Kathleen Norris

• Born: July 27, 1947
• Birthplace: Washington, D.C.

Biography

Kathleen Norris was born on July 27, 1947, in Washington, D.C., the daughter of John Heyward Norris, a musician, and Lois Ferne, a teacher. Norris received her B.A. from Bennington College in 1969, and in 1977 she married David J. Dwyer, a poet, translator, and computer programmer.

Norris began her writing career as a poet, winning the Big Table Poetry Series Younger Poets Award in 1971 for Falling Off. Her three memoirs, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), The Cloister Walk (1996), and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998), all explore her religious quest as a Protestant attracted to the monastic life and to Catholicism. The differences in these faiths and the conflicts in her own feelings result in a fruitful tension that make her spiritual explorations a gripping experience.

Norris’s books challenge the conventional world of marriage and family, affirming the virtues of celibacy and of a religious-centered existence. At the same time, Norris’s lucid language and directness open up her narratives to readers of all persuasions. She presents her personal journey in The Virgin of Bennington (2001), revealing herself as a reticent student who withdrew from social contact and devoted herself to poetry. This all changed when she embarked on an affair with a married professor, who helped her find employment in New York City, where she became involved in the milieu of avant garde art sponsored by Andy Warhol.

There followed several years of reflection on her life and then the writing of her memoirs. Much of this material, in turn, was preparing for her re-emergence as a poet in 1981, with The Middle of the World, which critics saw as a significant advance over her earlier work, which seemed derivative of poets such as James Tate, Stevie Smith, and Pablo Neruda. Norris’s later poetry was praised for its strong sense of narrative and its relaxed, conversational tone—perhaps the result of her work in prose. Norris’s subsequent books of poetry such as Little Girls in Church (1995) reflect her continuing concern with feminism and religion. This book coincided with the first publication of her memoirs, which received an overwhelming response (more than 100,000 copies of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography were sold).

Critics have greeted Norris’s explorations of religious devotion and celibacy as an almost therapeutic exercise—in part because she does not recommend her experience as an entire way of life so much as episodes that could be part of the lives of everyone who seeks a break from the relentless pace of modern life and the commitments that prevent any sustained inquiry into the nature of the self and the soul. In Norris’s work, the spiritual and literary quests seem to coincide in ways that readers have found both novel and enlightening.