Last week on March 17, Catawba College was honored with a special guest. For the 30th Annual Brady Author’s Symposium, the campus hosted American novelist Jane Smiley. Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for her fiction novel, A Thousand Acres, which she loosely based on Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The audience was riveted as Smiley spoke about her muses, her interests in both literature and agriculture, and how she was inspired by the beauty of nature during the travels of her life. Her life was a cycle of learning about food, learning about how food was produced, and then learning about and observing nature and natural lifestyles. As she spoke, she interwove excerpts from her trilogy The Last Hundred Years. Her major works have common themes about the simple agrarian lifestyle that provides fulfilling self-reliance with the beauty of nature. She discussed the future of farming, touching on political and environmental points, with her history in the “Pothole Prairie” in Iowa as a reference.
Her award-winning piece, A Thousand Acres, focuses on women based on the sisters of King Lear in a farming lifestyle. Smiley explained her idea for this with her belief that Lear was too controlling in the play and the girls never really got to speak for themselves. Catawba is grateful to the Brady Author’s Symposium for bringing such an iconic American author and talented speaker to campus.
