2 of 3

Let's talk about the title of the book, The Virgin of Bennington. You wanted to be called the Poet in a party setting, and they ended up calling you the Pope. Though you were experimenting with yourself in many ways, you did have this reputation of being somewhat more grounded.

The title that I had, the Virgin of Bennington, came from the fact that I think I was one of the very few girls who was a virgin until well into my senior year at college. People just found that extraordinary, including the school doctors and nurses. I went in for a physical exam one time and they were just stunned. So it was kind of a countercultural position at the time. I just would tell my friends, "I'm not hung up about sex. I'm not ready yet. Just leave me alone; it'll happen." And, of course, it did. I did the profoundly stupid thing of having a crush on a married professor. I did about the most stupid thing you could imagine, but for three and a half years I just kept telling people I wasn't ready yet.

It was that affair with this professor that gave me the nerve to go to New York City. In turn, that was what introduced me to the greatest mentor of my life, the woman I worked for: Betty Kray.

Elizabeth Kray is probably, other than yourself, the central character of this book. You call her the first reader of your life and of your art. She essentially involved herself in every aspect of your life, right down to what you wore.

Yeah. Because she wasn't my mother I would actually listen to her. That was the secret.

It was in New York that you also came into the Andy Warhol crowd and drugs.

As at Bennington, I sort of stood out because I wasn't really engaging in a lot of casual sex. In New York I stood out in that crowd because I really was afraid to experiment with drugs. The very few times I tried anything, like LSD or mescaline, once was enough. It was obvious that it was not for me.

You say the publishing of Falling Off was like an earthquake. Here you are in your 20s and you have a work of poetry published. That's amazing.

I think when success comes that young, quite often you don't feel like you've really earned it. But the reaction of some of the people I thought were my friends was extremely painful. All of a sudden, I was competition. I had pulled ahead of the pack somehow. It was $500 and publication of a book, which doesn't sound like a lot, but at the time it really was an enormous upheaval in my life. And it got so I stopped introducing myself as a poet. That was a very painful year. I think that's just one of those things that happens in your 20s. You have to sort out success and failure and who your friends really are.

You describe yourself as a young woman in need of grounding. But some things started happening. You went to a party at the Sanctuary, which was a nightclub in an old church. You describe it as "Sleeping Beauty was awakened not by a prince but by my Presbyterian grandmother in Dakota."

It was a very, very seedy place, which I still thought was glamorous. I was just young and foolish. There were some nights like that where I just began to realize maybe all this nightlife stuff and hanging out with this crowd is not conducive to long life, to working, and to writing. So I began to pull back. I started to make those adult decisions about how I wanted to live my life. Up until then I really had been very ungrounded and very drifting.

During this period of your life, you began to feel drawn to Dakota.

Betty was also the first person who turned me on to Edward Abbey. She was the only person in Manhattan who understood, when I started talking about moving to South Dakota, that this would be a good thing for me as a writer and as a person.

I've sensed now that I really had to write those other books about the religious journey in order to get back to telling this story. This is my prequel, as it were. I really think this book shows where a religious conversion comes from. It doesn't come out of a vacuum, but it might come out of a very messy life. Out of someone who really isn't even aware that God is working in the world, and certainly in her life. But I think that as I wrote the book I was very conscious that God was really present and active all along. It's just that I was too dumb to notice it.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46