20 women writing about the outdoors

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Cover image via Mariner Books)

16. Kathleen Norris

For many of you readers, there is a good chance that the plains region within the United States is either a cultural marker of stagnation and boredom, or it simply does not register at all. Currently, more than half the population of North America lives in urban areas. That leaves the country even more wide open than before — and perhaps just that much more culturally neglected.

While humans are experiencing a mass movement of people into the cities, that drive does not necessarily affect everyone. It certainly didn’t dictate where Kathleen Norris moved in 1974. That is the year in which she and her husband moved from the bustling metropolis of New York City to a family farm in remote Lemmon, South Dakota.

It was an even bigger move when you consider Norris’ background. She graduated from high school in Hawaii, then moved to Bennington College in Vermont, where she graduated in 1969. After, she became an arts administrator and started publishing her own poems.

As related in Norris’ 1993 book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, she found a richer life there than initially expected. Norris and her husband, David Dwyer, encountered a group of Benedictine monks nearby. This, in turn, sparks a revival of their own faith, to the point where Norris is now a Benedictine oblate (in this case, a layperson who has specifically dedicated her life to God).

Norris credits her increased spiritual strength with the landscape of her Dakota home, saying that “Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are.”