Article August 9, 1999 Issue

An uncloistered talk

Writer Kathleen Norris in conversation with News Editor Kim Shippey

Kathleen Norris is probably best known for her poetry, and for The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead Books), both of which have featured prominently on New York Times bestseller lists. Much curiosity has been aroused by her immersion in Benedictine liturgy, with its emphasis on the Psalms (about which she has also written), and especially by her accounts of her spiritual growth during two nine-month periods in residence at the Ecumenical Institute on the grounds of St. John's Abbey in Minnesota. We began by asking her whether she felt most people would benefit from a monastic experience.

"You need to get a couple of things straight," she says with refreshing candor. "A monastery is not for those restless people who can't give up the fax and the e-mail and the latest trends on the stock market. It's not a business hotel, and it's not a spa. If you rush in from the outside world, you really skid to a halt. The silence of the monastery pulls the rug out from under you. I soon found out that monks aren't impressed by much. Certainly not by where I am on the bestseller list."

Ms. Norris goes back occasionally, and always feels liberated. "There's a whole different sense of time, which is very refreshing. In our culture, time can seem like an enemy," she says. "But the monks insist that there is time each day for prayer, for work, for study, and for play."

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