I Saved Kathleen Norris and Kathleen Norris Saved Me

How "Forbearance" came to be.

This post is about how a single book can change the trajectory of our lives. Perhaps you will consider picking up a copy of my new poetry collection.

---

Several springs ago, I was browsing Labyrinth Books in Princeton, New Jersey, avoiding the future.

It was my final semester of seminary, and I had no clue what was next. Having abandoned my plans to pursue a PhD in moral theology, I’d begun a scattershot job hunt, applying to roles in book publishing, education, and ministry in places dissimilar as Lincoln, Nebraska, and New York City. But nothing felt right.

Raised in South Dakota, my wife and I had enjoyed two brief years on the east coast and even toyed around with giving Brooklyn a go. I was especially fond of this idea, having visited New York enough times to sense the tug of its cosmopolitan magnetism. Meanwhile, as I was studying, Jenny had been working long days at a hectic shopping mall in Princeton and was ready for a slower pace of life—that is, for me to get a job.

So, I was browsing Labyrinth Books, avoiding the future, when I noticed on a single bookstand a copy of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota.

The cover showed a little country church in the distance of a yellow field below huge blue sky. I’d read a collection of Norris’s poetry as an undergrad (thanks, Dr. Bangsund), so I vaguely knew she was associated with the Midwest, but that was it. Desperate for wisdom and a little homesick, I bought the book.

Weeks later, when I finished Dakota on March 13, 2018—exactly seven years from today, as it happens—I knew for certain we’d be moving back to South Dakota.

Norris tells the story of how she and her husband left their stimulating life in New York City to inherit the house her mother had grown up in, in Lemmon, SD. “More than any other place I lived as a child or young adult,” she writes, “this is my spiritual geography, the place where I’ve wrestled my story out of the circumstances of landscape and inheritance.”

“Wrestled” is the key word. Throughout Dakota, Norris illustrates how the harsh landscapes, weather patterns, and social conventions of Plains life shape the human soul, for good or ill. The book’s spiritual insights stem from its rich controlling metaphor: Norris compares life on the western Plains to fourth-century Christian monasticism, a time when men and women fled the comforts of cities to pursue what they hoped to be a more rigorous form of faith in the desert.

The metaphor stirred me. I had never thought of boring-old South Dakota as a kind of desert. But then, I had never read anyone write about the spiritual significance of my home state—and Norris can write:

The silence of the Plains, this great unpeopled landscape of earth and sky, is much like the silence one finds in a monastery, an unfathomable silence that has the power to re-form you. And the Plains have changed me. I was a New Yorker for nearly six years and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems and essays.

Two months later, we boxed up our apartment and moved back to Sioux Falls. Of course we were relieved to return to family, friends, and other comforts of the Midwest. But it was Kathleen Norris—or God by means of her—who ultimately assured me that our move back needn’t be a move backwards, that I could discover in South Dakota not only my old life, but a new one.

I took a teaching job at the high school I’d graduated from seven years prior… because nothing says “new life” like flashbacks to adolescence. I scribbled lines of poems between classes, wrote songs on the weekends. I was a monk now, the Plains my Cappadocia.

By this point Norris had relocated to Hawaii, but I kept returning to her Dakota for both inspiration and consolation. In one passage she writes of an old woman who lived her entire life on ranches in western South Dakota. Raised without electricity or running water, she rarely complained. But once she confided in Kathleen: “The one thing I could never stand was the wind.”

Grinning, I underlined the quote and set about writing a new poem.

Forbearance

Wind—unlike the likely droughts
and stubbled summer lawn,

or the cicada’s tymbal cry;
unlike the absolute emptiness

of fields under snow at night
with their highways like blue stitches;

unlike the austere Cooper’s hawks
perched upon fence posts

and splintered billboards—wind
was the one thing she refused

to abide: how it lashes the prairie,
the porch swing, the sky, penetrating

the slightest cracks of her
worn house, her worn face.

I submitted this poem to the 2022 South Dakota State Poetry Society contest, under the “Portrait” category, and it won. I tried reaching out to Kathleen to share the good news—thank her for the inspiration—but couldn’t find any contact info online.

Later that year I enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Seattle Pacific University, finally convinced I was doomed to write for the rest of my life. I’d heard good reports about the low-residency program, and was particularly interested in studying under its director, Scott Cairns, whom I’d come to consider one of the greatest living poets of Christian faith.

I was introduced to Scott at our next in-person residency in Seattle.

“Remind me where you’re from again” he said, shaking my hand.

“South Dakota,” I said.

“That’s right. Have you heard of Kathleen Norris? She’s an old friend of mine.”

Of course she is.

One year later, when Seattle Pacific announced it would be slashing its MFA program, it also slashed much of the budget for bringing in guest authors during residencies. In other words, it was time to call on old friends.

At first I was supposed to graduate in March of 2024. Due to my son’s birth, however, I was forced to take a brief leave of absence from coursework, which pushed my graduation out to the August residency. Coincidentally, providentially, Scott had invited none other than Kathleen Norris to join as a guest author for the August residency. And she accepted.

I am honestly not trying to make this all sound so serendipitous. But there I was, sitting in a small circle with the woman who’d started it all.

Now at 77, she was sharp as a tack, and wore a bright red floral skirt over a pair of white Hoka running shoes. My colleagues asked her questions about her writing; she asked us questions about our writing. At one point I let slip that I was from Sioux Falls. Kathleen said we have good restaurants, which is true.

We ended our workshop early so Kathleen could check in to her return flight before giving us a final reading that evening. She left the room but returned moments later, flustered, announcing her phone was dead and she’d forgotten a charger. She asked if she could borrow one of ours.

I volunteered to run up to the dorms and grab mine. I remember laughing to myself on the way back.

Kathleen thanked me profusely when she plugged her phone in and the screen lit up. “I travel all the time and have never forgotten a charger before!” she said. I assured her it was the least I could do.

Minutes later, we all gathered in a sunny lecture hall for Kathleen’s reading. As we were settling in, she pointed me out of the crowd and said into the microphone:

“I want to thank Cameron for letting me borrow his phone charger. He saved me.”

We laughed.

Because my leave of absence had afforded me a few extra months in the program, I had already by this time submitted my final manuscript of poems to a few publishers. I’d entertained several other (abstruse) titles for the book, but it was my mentor Jennifer Maier who finally proposed Forbearance, which felt so apt as to seem necessary. I liked how it harkened back to Kathleen’s metaphor about the monastic character of life on the Plains.

Later that week, I and the other graduates gave readings from our final manuscripts. Kathleen had flown home to Hawaii by then, but I thanked her aloud anyway, and read several poems her work had provoked in me, including “Forbearance,” “The Seagull Scans a Fallow Field,” and “Ponderosa.” After my reading, I sat down, took a deep breath, and glanced at my phone.

I saw this email:

And the rest is very recent history.

The poems of Forbearance summon us to ponder a great mystery—the mystery of existence as such. They wrestle with the given, revel in the real. Here are lines of mirth and dearth on the vast Dakota plains. Here are poems about blizzards and jazz solos and eternity's gracious flowering in time.