Minding Place by Anita Cirulis
Neighbors viewed Kathleen Norris and her husband with suspicion when the couple moved from New York City to Lemmon, a small, isolated town in western South Dakota perched along the North Dakota border.
Though her roots in the state went back three generations and she spent most of her childhood summers in Lemmon, Norris was still considered an outsider when they began living in what had been her grandparents’ home.
She was also a writer. And eventually she would give voice to people like the residents of her community—rural Americans living in an area largely invisible to the rest of the country. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, her book about the impact of the Great Plains on the human spirit, became a bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It also made her the clear choice as the keynote speaker for Northwestern’s first Day of Learning in Community, a day set aside to examine how place shapes people and how people shape place.
The Invisible Rural America
“This is a historic moment,” said English professor Keith Fynaardt when introducing Norris to the audience gathered in the Bultman Center gymnasium April 9. “We’ve suspended classes, closed offices and flung open our doors to the community. For one day as a whole college and community, we gather to explore a common theme.”
“Minding Place,” part of Northwestern’s celebration of its 125th anniversary, consisted of two weekend workshops, the Day of Learning in Community, and a two-day meeting to discuss the possibility of establishing a regional studies center at NWC. The weekend workshops, both of which were free and open to the public, brought novelist and poet Jim Heynen to campus to lead a session on writing, while presidential historian Charles Morrissey taught a workshop on oral history. More than 2,000 people participated in Minding Place events, including nearly 1,000 on hand for Norris’ opening address.
Like Heynen and Morrissey, Norris attracted guests to Northwestern’s campus from throughout the region—people who previously had no connection to the college.
“She drew the crowd. People came to hear her,” says Fynaardt, who was part of the planning committee for Minding Place. “We were looking for name recognition, but we also wanted someone who knows this place—someone as close to northwest Iowa as we could get.”
Not only had Norris written about the Great Plains, but her grandmother graduated from Sioux City High School, and her paternal grandfather pastored churches in Iowa. A Christian, she is thoughtful and articulate about her faith.
Norris drew rave reviews from organizers and participants alike for her ability to connect with her audience. With her stout frame, plaid flannel dress, black stockings and sensible shoes, she looked more like someone’s great-aunt than a best-selling author. As a speaker, she was unpretentious, witty and down-to-earth.
“I’m going to start out with a few poems because they’re fun, and I like poetry,” she said as she took the podium. Then came the verse of Morning Worship, by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren; Norris’ own evocative prose, On the Northwest Hiawatha, about a cross-country train trip to the Dakotas; and the whimsical, rhythmic Baling Wheat Straw on My 33rd Birthday, by Norris’ late husband, poet and photographer David Dwyer.
Norris wove poems and stories throughout both her addresses, painting word pictures of the place and people that were part of her life for more than a quarter century. Her morning address, “Dakota and Beyond: America’s Invisible People,” described the gap between urban and rural.
“I began work on Dakota,” she said, “because I realized what I was witnessing on the Plains in the early 1980s—the beginning of what was then termed ‘The Farm Crisis’ but now seems to have become the endemic state of rural America—was largely invisible to the rest of the country. And it interests me that, almost 15 years now after my book was first published, the people on the Great Plains are still so invisible to other Americans.”
In her evening address, Norris examined the “necessary contradictions” of stability and change that she believes help make a place worth living in and are critical for the survival of small towns. America’s emphasis on mobility, she says, stems from the pursuit of “the new best place” and makes putting down roots countercultural.
But too much stability can be just as damaging.
“It’s OK to have a genuine pride in place—that stable place that you love,” she said. “But it’s not OK when that pride becomes tribalism and reflexively rejects anyone or anything from outside as automatically suspect—as different and other and unwelcome.”
An Interdisciplinary View
Norris’ reflections on place served as bookends to an entire afternoon of more than 30 workshops led by faculty, staff, alumni, students and community members. The interdisciplinary sessions drew from a wide range of fields. English and creative writing workshops focused on stories about place. Other workshops looked at the history of neighboring towns and of Native Americans.
There were workshops about the Holy Land, the virtual places of online communities, and the restoration of prairies. Science faculty led workshops on the pollution of Iowa’s waterways and how the brain gives one a sense of place and presence; music faculty examined how place influenced The Music Man, by Iowa composer Meredith Willson. Still other workshops focused on the importance of experiencing different places in order to develop intercultural credibility.
Among the alumni who led workshops were Ryan Stander ’98, who talked about photographing place, and Kevin Sutton ’92 and Doug Hochstetler ’89, who reflected on how movement—hiking, backpacking, biking and walking—helps one experience a place.
“I spend my time creating experiences for people to walk into spaces, into wilderness,” said Sutton, who directs an outdoor/wilderness ministry for college students. “I want them to explore not just that place, but bigger questions: Who am I? What am I here for?”
As with the addresses by Norris, the workshops were free and open to the public. Orange City resident Doug Van Berkum ’62 attended a session designed to give participants a sense of their “cosmic place” through models that illustrated the size and distances between planets, solar systems and galaxies.
“I think this is a wonderful idea to have the college involve the community,” he said. “So many times, all we do is go to a game or an art exhibit.”
The mix of area residents, alumni, students, and faculty/staff participating in the Day of Learning in Community was especially gratifying to those who organized the event. Success was measured not only in attendance, but in the positive evaluations given by participants. Plans are already under way for Northwestern’s second Day of Learning in Community. Scheduled for April 1, 2009, it will center on caring for creation. 