Linda: Kathleen, I’m struck by the kind of community that you create in your works. Even in Dakota and The Virgin of Bennington, which are memoirs, your voice is one of several: a fourth century monk, a little girl in a schoolhouse, a neighbor in Lemmon.  In a way, each book is like an elaborate dinner party where you’re the hostess and you’re adept at bringing out the best in your guests.

Kathleen: That’s a wonderful image.  I’ll take that with me. When I started writing memoir, I was conscious of not wanting it to be just my own voice.  I had stories people told me or I’d overheard, and experiences with children I had worked with over the fifteen years I was artist in the schools in North and South Dakota.  They were part of my life and I was part of theirs and it didn’t seem right to just write about myself.  It is a kind of community that I deliberately try to create in my books.

Strictly first person memoir works, but there is the pitfall of the narcissistic eye.  Once I judged a non-fiction contest for memoirs; the books were just steeped in narcissism.  And even though people had interesting experiences, I couldn’t get in the books.  Maybe I went overboard in not doing that with my memoirs.  One of the reviewers of the The Virgin of Bennington called it an “un-narcissistic anti-memoir” and I want to send that person a prize.

LB: One of the strengths of your essays is that you can shuttle between, say, a discourse on virgin martyrs from an earlier century to the current plight of marginalized women, to a memory from Bennington College, to a line from a hymn, and you do it in a way that is seamless to the reader.  How do you do that?

KN: Well, it’s what used to get me in trouble when I was in elementary school*I have a very messy mind and it will jump around.  But I think that is the nature of the poet: our greatest joy is connecting things that aren’t supposed to be connected.  It’s what metaphors do.  When I spot something like the fact that the stories of the virgin martyrs from the early church reminded me of what I was reading in the newspaper about the abduction, rape and murder of young women, I thought ‘you know, there is a connection here and I’m going to explore that.’  To me, writing is all about making those connections.

LB: This connection that you make extends out to the reader as well.  In a sense we are also invited to the dinner party and lots of us have showed up.  In the preface to Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary to Faith you say that you “persist in your hope that you have something to say to people who can’t believe you joined a church, as well as those who wonder what took you so long.”  Rhetorically, that’s a tall order.

KN: I had a lot of skeptical writer friends who didn’t think I could connect these worlds of religion and writing and art.  My ultimate week was when I was interviewed by Christianity Today, who chose Cloister Walk as the top religious book of the year, and the Vatican radio.  Now that’s a nice stretch; that’s flexibility.  Some of the questions were similar and that’s what I really like.  My Jewish editor has been very helpful, especially as my books-- The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace in particular-- got more specifically Christian.  This person from another tradition will ask me questions in an extremely helpful way.  It forces me to explain what I mean more clearly than if I were writing for a strictly Christian audience.

I remember I had slipped in a little Christian jargon, “the living Christ,” and Cindy wrote a penciled note in the margin, “Do you mean that Christ is someone who once lived, or someone who lives now?”  Here is a good Jewish girl asking that question.  I said “Well I mean both,” and she said, “Then you’re going to need to unpack that phrase and explain what you mean.” It’s been both fascinating and gratifying to me, the variety of people who have found ways to use my work.

LB: Well, I’m one of those people. I moved to a small town in rural Minnesota and have lived there for about seven years.  I recently reread Dakota like it was a map, like it was essential to my orientation in the world.  Sections of it are unflinching in your assessment of the dynamics of a small town.  You even have a chapter called, “Can you tell the truth in a small town?”  Kathleen, can you and continue living there in the fullest sense of the word?

KN: You can if you know what the price is, and if your ultimate goal is not to punish people, get revenge, make your point at the expense of someone else, but to do it in such a way that you can keep living together.  I think that’s what happens in small towns*we know we’re stuck together out there, and so we have to get along. It sometimes means having to confront things directly and telling the truth.  It’s all in how it’s done.  Of course in a small town, they knew my grandparents and know my mom.  I’ve got standing there.  I didn’t just bluster in to make my point but did some sitting around and seeing how things are working and being deliberate and careful about how to tell the truth.

I began writing Dakota because the farm crisis was disrupting churches, schools—all the small town institutions.  I was hearing horror stories about some teachers and pastors.  The last chapter I finished was “Hope Church” which was the ultimate positive one for me, but it was quite a process from that negative stuff to work my way through to the more positive.

