Book : Dakota A Spiritual Geography - Norris, Kathleen

-Titulo Original : Dakota A Spiritual Geography

-Fabricante :

HarperOne

-Descripcion Original:

“A deeply spiritual, deeply moving book” about life on the Great Plains, by the New York Times-bestselling author of The Cloister Walk (The New York Times Book Review).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. Review Deeply moving. The New York Times - About the Author Kathleen Norris is the author of two books of poetry, Falling Off (1971) and The Middle of the World (1981) and has received awards from the Guggenheim and Bush foundations. She lives in Lemmon, South Dakota, with her husband. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PREFACEDakota is everywhere, at least in diaspora. In January of 1993, when I first began traveling across the country to talk about Dakota, a woman from a San Francisco suburb told me that her mother had graduated from Lemmon High School in the 1950s. In New York City, a man showed me a photograph of the old Lemmon railroad station taken not long after it was built. His great-grandfather had helped lay the track to Lemmon in 1907, when the town was founded, and stayed for more than ten years.In Minneapolis, a woman said that in the late 1960s her grandparents had lost their farm to the Oahe Dam. It killed them, she added solemnly. It took the spirit right out of them. In Chicago, a Lakota man asked me if I knew anything about the Catholic boarding school his father had attended. In Portland, a woman said she hoped the book would inspire her mother to talk about her upbringing on a homestead ranch near Kadoka. She doesnt think her story has any value, the woman explained, and much of it is so painful she doesnt want to revisit it. But I need to know about my familys past. In Seattle, a show of hands revealed that nearly half my audience had roots in the Dakotas.These people and their stories point to a dilemma: the Dakotas are a place people are from, a place that has suffered a steady outmigration for the better part of a hundred years. What does this do to those of us who remain? Although I explored that question in Dakota, I dont pretend to have any answers. I did discover that many former Dakotans felt that my book reaffirms their sense of being glad to have escaped, while others found, especially in the descriptions of the Plains physical beauty, a reminder of the place they were forced to leave for economic reasons, but dream of returning to one day.And Ive received letters from people who feel that Ive somehow described their own small town. A high school English teacher in New Jersey reported that what Id said about gossip, provincialism, and fear of change captured the atmosphere at her school. I got similar letters from university professors and corporate executives. I was stunned by the variety of people the book had touched. A Mexican American priest wrote to say that Dakota had helped him to understand the older generation in his Los Angeles parish, mostly German Americans who had fled during the economic depression that first hit the Dakotas in the 1920s and intensified in the 1930s. The Methodist bishop in Fargo began giving copies of the book to all new clergy coming into North Dakota. Several people wrote to ask why I didnt write more about the Indian population of the Dakotas. I felt that many fine Indian writers -Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Louise Erdrich, Adrian Louis, Susan Power, David Seals -were already doing that, and I needed to describe the Dakotas of my own experience. I wanted the book to be a portrait of a place, the kind of small Dakota town that has had little written about