Ep. 342 Kathleen Norris - On Disability, Humanity, and Hope Through the Story of Rebecca Sue

In this episode, I sit down with acclaimed writer and poet Kathleen Norris to talk about her deeply personal new book, Rebecca Sue. The book tells the story of her sister Becky - born with brain damage at birth - whose life was marked by both difficulty and transformation, humor and resilience. Kathleen shares what it was like to grow up alongside Becky, how storytelling became a way of honoring her full humanity, and why persistence was necessary to bring this book into the world. Along the way, she reflects on grief, community, the role of faith, and the ways we learn to see people not through labels or limitations, but in the fullness of who they are. This is a conversation about love, loss, and the surprising grace that emerges when we pay attention to every story - even the ones we’re tempted to overlook.

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of the New York Times bestselling books The Cloister Walk, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, The Virgin of Bennington, and several volumes of poetry. Exploring the spiritual life, her work is at once intimate and historical, rich in poetry and meditations, brimming with exasperation and reverence, deeply grounded in both nature and spirit, sometimes funny, and often provocative.

Widowed in 2003, Kathleen Norris now divides her time between South Dakota and Honolulu, Hawaii, where she is a member of an Episcopal church. She travels to the mainland regularly to speak to students, medical professionals, social workers, and chaplains at colleges and universities, as well as churches and teaching hospitals. For many years she was the poetry editor of Spirituality & Health magazine. She serves as an editorial advisor for the monthly Give Us This Day from Liturgical Press, and writes for a weekly e-newsletter, Soul Telegram: Movies & Meaning with her friend Irish storyteller Gareth Higgins.

Kathleen's Book:

Rebecca Sue

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• 12:57 (Cont.) Ep. 342 Kathleen Norris - On Disability, Humanity, and Hope Through the Story of Rebecca Sue
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• 30:57 (Cont.) Ep. 342 Kathleen Norris - On Disability, Humanity, and Hope Through the Story of Rebecca Sue

Transcript

Kathleen Norris: 0:00

You hear someone is disabled, you kind of dismiss them. You don't want to hear what they have to say, and you don't want to really get to know them that you've got a lot of people just kind of shy away. But I want Becky. I want people to meet Becky in full. You

Unknown: 0:20

Joshua,

Joshua Johnson: 0:26

hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, today I am joined by acclaimed poet and writer Kathleen Norris, her work has always helped us see the sacred in the ordinary, but in her new book, Rebecca Sue she takes us into her own family story, one shaped by love, difficulty, humor and transformation. It's the story of her sister, Becky, who lived with brain damage from birth and yet became someone unforgettable, full of personality, resilience and surprising grace. In this conversation, Kathleen shares what it means to see people in the fullness of their humanity, not just through labels or limitations. We talk about storytelling as a way of healing, about the persistence it takes to bring a book like this into the world, and about how community and faith hold us in seasons of grief and loss. This is an intimate, moving and hopeful conversation, one that reminds us that every life is worth seeing, every story worth telling. Here is my conversation with Kathleen Norris, Kathleen, welcome to shifting culture. Really excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me. Well, thanks for asking. This is a treat. I'm excited to talk about Rebecca sue your sister, Becky, and this new book. So tell me a little bit about Becky. Well, Becky was born in 1952

