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Authentic spiritual journeys are seldom neat and orderly, especially for artists. Kathleen Norris's biographical reflections in The Virgin of Bennington bear witness to this. As Augustine summarized his own messy journey, "Salvation is far from sinners, and such was I at that time. Yet little by little I was drawing closer to You although I did not know it." Among Kathleen Norris's books are Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and three books of poetry. The Virgin of Bennington is now available in paperback.

How would you describe your conversion experience?

I would call it a reconversion. I'd grown up singing in church choirs in the Methodist Church and United Church of Christ since I was 3 years old, and drifted away from all of that when I went to college. Once the family moorings are gone you can drift awhile before you realize that maybe there is something to this faith business, and to Christianity, after all. It isn't just for grandmas and small kids, which is how I looked at it in my 20s.

Your home and your Bennington life were radically different.

Absolutely. I had a very close-knit family. We went to church every Sunday. And I really missed my family at college. I missed Hawaii because there's a huge difference culturally between Hawaii and Vermont. Weather has not much to do with it. It's just the whole cultural shifting to the East Coast. Bennington is really connected more to New York City than to the countryside.

The Bennington of the '60s was known for being a very out-there environment.

And always had been. It had been founded in the 1930s during the Depression by followers of John Dewey for "learning by doing." It was one of the first homes for modern dance. I think Martha Graham taught there in the '30s. So Bennington had this wonderful artistic reputation, and that had appealed to me. I don't think I knew I wanted to be a writer when I went there, but I was certainly willing to let the college encourage me in that.

But you were bookish.

Definitely. I thought I was going to be a librarian. But Bennington has a well-deserved reputation for nurturing young artists in dance, drama, painting. What they weren't excellent at in the 1960s is really knowing what to do with girls who came from the Midwest or the West, from small-town backgrounds, and who weren't prepared to find peers who had been going to psychiatrists since they were 12 years old and addicted to methamphetamine.

It was your place for sexual experimentation.

Yeah. One of the things that I really learned during this is not to buy the lie of the sexual revolution—that it doesn't matter who you have sex with or who your partners are. I got engraved invitations to orgies, which I turned down. I had that much common sense. But people would say that sex doesn't matter. You can go out and have sex with anyone. This really was the cultural lie at the time. I remember having my doubts about that. If I learned nothing else in my 20s, it's that sexual desire and sexual experience are extremely powerful. It can turn you on a dime. It can turn you into someone you don't want to be. And it can also lead you in the right direction, which I think in my case was my 25-year friendship with my husband.

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46