LB: What sort of comments did you get from your neighbors?

KN: Oh, it was wonderful, because everything I said about gossip was confirmed by my experience, and many people have pointed that out to me.  At the time I was on a book tour and Dakota was a little slow to actually arrive to Lemmon, but people were hearing about it from relatives in Boston or New York-- and so all these wild rumors were being spread--that I had named names and it was awful and I had done a terrible disservice to the town.  I got a phone call from a good friend and she said “What have you done?”  Turned out she had gone to a coffee group and everyone was so upset and then she said, “I got so mad because I asked them well who’s read the book and no one had. They were just spinning out this crazy stuff.”   So I told her  “I’m glad I’m out of town.”  When people got the book and started to read it, they realized the rumors weren’t true and that I had tried to give a more balanced picture.  I haven’t moved away after my success, and that’s the normal pattern: if you make it in Lemmon you are free to leave.  I love the place, so that was reassuring to people too.  It took a while but I think most people are quite happy with it and the Chamber of Commerce is now selling it on Main Street.  In the tourist information they promote Lemmon as the hometown of Kathleen Norris. They actually get people driving highway 12 coming through Lemmon just because they read Dakota, so I’m good for business.


LB: A parallel sort of question for The Cloister Walk.  How was it received by the monks and the sisters?

KN: Well again, because I had known Benedictine men and women for about fifteen years by the time that book came out, and I had talked to all sorts of people, including people who had said they’ve never been asked about celibacy.  It was just the type of stuff they didn’t talk about in formation.  Oh my God, someone has been a nun for thirty years and no one has asked her what celibacy means to her!  Amazing stories that came out of that.  I guess the main reaction was that people were so relieved to be human beings and weren’t romanticized in the book.  Sometimes people write about monasteries and they’re all “gosh this is heaven on earth,” and a monk or nun reads it and thinks “if they only knew.”  This is community, this is living with other people, and it’s never easy. They thought I painted a fairly accurate picture for someone who was definitely an outsider but knew them pretty intimately.
 
LB: I’ve met a fellow Catholic here at the conference who was saying that for years he’s gone on retreat with the Trappist monks at their monasteries and lately they’ve been booked.  I think this is a phenomenon*

KN: And you blame me as part of the problem*

LB: It’s a nice kind of blame, but yes, how does it feel to be responsible in part, for this phenomenon?

KN: Well I’m not really responsible because that was starting to happen in the seventies, especially with protestants more than Catholics, taking advantage of Monastic retreats.  Whenever I would go to a monastery I would run into all sorts of Protestants--a variety of people--so I’m not going to take total blame for that, but I think it reflects a real need in our culture for silence and prayer.  For communities that are practicing day in and day out.  In some ways this total immersion in scripture all day long is the ultimate protestant experience.  It’s indicative of a really deep need.

LB: I think it’s a wonderful phenomenon.  I wish George Bush would take a silent retreat.  I think our country would be better off*

KN: Well there are some places he could go right at home in Texas and Oklahoma.  They could just shut him up for a while, put him in a little room and he could talk to his maker.

LB: Or some of those nuns.  .  .  I’ve had the good fortune of going on retreat, and it makes such a difference in part just knowing the Carmelite nuns are praying for us.  The challenge is bringing that contemplative spirit back to my daily life, and that’s why I appreciated this little book, the Quotidian Mysteries, subtitled “Laundry, Liturgy, and Women’s Work.”  

KN: That was a part of a series of lectures at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.  There are twenty years worth of these lectures.  As the first protestant woman who was invited to do this lecture, I was honored.  This was my interim book between Amazing Grace and The Virgin of Bennington, and actually I think of that book as the seeds for my next one.   It’s going to be on the sin of sloth, or what the ancient monks used to call acedia.  Acedia is an ancient word that we’re not familiar with but I think it is an apt description of what we suffer from a great deal.  If you don’t know the name of the thing that’s bugging you it’s a lot harder to deal with.

Quotidian Mysteries is a meditation on spirituality in everyday life.  I once gave a retreat based on the subtitle, and one of the women said, “I came because the word ‘laundry’ was in the title and I thought if someone can connect spirituality and laundry, I gotta hear about this.”  I was glad to get that kind of response because how we do everything reveals our spirituality.  How you give a baby a bath can teach a lot about honoring the body as a created being, or you can just dunk the kid and rub and be irritated and distracted.  Thoughts matter, which is a very ancient Christian idea: the monastic people thinking about good thoughts and bad thoughts later getting turned into virtues and sins.