Kathleen Norris: 1:57

and, you know, I had an older brother, and then myself. I was five years old when she was born. My parents were both educators, and my mother was very interested in early childhood education, and firmly were in kindergarten and all of that. And from a very young age, I noticed mom was noticing that Becky was not developing the way most kids do, like she never learned to crawl that was physically too difficult for her. Her speech was coming along pretty well, but my mother was observing these things, and it came from when Becky was born, my mother was something like 40 hours in labor, and they'd given her too many drugs. It was basically medical mistakes. So Becky was born with what they call perinatal hypoxia, not enough oxygen to her brain at a critical time in the birth canal. But Becky was just she was intelligent enough to know that that had happened to her, so right away, she had a more difficult life than most people, just with that living with that burden. Why me that sort of thing? And in the 50s, of course, the advice was old doctors just said, oh, you should just put her away in an institution. And I'm so grateful to my parents, because they talked to us and they said, Do you think that's a good idea? What do you think of that? My brother and I both said, Well, that's crazy. She's part of the family. This is what, you know, and Becky was very borderline. If she had much more severely disabled, maybe that would have made sense, but it didn't make any sense for us. So she just came up in the family. And yeah, she ended up with a younger sister who's very sharp and very bright. No problems there at all. And and so the book is basically about growing up with Becky and watching her mature more slowly than most people, but turning into really by the time she died, a really wonderful person, and she'd been very difficult for a lot of her life, but she really turned into this marvelous, open, generous person, and that's part of the book is about that transformation that occurred in her later years. It's beautiful when you get to be able to see some of that transformation happen later on, especially when it's so difficult. So for you, just as you're entering into the relationship with Becky and your family, what was it like for you? How was your relationship early on with Becky, growing up? Well, I think it was pretty ordinary, because, as I said, Becky was part of the family. My brother and I knew we had to look out for her, because she was she lacked common sense sometimes, and was a little more accident prone. But otherwise we squabbled like any siblings do. It was just normal. And one of the great stories, Becky used to love to tell the story on herself, because it was complicated in some ways. When I was about 14, I got my first lipstick, ugly shade of coral that I just thought was the most wonderful thing in the world. And Becky had a good dose of jealousy in her. She was very jealous. Because she was too young for a lipstick. I kind of found her. We lived in navy housing then, because my dad was the band director out of Pearl Harbor, uh, cement block walls, I found my sister writing on the cement block wall with my new lipstick, and I knew I couldn't hit her, I would be in serious trouble. But I was furious, and I yelled, and my mother came in to find it, and Becky just looked at me and said, You can't hit me. I'm retarded. So there was, you know, she she knew enough about herself to and her her situation, to take advantage of it. And she found out that really didn't work for sisters. I was still pretty mad. You know, I wasn't going to hit it. That that, but you can't hit me. I'm retarded. I mean that in a sense that Becky in a nutshell, that she knew enough about her problems and enough to sometimes take advantage of them, and it became issued later on, she sometimes would have me go to her counselors, her psychologists that she worked with, because we had to figure out what were things that she knew were Bad, and she did them anyway, which is definitely sin. We all who think that what were things she knew was bad she did them anyway, and what were things she couldn't help because of her disability? And that was always a very fluid line, but it always kept us on our toes as the rest of the family to figure that out. And she was just interesting personality. She had a big personality, and I really wanted the book to convey that, because you hear someone is disabled, you kind of dismiss them. You don't want to hear what they have to say, and you don't want to really get to know them. That you've got a lot of people just kind of shy away. But I want Becky. I want people to meet Becky in full at the very beginning of your book, you talk a little bit about handicapped, disability, disabled and trying to not just see people through their disability or handicap, but actually see people for who they are, for their full personhood. How does that help us, when we see people in their full humanity, and not just about what whatever difficulty they have in life. I think it can be transformative for us and for the people we're looking at as disabled. And this isn't in the book, but I may write about it someday. But growing living in a small town my mom's hometown in western South Dakota for years, taught me a lot about that, because one of the, one of the, my favorite people in town, was a paranoid schizophrenic. And every now and then she would go to the state hospital and get her medications changed, and but people in the town, my I was one of them. People in the town could tell when she was off her meds, because she was yelling about the Federal Reserve and the gold standard, and just being being literally crazy. But and when that would happen, I'd run into her in the street, and I said, Ask her to talk about her son. And like you could see the gear shifting, because she was very proud of her