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Everyday Mysteries
By Leonard Gill
APRIL 12, 1999:
To hear her tell it, Kathleen Norris is something of a sneak and
a thief: a sneak when it came to injecting poetry into the best-selling
prose of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and a thief when it came to her own poems.
I feel very free to steal from myself, Norris said by phone
before embarking on a two-month tour to promote the paperback
edition of 1998s Amazing Grace. With Dakota, the original manuscript
had some poems mixed in with the prose, and my editor said, Youre
a new author and this is going to be a hard-sell for the sales
department. They will not want to see poetry in there. They think
thats the kiss of death. So I said, A lot of these images and
lines I really like. How bout if I just translate it into prose
and they wont know the difference? My editor said, They wont
know the difference and it will be good, it will be good prose.
So thats what I did. I added modifiers to make it feel a little
more prosy ... to get it past the sales department. I and my editor
had a lot of fun doing that.
Fun, then, for Norris and her editor, but a gift to readers, who
since 1993 have charted the authors progress back to her home
state of South Dakota and a homecoming of sorts to the Presbyterian
faith of her forebears. Reclaiming those roots, as Norris audience
well knows, went by the unlikely route of a laypersons perspective
within the 1,500-year-old tradition of Benedictine monasticism.
Does she mind being type-cast not as poet but as writer on religion?
No, except to make clear that she is writing not as a theologian
so much as a literary person and a storyteller. And Amazing Grace,
a loose lexicon of religious terms that have engaged, attracted,
and terrified her, spells it out in language even an atheist
can admire. Her goal through the use of such language? To remove
the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious
words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the
world we live in ....
I wasnt trying [in Amazing Grace] to write a comprehensive guide
to the Christian faith, Norris said. The book isnt even specifically
addressed to Christians. It cant be because my editor is Jewish.
I get letters from atheists saying its helped them understand
some things, although they still think its a lot of bunk. The
letters I treasure the most, though, come from readers from other
religious faiths. Thats what Ive been trying to do. Just talk
about my own experience. Christianity from one persons experience.
Plus some historical knowledge of this and that. The broadest
possible audience is what Im trying to reach. Judging from some
of the mail Ive gotten, especially from Jewish and some Islamic
readers, theyre interested in what Im saying, that Ive illuminated
subjects, such as the Incarnation, which can seem really abstract
and weird. Now they can say, Oh, well, I see what she means by
that. Thats my goal, and when it happens Im really happy.
That goal back in the early 1980s when Norris left New York
and returned, with husband and poet David Dwyer, to her grandmothers
house in Lemmon, South Dakota didnt necessarily sit so well
with her literary friends, however.
Religion is a subject that a lot of writers take very, very seriously.
They dont always write about it, but they engage with that subject
very strongly, Norris told me. But I think the atmosphere has
changed. Ten, 15 years ago, if you wrote about religion you were
stereotyped and people might not publish you. Thats changed a
great deal, and Ive benefited from that. But Im not the only
one. There are a lot of writers out there writing about their
faith. ... and I think its a real sign of health in our country
that all this is going on, but none of it is commercially all
that successful. Back in the early 80s, though, people just werent
talking about it. It was still like the last taboo.
Last taboo, or in-house topic for disagreement? I asked Norris
about her husband, an ex-Roman Catholic who has not joined her
in refinding faith but who does make for a kind of shadowy presence
in all three books as a sufferer from periodic, debilitating depression.
Does he mind his portrayal inside Norris pages or his position
just outside the margins?
Sometimes people say, Why dont you write more about your husband?
My husband is in the books exactly as much as he wants to be,
according to the author. If I write something and hes in it,
I always show him. I say, Is this okay, or would you rather I
not say this? Because I dont feel like I have the right to appropriate
him. But he likes the idea of being a shadowy presence. Hes
an Irishman, so thats romantic for him, I guess. I think weve
struck a pretty good balance.
Is Norris planning a fourth book of prose along the lines of her
previous three?
Im going to move on now, she said. Im going to write a book
that wont be specifically about religion as much. Im going to
write about that period when I didnt go to church for 20 years,
when I was on my own, a writer in New York City, very young, in
my early 20s, foolishly sort of drifting. But I did have several
wonderful mentors in the poetry world, and they kept me sane and
they kept me from really self-destructing.
And back to poetry. Does it figure now?
The prose has kind of swept away the poetry ... but poetry is
my vocation, my first love, she said. Its my grounding. I keep
returning to it. Id be very unhappy if I stopped writing poetry
altogether.
Norris latest publication is an address she delivered to students
at St. Marys College at Notre Dame titled The Quotidian Mysteries:
Laundry, Liturgy and Womens Work, from Paulist Press. In it,
according to the author, I talked to these young women and wrote
this little book about some of my experiences when I was in my
early 20s, around their ages, the life choices you make. But I
also put it into a context of respecting and honoring the daily.
The daily processes are what really count in the long run. Quotidian,
everyday mysteries. If you can learn to see the value in routine
and the routine things youre going to have to do as someone in
the work world, as a parent, a wife .... I talk about how I failed
at this very much at their age, some of the stupid decisions I
made. In a way, its a little more confessional than some of the
other books Ive written.
The other books in this lecture series [are] pretty heavy-duty
theology feminist theology. But no one had ever talked about
doing laundry or washing dishes. And I decided as a poet coming
in that these were important, because poets really know the importance
of little things. Its time for someone, for feminists to start
talking about the laundry. Everyone knows that its part of life
and its a pain, but you have to do it.
To see the grace in it, check with Kathleen Norris.

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