A Conversation with Kathleen Norris
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Poet and author Kathleen Norris spoke at CLU in Samuelson Chapel. Listen to the podcast below.
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About the Speaker
Kathleen Norris is an acclaimed poet and author of spiritually themed best sellers. Her recently published book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life is a study of acedia, the ancient word for the spiritual side of sloth. While the meaning is difficult to capture in our language today, she explores this apathy, boredom or indifference in the light of theology, psychology, monastic spirituality and her own experience in life and in grief.
After graduation from Bennington College, Norris moved to New York City to become arts administrator at the Academy of American Poets. In 1971, she published her first book of poetry, Falling Off. Other works of poetry followed: Little Girls in Church, How I Came to Drink My Grandmother's Piano and The Year of Common Things.
When she and her husband, poet David Dwyer, moved from New York to South Dakota, their life on the Plains inspired Norris' first nonfiction work and New York Times best seller Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. This book was followed by The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith and the autobiographical The Virgin of Bennington. The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle calls Norris "one of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time."