son. It was very bright young man, and she had been bright when she was a young woman. That's a horrible thing about a lot of schizophrenia. It strikes very bright young people, but getting to know her and understanding the pain of her condition was a milestone for me. And of course, most schizophrenics are not violent people, although I remember one day I ran into her in the post office, and she had pinned a note to her blouse that said, Go to hell, and I knew that she didn't mean me, I just decided to ignore that, and I think it was probably addressed to her husband. But she was a character in a way, but getting to know her, and really, one day, when she talked about some of these paranoid delusions she had, I said to her that must feel terrible. You must feel terrible. And I could really empathize, and I I'm so grateful for those experiences. Becky was never schizophrenic. It was just a matter of a lack of oxygen to the brain at the wrong time. But she certainly presented difficulties for the family, especially when she got into her late 20s, early 30s, because adolescence for someone like that. In early 20s was a very difficult period, but just kind of knowing the full person, I think, is what we're called to do. I think as Christians, and you look at it, Jesus didn't shy away from people who were outcast and neglected or dismissed in his society. And I think that's that's an important thing to remember. What do you think your role as as a writer and an observer, as somebody can see other people? How does that help me, or the people who read your work, or the people that you get to talk to, to be able to see more fully who people are? How is your role as writer and observer help that. I think my job is just to tell stories and to tell them in a way that people can relate to them no matter what their own experience is. They may never have known someone with brain damage, but tell stories and then let people make of them what they will. I'm not interested in telling people how to live or what to do. Do I want them to read a story and go, oh, oh, well, maybe the next time I see someone in a wheelchair, I'll talk to them, and not the person who's driving the chair, that kind of thing, so they might change but, but again, I want them to take it and run with it related to their own experience. But I think just simply a storyteller. I don't I'm not a philosopher. In fact, I pretty much flunked philosophy and got sent over to you belong in the literature department, that kind of thing. But storytelling is so valuable. And of course, the great model for that is Jesus, and it's one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture that when this lawyer wants to know what he can do to be saved, and he knows the right answer, the ancient Jewish formula, the Shema, that you love God, love your neighbor, Love Love your neighbor as yourself, he has all that. But then he will Who is my neighbor? And he's a lawyer, he's probably expecting a legal definition, and instead, Jesus says a man was walking along a road and was beset by robbers. He tells the story of the Good Samaritan, you know, and that, to me, is like the essence of why writing is so valuable, because it gives us stories that we can take and run with, and people should make, in some sense, I actually think the writer completes my work, I hear something often, somebody will tell me that something I said or wrote what it meant to them, and I wasn't even aware I was doing it. And that's a real gift. I think every preacher knows that you put something in a sermon, and somebody will come back and said, Oh, this meant so much to me. I said that well, but that's the Holy Spirit, that's the gift, that's the real gift of of writing. You know, this story of your sister is you're really close to it. It is, it is very, you know, personal. It's intimate. It is something that you have experienced. So how did the role of you being storyteller and then experiencing the story like like, early on in your life, did it? Did it shift perspective as you then started to tell the story after you've lived it? Yeah, and I think this book felt impossible to write for a long time, because I was close to it. And how do I do this? Because growing up with Becky and then living apart from her for a long time, because I went to college away from the family, although I saw the family frequently, but I was away at college, I was working. I didn't see Becky as much, but then Becky had the wonderful gift of writing stream of consciousness letters. She probably sent three or four letters a week to people in the family, and I had all of those letters. Writing is hard to read, but they really were stream of consciousness, and you could really tell what was going on in her mind and stuff. So I had all of this material. And then another grace that happened, this clinic, Medicaid clinic that she went to for years that really saved her life, did so much for her when I was talking to some of the staff there because they knew I was wanted to write this book. Well, would you like all of her medical records? I said, yeah, all of them, including the doctor's notes from all of the emergency room visits she had, she had a lot of physical problems, as well as the as the mental and so having all of that, and then having to figure out how to use it, how to put it together. But the book felt impossible for me for a lot of reasons at first, but then when I started looking at all these materials and my parents letters to me about her and the problems, and talking to family members as I was progressing with the manuscript, suddenly I realized, no, I can do this, I can tell this story, and it just kept blossoming. And then I got a wonderful editor at IBP who really pushed me hard and got even more stories out of me, which was a blessing as well. The whole book, in a sense, feels like a miracle, because I knew something