday of the month sounded good in theory but turned out not to work well in practice.

What’s next?

Read “The Conversion of Sum Loo” sometime this month and then come back to discuss it on the response post I will share on May 26th, the last Wednesday of the month. Feel free to read now and comment here if you can’t wait until then!

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New to this blog? Learn more about the Willa Cather Short Story Project here. In a nutshell, we’re reading one Cather short story a month. I remind everyone of what story we’re reading on the second Wednesday of the month and then share a response on the fourth Wednesday of the month. Jump in anytime!