The winter prior to my conversation with Kathleen Norris I planned to read all of her books.  This was no easy task, given that she’s written more than 14, and that my two little girls did not much like stories about 4th century virgin martyrs.  My life that winter took on a rhythm.  In the morning I colored with my three-year old Audrey, nursed baby Frances, mopped up the mud that should have been snow, and read Kathleen Norris. I started with Virgin of Bennington, her most recent book, which made me question what we had in common and what constitutes a memoir.  I’d change a diaper and nurse and read a few of her poems. The ones that tasted good on my tongue I read aloud to the girls, finishing with a round of “Eensy Weensy Spider.”  

Norris wrote Cloister Walk at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, which is about an hour from where we live.  I am Catholic in spirit only.  For too many Sundays I sat through Father Eisenhower’s drones about needing money to tar the parking lot.  It still gives me a shiver, remembering opening my mouth to receive the host from his thick yellow fingernails and bulgy blue eyes.  Then there are those minor doctrinal issues of birth control, choice, and the ordination of women.  In Cloister Walk, Kathleen pried open the rusty can that had become my tradition, and helped me to discover the fruits of wisdom of the Catholic faith.

Before I moved to rural Minnesota I had read Norris’ spiritual geography, Dakota, but after seven years in this farming community, I reread it like it was essential information.  I studied it like it was a road map for my own life as a woman writer in a small town.  All that winter my life was orbed by my family, reading Kathleen, and watching Rosie. 

To talk about Kathleen Norris I need to say something about Rosie O’Donnell.  This blunt, funny, weight-obsessed woman reminds me of Terri, my best friend growing up. Terri and I broke bottles of Vernor’s Ginger Ale, cut our fingers on the glass, and became blood sisters.  When I would sleep over at her house, we’d sneak in the kitchen and make a butter, sugar and graham cracker mix and eat it under a dark tree, the cicadas thrumming around us. Then we’d get on our Schwinns and drive by the light of street lamps down the winding streets of her neighborhood.  In high school I would, now and again, find myself in a bathroom stall hunched on a toilet crying hard for no apparent reason.  By some instinct Terri would cut whatever class she was in and find me.  She would talk to me from the other side of the metal door, her voice low and even, like you’d talk to a panicked child or a cornered animal.

Even then Terri was hiding some dark truths that none of us closest to her would bump up against until years later.  This was something else she had in common with Rosie and it was in part Terri who I’d turn on at 3:00 in the afternoon.  On good days both girls were napping and the pile of laundry to fold was not too big.  My favorite part of the show was the first five minutes when Rosie told stories about her three adopted kids or talked about politics.  My response to her was somatic: I would laugh and feel good inside and less alone in the world.

What is deemed “high” culture mixed it up with “low” on Rosie.  The literary world collided with daytime TV.  When writer Annie Lamotte was on she was so nervous she could barely look at the audience.  Rosie was kind to her and gave a copy of her book to everyone there.   Jonathon Kozol spoke eloquently about what he had learned from the children he taught in inner city Harlem.  When Rosie interviewed actors such as Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, she would ask them about their activist work rather than what they were going to wear to the Oscars.  I was moved by Michael J. Fox, jerking in that distinct Parkinson’s way, talking about the disease as a gift that keeps on taking.  And by Rosie speaking about her struggles with depression.  And by the kids she brought on who survived more horror than I’ll ever know.  Rosie got giant corporations like Kellogg’s to pay their way through college.  She made me laugh, she made me cry. 

In the same unlikely way that Terri would find me in the stall, Norris and O’Donnell, these two vastly different women, found me in my domestic life.  This is not an easy thing to do.   I live down a muddy road in a renovated garage.  Both women met me where I live:  Rosie, a mother with young children who also reads and loves music and feels passionately about making a difference in the world;  Kathleen, a women writing about matters of faith and attempting to make sense of rural culture and the strange country that is marriage.  Kathleen helped me remember that I had a mind and a soul, that I was more than a play station for my girls.

This may not seem like a miracle, but it is hard to describe how, in those early years of mothering, life can be narrowed down to your own private pinhole.  I live in a community with close women friends who were also raising small children, yet at times I still felt alone.  Do not underestimate how whacked a woman can get from birthing a child.  Pardon me Yahweh, but it appears that mothers are doing the knitting in the womb.  We are creating a whole new being out of our parts.  Some alien is sucking on our vitals and it seems with each progressive one there’s less to pull from.  Once they’re out, the sucking and carrying just gets externalized.

So when you are in Target and see a mom struggling to put her kids in a shopping cart, toss up a prayer for her while she fumbles with the tangled, gunked-up, probably broken plastic seatbelt.  Instead of judging her for how crabby she’s being with her children, mentally picture her climbing Kilamonjaro and find the nearest flower to toss petals at her feet.  Do not smile and say, “Oh these years go by so fast,” unless you want a pacifier shoved in your mouth.  And never forget Andrea Yates of Texas.  That woman had no parts left to work with.  Let her be a Greek chorus in the back of our collective psyches for how torqued a woman can get from creating other humans.  Let her be a cattleprod on the slack behinds of our society to provide a more nurturing culture for women and children.

Mothering little ones was the backdrop for preparing for my interview.  I was weaning my baby and in retrospect, still recovering from the physical and emotional welter that is the second child.  I’m pushing 40 with a masters degree in English.  Having children was something I was going to do on the way to becoming a professor, which is a little like studying long and hard for the Bar only to find yourself with a piece of chalk in your hand in front of a class of preschoolers.  The notion of a dialectic was never more real to me.  At once I was in love with my children, with the sensuousness of nursing, holding, and kissing them.  I reveled in the startling things that came out of Audrey’s mouth, in the pure gaze of Frances’ blue eyes.  And I felt pulverized by the constant needs, the lack of sleep, the hoisting and cleaning of bodies, the obliteration of personal space and time.  In the midst of this turmoil I was reading Norris and writing down ideas and vacillating between stabs of doubt--Who am I?  Why am I interviewing Kathleen Norris?  What am I going to wear?--and moments where I thought she was writing similar things to what I could if given the chance.   It was a strange odyssian journey, finding my way to Calvin College in spring.

The morning of the interview, Kathleen gave a reading, and I sat in the bleachers with the rest of the audience and listened to her recite and talk about poetry.  She seemed small and quiet in the too-bright, too-big gymnasium, and it dawned on me that she might need me to help her roam.  This kept me from throwing up my breakfast.  Shortly before the interview I walked across campus in the bright sunlight, my feet finding a pond where a Canada Goose hissed at me and for a moment made me forget my fear, where I put my arms around a pine tree and the rough warm bark evened my breathing. 

I walked back and waited for Kathleen in the room behind the stage.  Then went looking for her, and found her waiting for me in the hall, so that we ended up having five minutes behind the curtains while the sound guys were putting mics on us and testing the system.  She complimented me on my blouse and got down to business.  After glancing over my questions she announced this was going to be a good interview and it was--a conversation between two women about matters of faith and writing--with a few hundred people who happened to be listening in. 

The next morning in the Grand Rapids airport, I saw Kathleen seated at my terminal.  We chatted then boarded the same plane.  While I read Rosie O’Donnell’s memoir, Find Me, which I had saved as a reward, I kept an eye on Kathleen, gesturing and talking to the young man with a crew cut next to her.  We were together in the clouds, suspended by a force larger than ourselves.