was up. The first little piece I wrote. It's simply this tiny thing about taking my sister to a Beach Boys concert in 1962 in Hawaii. And that was the first piece I wrote. This memory just Well I knew I wanted to write about my memories of my sister that welled up in me. And as soon as I finished it, I sat there sobbing. Just absolutely fell apart. And I thought, Oh, dear, this is going to be a journey. This, this is some something significant has just broken through. And then it took about another eight years for me to really finish it and find a publisher. And because this book, this manuscript, got rejected a couple times, so by people. So finally, it would wake me up at three in the morning, and I could, I could hear my sister saying, you know, she was jealous of my when I my book started to sell and everyone was talking about my book, she was quite jealous. She told me my book, Dakota was boring, and that was for reaction, but um, detect the letter that she wrote. Me about it is in the book, it's, it's really sweet. She said, One day, well, you should write a book about me so I can be famous like you. That felt like a calling, and at three in the morning it would wake me up. But what are you doing about my book? My book, and I'm thinking, I really want to write it, but I don't know how. But I actually think a lot of books are this way that it's such a big project and it takes so long, it's easy to give up, but I've learned not to. I've learned to just persist. If a book is important enough, then I have to stay with it, and I'm really glad I did. So what does that persistence start to look like in your life, and what was this emotional journey of that's a that's a long process of writing this book and being immersed in something that writing, you know, an essay, of taking your sister to a Beach Boys concert ended up in weeping. You got what? What was this emotional journey like? I knew something was up, and so I just proceeded carefully, because I just that was about a year or two after she had died, and that spring, and I just started very gingerly, exploring a few more memories, and then more memories, of course, started to come. And I thought I had, I had about 300 pages of Finally, after another year or so, and I sent it off to an editor and an agent that I'd worked with for years, and they both just flatly rejected it. So that was a blow that was expected blow, because at least the editor, I thought the thing that really she's she's still my friend. I told her, we're not going to lose our friendship over a stupid book manuscript, but because I've known her for a long, long time, but the heart, the thing that was hardest was that she wasn't even willing to take it on and work with me, because I knew the book needed work. You know, that's what wanted her to see it, because she's She, she, she was the editor for Dakota and pleasure walk and amazing grace and the Virgin of Bennington. She was a wonderful, wonderful editor, but she wasn't even willing to take it on. And that was like, Oh, dear. What do I do now? And that sort of and then the agent just said, why don't you write about something else? And I'm going, Oh, I mean, again, I just felt kind of lost for a while. Book went on the back burner. I did try to write about something else, which may or may not, I think I and we'll end up with another manuscript within the next year, but, but that was a terrible, terrible experience and humbling, and, you know, and all of that, and, but that book, but Beck, I call it Becky's book. Becky's book her voice, you know, write a book about me that just kept waking me up in the morning in the middle of a good sleep. And I say, Yeah, I think I really do have to do this. And finally I said, Okay, I'm just going to find another editor, another agent, and go from there. I'm too old to wait around, and I'm so grateful that I did. It just was a decision that that I needed to dust this book off, see what I had, what I needed to change, and then send it off again, and it was wonderful. Early on, I know that your parents had a little guilt on even the hospital experience around Becky and what happened with the hospital experience her birth and the lack of oxygen to her brain. How did your parents deal with that guilt? And how do you think that some of that guilt affected the family growing up as well. I don't know that it affected the family a lot. It made my dad overprotective, because he was one that I think the decision had been made because he was in the Navy. He when Becky was born, he was an assistant conductor and orchestrator for the Navy Band in Washington, DC, and I don't know what all went into this decision. I remember vaguely hearing them talk about this, but they decided not to go to a private hospital, but to have Becky go mom went to the Navy Naval Hospital at Bethesda. And I mean, Navy doctors can be wonderful, but sometimes they're just putting in their time, their service, and all that kind of stuff. So you get a real mix. And my dad always felt that if they had gone to a private hospital, what happened to my mom and what happened to Becky wouldn't have happened. So he had whether or not that's true, I don't know, but that's how he felt about it, and that was a load of guilt for him. My mom was much more stoic and just accepting, I think. And she was a teacher. She taught small children, so she she understood Becky very well, and understood what she could do what she couldn't do, you know? And I don't know that, and I know she, she had that horrible experience of giving birth. She might have felt some guilt about that, but she knew it really wasn't her fault. She'd been given too many drugs. Really, she'd given birth before to my brother and me, so she knew things weren't right, and she actually heard a doctor say, one doctor say to the other, you got yourself into this mess. Let's see you get yourself.

