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Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
by Kathleen Norris

Published: 2001-04-06
Paperback : 256 pages
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A beautiful meditation on life in the Great Plains from award-winning author and poet Kathleen Norris.

 

Kathleen Norris invites readers to experience rich moments of prayer and presence in Dakota, a timeless tribute to a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and ...

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Introduction

A beautiful meditation on life in the Great Plains from award-winning author and poet Kathleen Norris.

 

Kathleen Norris invites readers to experience rich moments of prayer and presence in Dakota, a timeless tribute to a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth. In thoughtful, discerning prose, she explores how we come to inhabit the world we see, and how that world also inhabits us. Her voice is a steady assurance that we can, and do, chart our spiritual geography wherever we go.

Editorial Review

After 20 years of living in the "Great American Outback," as Newsweek magazine once designated the Dakotas, poet Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk) came to understand the fascinating ways that people become metaphors for the land they inhabit. When trying to understand the polarizing contradictions that exist in the Dakotas between "hospitality and insularity, change and inertia, stability and instability.... between hope and despair, between open hearts and closed minds," Norris draws a map. "We are at the point of transition between east and west in the United States," she explains, "geographically and psychically isolated from either coast, and unlike either the Midwest or the desert west."

Like Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge), Norris understands how the boundary between inner and outer scenery begins to blur when one is fully present in the landscape of their lives. As a result, she offers the geography lesson we all longed for in school. This is a poetic, noble, and often funny (see her discussion on the foreign concept of tofu) tribute to Dakota, including its Native Americans, Benedictine monks, ministers and churchgoers, wind-weathered farmers, and all its plain folks who live such complicated and simple lives. --Gail Hudson

Excerpt

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Discussion Questions

Suggested by Members

Comparing life in a monastery to life in remote areas of the Dakotas
Hospitality of people in small towns and rural areas
The humor in Norris' writing
by Squires (see profile) 08/14/15

Notes From the Author to the Bookclub

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Book Club Recommendations

Make the food a church pot luck meal
by Squires (see profile) 08/14/15
I had tuna casserole, green jello with carrots and a little mayonnaise on the side, cantaloupe, and sour cream raisin pie for dessert with a dollop of CoolWhip. These are all things that I had growing up at church pot luck dinners.

Member Reviews

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  "Dakota Changed My Life"by Sandra S. (see profile) 08/14/15

This is my second reading of Dakota, many years after the first read. Kathleen Norris describes western Dakota near where I grew up , but on the Montana side. Reading it, I felt as if Norris had gotten... (read more)

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