By CSC COLLEGE RELATIONS
CHADRON – In an illustrated lecture Sept. 27 British author Alan Wilkinson will reveal how a road trip to Nebraska 30 years ago led him to discover Nebraska, its people, and its writers. The free, public 7 p.m. reading from Lost and Found in Nebraska is at the Bean Broker on West Second Street.
Wilkinson will tell how he came to be the only person now alive to have read Mari Sandoz’s unpublished novel, The Ungirt Runner, a clearly recognizable as a doorway to her masterpiece, Old Jules.
Wilkinson has re-visited Sandoz country many times, intending to eventually write a book about his heroine. In 2011, he even spent six months alone in a hunting lodge by the banks of the Niobrara River to experience the landscape as Sandoz did. He recorded an account of his time there in The Red House on the Niobrara.
However, it wasn’t until 2019 he found time to write extensively about his heroine. When he did, his first task was to locate the unpublished manuscript. He made inquiries at the University of Nebraska Lincoln archive, also at the Sandoz Center, but came up empty.
Finally, through mutual acquaintances, Wilkinson was able to locate and read the manuscript and take notes at Caroline Sandoz Pifer’s ranch near Gordon in 1993. He discusses the experience in a July 2022 blog entry.
“What I had in front of me was clearly an apprentice writer’s attempt to describe her young life, and – I can state this with conviction – to put on record her every grievance against her (fictionalized) father and mother. It was an exorcism: intemperate, angry, occasionally incoherent. And there was no mistaking the true identity of the fictional characters, nor of the home they inhabited. It was the Old Jules homestead alongside the upper Niobrara,” Wilkinson wrote.
When he sat down to write about Sandoz, he had 20 pages of notes from that day. To his surprise, the book that emerged was not a scholarly study of Sandoz’ life, but rather a work of fiction in which she played a minor, but significant, role.
Drawing on his extensive experience of the Sandhills landscape, its people, and Sandoz, Wilkinson’s novel is about loss and reconciliation that bring together an exiled son of the Panhandle and an academic on a mission (not unlike his own). Together, the two make some significant discoveries about their own lives and Sandoz’s.