LB: My mom, Rita, a devout Italian Catholic, fell in love with your books and she said that in your interpretations you’re more Catholic than she is.  I mean, for Pete’s sake, you wrote a book called Meditations on Mary.  But she wondered why you haven’t converted.

KN: A lot of people ask me that and it’s just not there.  I’m a fairly conservative person in that I respect my roots, which are extremely protestant.  We have a lot of ministers in my family.  My grandfather and great-grandfather were both Methodist pastors, circuit riders.  Also on my father’s side, the first person that we trace back to the split at the time of Henry VIII is a man who had been a Catholic priest and became an Anglican priest.  So I have deep roots in the Protestant tradition and that’s something that I haven’t felt compelled to set aside.  It’s just one of those internal things.  If it happens some day it will surprise me.  I’ve got a Catholic side and a protestant side, and if I can keep them in balance then I’m okay.  The Cloister Walk is kind of Catholic; Amazing Grace is kind of Protestant, more protestant than a book about the liturgical year.

LB: Years ago I had this moment of insight when I was playing tennis with a friend.  It started to mist and we kept playing, and then it started to drizzle and we were enjoying it so we kept playing, and then it really started to rain but we continued and we were slipping on the court and an arc of water would follow the ball, and then two people came out on the court next to us and I thought, “Now what would possess people to come out in the rain and play tennis?”  In that moment I realized, “That’s how I feel when people convert to Catholicism.  What would possess them to come out in the rain?”

KN: A lot of people think of it as finding a home. When people have a serious religious conversion or commitment to a Protestant or Catholic church, there’s usually some interesting story behind it.  They’re seeking and finding something so you have to honor that.

LB: Your writing has helped me to understand why they would.

KN: My husband was raised Catholic and since he was about 12 he hasn’t wanted to go near it.  As an outsider it was easier for me to see what was good there.

LB: This morning you alluded to the monastic practice of lectio divina, a kind of holy reading that you write about in Cloister Walk.   You discussed how the poems that you were writing in response to the scripture were a form of lectio: a way of reading that in the words of a 4th century monk, “works the earth of the heart.”  

KN:  Lectio divina is writing as a spiritual process, where the poems are wiser than you are.  This has happened to me a great deal and I think it happens with a lot of writers, that you look at something you wrote a few years ago and all of a sudden you realize what it’s about.  You weren’t conscious of it at the time but maybe you were working towards something.  That is part of the process of writing, where the words and poems that come out know more than you do.  Poetry works well for lectio because it is usually written in that state of going slow and trying to evoke things rather than to grab and hold onto them. The writing becomes the conversion itself.   

Poet Denise Levertov wrote a beautiful essay about her experience.  Her father had been an orthodox Jew and became an Anglican priest, and her mother was Welsh.  I mean talk about a recipe for a poet.  She was writing a poem and she thought, “So many composers have written masses and done so much with the liturgy, why not a poem that is a mass?”  As she began writing it she was kind of agnostic with religious roots, and by the time she got to the agnus dei she was a believer.  Writing the poem and working with the mass had converted her.  Before she died I think she did become a Catholic.  

Writing has that kind of power.  Lectio divina sounds so mysterious; it’s just a very slow process of reading so you’re not reading for information, you’re reading with the heart.  If a word or phrase stops you, this is especially powerful with the Bible, you go, “Oh, he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes. Let me just think about that.  All day.” It helps, boy, when you turn on the TV news and you think, “He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.” That becomes a powerful play with the world.  The Word and the world, in you, working out something.

LB: In The Cloister Walk there’s this inherent tension between academic or theological discourse and poetry. You called Emily Dickinson “the patron saint of biblical commentary in poetic mode.” Who are other writers who have wedded the theological with the poetic?

KN: Emily Dickinson is the prime example, partly because she knew the Bible so well.  Poet Scott Cairns would be a good example.  He has a fairly sophisticated understanding of the early church and saints and modern commentary.  I don’t know, it’s kind of unusual. You find a scholar like Walter Bruggeman who writes very well and in an accessible way and his scholarship is great.  He doesn’t write in that dry academic style.  Roberta Bondi has a doctorate from Oxford in ancient church stuff but she writes like a human being; she engages in real story telling.  I look around for people who are both solid scholars and also have a real style.

