Kathleen Norris: Dakota and other holy places - includes related essay on poets and monks - Cover Story

Christian Century, July 27, 1994 by Debra Bendis, Kathleen Norris

Religion for Kathleen Norris was once "a constraint to overcome by dint of reason, learning, artistic creativity, sexual liberation." But 20 years ago a move from New York City to South Dakota changed all that. The cultural and geographical shock of the move prompted Norris to begin a religious quest in which she eventually "rediscovered the religion I was born to, and found in it a home."

Her journey back to Christianity, as described in her 1993 book Dakota, was marked by unusual spiritual persistence. Norris, who before Dakota wrote two books of poetry - Falling Off (1971) and The Middle of the World (1981) - is the kind of person who can regard long evenings in a small-town motel in North Dakota, surrounded by "red and black flocked velvet wallpaper," as a "gift of silence and solitude." She is also the kind of person who will ask not only, "How much will this church do for me?" but "What can I do to make this work?"

Norris and her husband, David Dwyer, moved to Lemmon, South Dakota, when her grandparents died. They planned to stay only for a year or so - live in the family farmhouse, arrange for the management of the land and cattle, and then move back to New York. Once there, they began weaving together a living from a variety of jobs, including running a cable television business, working in a library, tending bar and translating French literature. The essays in Dakota (some of them first published in Northern Lights, Massachusetts Review, Gettysburg Review and other magazines) report on this new environment - the isolation, the region's bleak economic outlook, the locals' insular thinking and tendency to isolate newcomers. The essays also affirm the tenacity of her new neighbors and the patient understanding of life and death that they've acquired through a close, dependent relationship with the land.

NORRIS BEGAN to appreciate the "desert" of western Dakota. "We found that we liked our silence and kept coming back to it. We liked the way it made a space for us in the midst of noise ... and the way it allowed friendships to develop." She found that it was impossible to shut out the vast skies and endless vistas of the plains, and like the psalmist, she acknowledged the power of the natural world and accepted its centrality in her life. "The Plains have been essential not only for my growth as a writer, they have formed me spiritually. I would even say they have made me a human being."

Interspersed with the longer essays in Dakota are short, lyrical pieces describing the land. Some of these are titled "Weather Reports": they interrupt the reader in the way the weather interrupts Dakota life. There is the relentless wind, for example, that "yanks moisture out of the ground, turning wet fields to dust in a matter of hours ... encircles us, much as water encircles an island." Walking in this wind, says Norris, is "like staring at the ocean," humbled before its immensity: "I have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air." As she learns to accept the bleak landscape, she pays attention to the glory of "little things": the wingspan of a golden eagle, a columbine blooming after a hailstorm, a lone juniper tree on a hillside.

After the wind, there is quiet. Being a writer, she had sought solitude before. But "living on the Plains has nudged me into a quieter life." She was surprised to realize that "this is what I wanted." She accepted the solitude, admitted it into her life and began meeting the terror and opportunities that came with it. "A person is forced inward by the spareness ... seeing the Plains is like seeing an icon: what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state."

Though she had thought that "writing had substituted for religion in my life," in South Dakota she found religious questions waiting for her. The new dimension of quiet in her life made room for memories to emerge - memories of her religious upbringing and especially of her Methodist and Presbyterian grandparents. As she moved through Grandmother Totten's house, tried on her grandmother's jackets and played her grandmother's piano, she decided that she would have to confront all "the crap I learned in Sunday School." She also had to admit she was largely ignorant about the religion she had rejected.

Norris began attending church. (She was greeted with "It's good to have a Totten in church again.") She noted the steady witness of the church's strong older women with their worn Bibles, and suspected that they knew something she didn't. And yet it was "an uneasy exercise in nostalgia."

In a recent interview Norris recalled that going to church "didn't feel right and so it was very easy to drop it, just not go." But she became friends with some of the ministers in the area. "I would find out they had things in their libraries that I wanted. We developed this very informal network and from that some of these questions arose ... about finding my way back .... I ended up with a really remarkable spiritual mentor ... a Presbyterian pastor who has basically a Russian Orthodox spirituality."