Reminder post. “Wee Winkie’s Wanderings” is our story this month for the Willa Cather Short Story Project. It was published in the National Stockman and Farmer on November 26, 1896.

You can read “Wee Winkie’s Wanderings” at the Willa Cather Archive: https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss046

National Stockman and Farmer

“Wee Winkie’s Wanderings” was featured in the Summer 1973 newsletter of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial (which has grown into the National Willa Cather Center). In this issue scholar Bernice Slote writes that a newspaper clipping Cather sent home in 1897 led her to identify several stories Cather wrote for children that were published in the National Stockman and Farmer. Slote found there is “abundant evidence to show that Willa Cather edited and wrote for the page called “Our Young Folks” in the National Stockman and Farmer.” This periodical was produced by the same publishers of the Home Monthly, the magazine Cather was managing editor of at this time.

Slote states that “Wee Winkie’s Wanderings” is “almost certainly an autobiographical account from Willa Cather’s childhood.” She identifies some locations that were also used in Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which are known locations around the family home in Back Creek, Gore, Virginia.

I was surprised to read that “Wee Winkie’s Wanderings” was reprinted for the first time in the June 1973 issue of Vogue. That seems weird to me, but as I’m not all that familiar with Vogue, this is probably my ignorance showing.

What’s next?

Read “Wee Winkie’s Wanderings” sometime this month and then come back to discuss it on the response post I’ll share on March 23, the fourth Wednesday of the month. Or, feel free to read it 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!