AUTHOR PROFILE - PROJECT IV

Kathleen Norris

English 273

Kay R. Scougal

October 28, 1999

What happens when a poet, who was hanging around the fringes of the Andy Warhol crowd in New York City, becomes part owner, through inheritance, of her grandmother’s home in Lemmon, South Dakota? Does she sell the farm and pay exorbitant taxes or does she decide to move to South Dakota to live and manage the farm? Somehow, Kathleen Norris found the answer quickly and abandoned a promising career and an exciting lifestyle, as a published and honored poet, to move to South Dakota.

Kathleen Norris was born in Washington, D.C. on July 27, 1947. She graduated from Bennington College. She is married to David Dwyer, a poet and translator. She spent most of her childhood in Hawaii. She describes her early life as being an outsider or "misfit." These feeling were brought on by the fact that she was a constant reader, absorbed in school. She felt like a "fish out of water" because she was very light-skinned in a state of bronzed tans.

She describes herself as a poet, memoirist, editor, and manager of a family ranch corporation. She has published seven books of poetry but she has received greater recognition for her four non-fiction books. Her first book of poems was entitled, Falling Off. She was the 1971 winner of the Big Table Younger Poets Award. Reviewers advised her to abandon her references to angels in her future poems. However, they were drawn to her wit and felt she merited attention. A chapbook, The Year of Common Things, followed. Again, reviewers praised the intensely personal responses of her characters. Another book of poems called, Little Girls in Church, was dominated by religious and female themes.

Once she settled down in Lemmon, South Dakota, her writing and lifestyle took on a new and more personally satisfying direction. She gained widespread recognition with the publication of her first non-fiction book, Dakota: A Spiritual Biography. Her writing is in the rambling, stream of consciousness style similar to Annie Dilliard’s, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She comments on a vast array of books and authors, weaving their ideas and experiences into her own, in a very engaging manner. Her references to other writers reveals a very rich and varied reading life. She uses image and metaphor in a powerful way. It creates, in the reader, an almost hypnotic awareness of being present in her day to day life. She is able to create meaning and interest in the ordinary events of life. She takes on a spiritual quest that permeates everything she does and all her writing.

The setting for Dakota is the small farm community of Lemmon, South Dakota. It is the ancestral home of her mother’s family. She was known to the locals as the granddaughter who visited during her growing up years. She brought to this unpromising landscape a twenty year apprenticeship as a poet. In Dakota, she recorded her musings about the barren landscape, religion, marriage and the contrasts of rural and urban living.

She joined the Presbyterian church, where her grandmother had been a member for 60 years. The church had trouble supporting and retaining a regular minister. She was called on to "fill in" when there was no minister. Subsequently, she became a lay minister and conducted services for two small churches.

The first printing of Dakota was only 2,500 copies. It went on to sell over one hundred thousand copies in hardback. It was later published in paperback.

She was in residence of two nine months periods at St John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota and, later, became an oblate of the Assumption Abbey in North Dakota. She arrived at the abbey in Minnesota racked by marital strife and aware that she had made literature a substitute for religion in her life. Her next non-fiction book, The Cloister Walk, is structured as a diary of her monastic experience interspersed with meditations on: virgin saints, Emily Dickerson, celibacy, loneliness, monogamy and interesting facts about a fourth century hymnist and theologian Ephrem of Syria. Some reviewers compared her portrait of the world of the monastics to the writings of Thomas Merton.

Norris was most impressed with the rule of the Benedictine that all guests are welcomed as Christ. They base this generosity on the biblical phrase spoken by Christ, "I was a stranger and you took me in." Perhaps, her discussion of celibacy is one of the most outspoken and rational explanation found in popular literature. Basically, she states that by forgoing sexual expression the monks are freer to express their hospitality in a deeper sense. Also, monastics are celibate for a very practical reason. They want to create a special form of communal living and this is not possible if people are pairing off.

Her book, Amazing Grace, continues her theme that the spiritual world is rooted in the chaos of daily life. In this book, she sheds light on the very difficult theological concepts such as grace, repentance, dogma, and faith. Her intention is to tell stories about these religious concepts by grounding them in the world in which we live. Amazing Grace is a book that requires time to read and reflect on.

Kathleen Norris has become a popular speaker and frequently writes for academic and popular magazines.

Bibliography

Norris, Kathleen, Amazing Grace. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998

Norris, Kathleen, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. New York: Ticknor and Fields 1993

Norris, Kathleen, The Cloister Walk. New York: Riverhead Books 1996

Peacock, Scott, editor. Contemporary Authors. New York: Gala Re- search Press 1998

PUBLISHED WORKS

Kathleen Norris

Poetry:

Falling Off, Big Table Press (Chicago), 1971

From South Dakota: Four Poems, Editions duGrenier, (Chicago), 1978

The Middle of the World, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh,PA), 1987

How I Came to Drink My Grandmother's Piano, Benet Biscop Press (Blue Cloud Abby, Marvin, SD),1989

The Year of Common Things (chapbook), Wayland Press, 1990

The Astronomy of Love, Hayborn Press, 1994

Little Girls in Church, University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA), 1995

Non Fiction:

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Ticknor and Fields (New York City), 1993

The Cloister Walk, Riverhead Books (New York City), 1996

Amazing Grace, Riverhead Books (New York City), 1998

The Quotidian Mysteries, Paulist Press, 1998

Editor:

Leaving New York: Writers Look Back, Hungry Mind Press (St. Paul, MN), 1995

Source of Author Bibliography:

Contemporary Authors, Vol. 160, Scott Peacock, ed., Gala Research Press (New York City), 1998, pp. 292-294