LB: Why don’t we move to poetry. Let’s talk about the poem “Little Girls in Church”?

KN:  “Little Girls in Church” is the title poem of my book that came out in 1995.  For a while I was haunted by little girls in church. Whenever we’d go to a worship service there would be little girls doing something interesting.  I think you can see how this poem was a part of my own conversion.  It is a transitional poem because at that time I wasn’t sure I could pray, for myself or for anyone, so that’s why the poem ends: “I will pray for you, if I can,” It is a prayer in a sense but I still had that huge area of doubt and agonizing.  It is kind of wimpy when you think about it, but that’s what I was capable of at the time so it felt more honest to leave that poem as it was.

LB: I have a three-year-old and I have to decide what to do about church.  The last line where you write, “The great love within you, star-like and wild.  As wide as grass, solemn as the moon.” I didn’t find a lot of that in church.  And yet, partly why I have faith today is because of that time I spent in church.

KN: Sure, you were raised in it. When I’m in Honolulu, I attend an Episcopal church and I love what they do with children.  The kids have Sunday School and miss out on the stuff that would bore them, which is the readings and the sermon. And then they have their own procession, where they bring the gifts up to the altar.  Two of the children have white robes and are usually barefoot or in flip-flops, and they’re carrying their own cross, then the majority of them come in and sit with their parents, right when we’re going to do the Eucharistic prayers.  One little boy has this ritual.  He comes in and hugs his mother, then his father, then his baby sister.  It’s like wow, this is Eucharist. This is worship. And they fidget and make a little noise but that’s when you want a little noise, some celebration, cause we’re half asleep after the sermon so now we need to get hooked up.

By the time the kids are in eighth grade or high school they’re having struggles.  Some churches have figured out ways to give these kids a solid tradition in joyful worship, music and prayer.  That’s something that they’ll keep with them, whether or not they drift away for a while.  Teenagers are asking difficult questions and they need something*maybe their own worship service besides.  Rather than making them memorize a lot of things and do things by rote, answer why we do things in worship. Because they’re curious. Give them good answers about why we light candles or don‘t, or why we have the cross where it is and why we sing hymns.  I think that’s a significant part of the formation as a Christian.

LB: How do you decide whether something’s going to be a poem or a poetic piece of prose?

KN: I usually know pretty quickly because if it’s a poem it starts out as a kind of wordplay.  Some little phrase will stick in my mind and I’ll be spinning it around and gradually write it down.  A piece of prose often starts out as a story I want to tell or an idea that I want to get across.  Like some of the chapters in Dakota, especially the things about the farm crisis, seemed too big a subject for my poetry.  So it’s usually in the origin*where it comes from.  And sometimes they switch places, too.

LB: You quoted Jean Cockteau: “Poets, like monks, are useless but indispensable.”

KN: My husband says that about himself: “I’m useless, but indispensable.” I am very glad that there are these communities around the globe that are praying all the time, 24 hours a day.  I like knowing that.

One of the marvelous things is when I’m in a monastery choir, especially with young monks or sisters, and I realize that these people have been doing this for 1700 years.  And before that it was the Jewish psalm tradition of morning prayer, and evening prayer that is really ancient.  And we‘re still doing it.  It’s not the new and improved model, it’s not for sale on TV, it’s something much more significant and powerful and truly ancient.

 LB: In Dakota you state, “Gossip done well can be a holy thing. It can strengthen communal bonds.”  And your children’s book is called The Holy Twins.  What do you mean by the word “holy?”

KN: When I said that about gossip I was reflecting the history of the word, which originally meant someone present at a baptism.  A gossip was a godparent.  I looked it up in an etymological dictionary and it said “gossip: see holy.” And I went, “Whoa. I don’t think so.  Now how has that word changed from being something holy to being something unholy?”  I guess holy, whole, and hail and hearty.  When something is right, righteous and healthy, we know it, that’s what makes it holy.  At the Presbyterian church in South Dakota, when we have our joys and concerns, it really is a form of gossip.  Some of the people go into great detail about operations and recovery and we’re learning more than we need to know, but it’s all for the purpose of prayer.  After church if you visit a church member in the hospital you gossip. You say, “This is who we prayed for in church this morning and this is why.” And you tell them about the operation and the recovery.  

Knowing what people are up against in a small town can sometimes be very useful.  Like when I’m working in the library and somebody comes in and I just heard they are in the middle of a messy separation and there’s going to be a child custody battle.  I may not say anything directly about it, but it’s good to be aware of it.  That’s what I mean by the holy use of gossip.  I’ve had a lot of responses*teenagers especially*who say “Gossip is horrible. There’s nothing good about it,” but I would argue with that.  I think we can reclaim that as a holy word.

LB:   In Dakota we get a sense of both the strength and fragility of Hope Church and if it isn’t thriving it feels like somehow all of us are diminished.  The readers end up having a vested interest in Hope church.

KN: Oh good.  Hope Church is doing well but that is only because another small country Lutheran church closed.  We’re talking about the frontier where everything, including boundaries, are a little different.  What happened was all the Lutherans decided to join the Presbyterian church rather than let another country church dwindle.   The Lutherans who were living close to Hope church became Presbyterians and its been a seamless transition.  After I wrote about Hope Church it was down to 30 members, now it’s back up to around 50.

When my editor visited me one place she definitely wanted to go to was Hope Church.  We had car trouble on the way back and she said, “This is what happens when a nice Jewish girl goes to church.”  Car trouble at Hope Church meant we had all sorts of help.  We were rescued along a country road by a church member.  It’s a remarkable and hospitable place in this sea of land.

LB: Let’s talk about celibacy.  I was speaking with a single protestant woman and she liked what you had to say about celibacy in terms of hospitality*that resonates with her experience.

KN: I’ve noticed with monastic people, their celibacy has a lot to do with how well they listen and respond to you because conversation is their form of intimacy.  That’s one of the reasons all sorts of people go to a monastery*because they can sit and be listened to.  Some of the nuns were telling me, “This is our form of intimacy, it’s a part of our hospitality.  We want to be open to everyone*not just to a wife or a husband.”  

The orthodox tradition makes a lot of sense.  The clergy are often married, or not, it’s their choice.  But the monastic communities are always celibate, because if you’re trying to have a religious community and you have people pairing off, it doesn’t work so well.  You have these exclusive or intensely sexual romantic relationships and then the community suffers.

LB: This woman wondered about the implications of celibacy for protestant men and women, given that there isn’t really a community supporting celibacy.

KN:  I think community is the key.  The current crisis in the Catholic Church with the priestly abuse of their role and their authority doesn’t have to do with celibacy per se, it’s the factor of loneliness of the diocesan priest.  Someone who’s out there without a community trying to be celibate. These people get extremely lonely and they stop praying and it’s a difficult situation.  I talked to a Benedictine and he said “if I had to be out there alone in a parish, I couldn’t do it.” They don’t understand how people can be celibate outside of a community.  If you want to be single and celibate and protestant I think you have to be very aware of getting a support system, having friends of both sexes and being deliberate about not letting yourself be isolated from human affection, because I think that friendships would become extremely important and the big danger would be isolation.  As well as thinking “because I am celibate I am holier than the people who aren’t.” That can get all twisted.  If you’re doing it because you’re repressed then that’s going to kick you in the rear in the long run.

LB: I think many here would like to know, how did you cultivate the permission to write about the big things like, incarnation, trinity.

KN: You know, that was funny.  While I was working on The Cloister Walk I started writing these passages about words, and finally my editor and I said, “There are two different books here.”  I decided I wanted to call the book “Scary Words” and my publisher said “No, no, you can’t do that.”  I started tackling words that had troubled me the most when I was trying to make my way back to church.  Or simply words I had learned something about that I wanted to share, like “perfect” as in “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  That’s a bad translation; it really means “ripe” and “mature” and “fulfilled” and it’s a much richer word than “perfection.”

But it was comical because I would think, “Oh my God I have to write about judgment, ugh.” And I would come in from working intensely and I would say “David, just be nice to me, I’ve been writing about Hell all morning.”  At times I would think, “Why me Lord?  Why am I doing this to myself?  Why am I tackling sin, judgment, hell*”

LB: Antichrist.

KN: Antichrist, oh yes, what a fun subject.  I was inwardly driven to do that book.  I think it’s obvious when you read it.  I guess because I’d been a poet so long I had some nerve.  Poets really do rush in where angels fear to tread, so that makes us either poets or fools or both.  

LB: Well, it looks like it is time to close now.  I want to say for all here, thank you for helping us find the words to say what we believe, and for working the earth of our minds and hearts.

KN: Well, thank you very much.  This has been delightful.