Unknown: 20:40

Out

Kathleen Norris: 20:41

that was really a horrible experience for her. I don't think she had a lot of guilt about it. She wished, obviously, wish things had been better, and we all sort of dealt with that. What if question with Becky and my, one of my dad's comments, and Becky actually laughed at this, Becky, you know, if, if you had, if she had been more severely damaged, brain damaged, then it might have made sense to put her in an institution. If she'd been just a little less brain damaged, we could get her elected to Congress, and Becky got the joke. That was my dad. I mean, he had that crazy sense of humor, and so we all knew that there were a lot of things she could do, a lot of things she couldn't do. And the thing that we both shared, and Becky and I used to love to talk about all the things we had in common, and one of them was math anxiety. Becky was in terms of numeracy. Becky would that's probably where the brain damage really was, because she could, you could hand her a $1 bill or a$20 bill, and she would not be able to know that there was a difference. Now I I'm not that bad, but Becky, that was really probably that part of the brain was what had really been damaged. So we had to look out for her in that way. But otherwise, you know, as kids especially, we just played in the backyard and had a dog and, you know, did, did pretty normal kids stuff. Squabbled a lot, of course, and parents had to step in and make peace. You know, where do you think the transformation came later on in her life? And why do you think that there was a shift and a change in Becky? Well, part of, part of it probably was dealing with some really serious illness, and because my bet again, Becky's life was so unfortunate in so many ways, she got breast cancer. Now she discovered it herself. She did breast self examination. She was aware that of the danger. She found this lump, and she told her doctor she needed to get examined. And it was breast cancer. This wonderful doctor at a Medicaid clinic got her, got her into a very good women's program for that, she told my parents, you know this girl, this this young woman, is falling through the cracks so many times in her life, I'm not going to let it happen. So Becky got very good care for her breast cancer, and she survived 10 year survival. About 10 or 12 years after she had the breast cancer, she got esophageal cancer, and that is what killed her. And with totally unrelated The doctor said that two cancers are just probably not related at all. They could not see any relation. But having to deal with serious illness and being in cancer wards, I've been in cancer wards, not only with Becky, but also with my husband, that kind of changes your perspective on things. You know, you see people dealing with some really serious issues and all of that. And the remarkable thing with Becky was that it made her less self centered. And I remember this, the story is in the book that one of the oncology nurses that just adored her said, Oh, your sister's so selfless. And I'm going, Wow, that's a change, because, like a lot of damaged, wounded people, neuroses and self centeredness become their defense mechanism. That aced that for years, she was extremely self absorbed, pretty neurotic, but we all understood this was her defense against people calling her slow and stupid and retarded and treating her badly. And it worked for years, and then suddenly it was gone. And it was amazing to see in the cancer world, there's quite a bit about that when she would go there, because a lot of people, when they're in, you know, getting chemotherapy and things like that, they're angry, and they take it out on the nurses, and they're they're afraid. Becky was just she treated it like it was a social encounter. She talked to the nurse. Well, how long have you been doing this? What drew you to this kind of work? Do you have any kids? How old are they? She treated it like a social occasion, and she looked forward to going and the only person I've ever known and looked forward to going to chemo. I mean, it's just incredible. But this interest in other people, which my dad always had, it was like my sister sort of adopted more of my dad's personality, but that self centeredness, that there's a story I tell in the book, it was pretty overwhelming for a while, and Becky lacked the filter to hide it the way most people do. So I remember there was one occasion I was taking her to a movies, which I did a lot, because she loved movies, and we're I'm trying to tell her something really significant that had happened to me, something really important. And she said, No, I go first. My story is more important than yours. And by then, I knew not to laugh. This was curious. I just okay, Becky, what is it? And it was the usual thing about some roommate in the group home, and just, you know, her usual ranting about something. And I eventually tell my story. But. My star is more important than yours. And you go, yeah, a lot of people feel that way, but they're not going to admit it. And there's Becky right there, just, you know, you could count on her, you know, to do that. And I remember our mother's funeral, I got up to give a eulogy, and Becky tugged at my dress and said, Don't mess this up. Okay? And then I when I came back and sat down, I said, Well, how'd I do you were okay? I mean, she was just such a character, but honest in a way, and it's so even when she was at her worst, in terms of the narcissism, it was so transparent, you couldn't really be upset with her, because that really was a very good defense mechanism. And I've known other very narcissistic people, and I always think I want to know what's behind this. Why are they this way? Because they must have some pretty deep wounds that they're they're dealing with, and I saw that with my sister, but yeah, the transformation in the last, I guess, five years of her life was just extraordinary, and it was so much fun to write about that. And I don't not just using my own words, I'm using the words of that nurse and some other people who knew her and absolutely adored her, and she left it up, of course, but her early childhood was really difficult because Special Ed wasn't very well developed, especially in Hawaii. And, you know, she was rejected just over and over and over by her peers, by teachers, even the one teacher she didn't know what to do with her special ed students, so she had them clean the classroom. I mean, not good, but Becky always had the family. The family was the one place she knew she belonged. She was loved. You know, Home Base was very, very important to her, yeah, and so how do we find that? Let's take this into humanity. I think a lot of us wear a facade that we have our own defense mechanisms. We have masks on. We don't actually portray our true selves the world because we're afraid of getting hurt or we're afraid of something. How do we show our true selves? How do we become the people within a community so that we can know that there is some love and acceptance within community and with one another. What does that look like for us to do that? Yeah, I think the word fear. I think that is at the heart of it, that you know, everyone's experienced rejection, and you're afraid of experiencing more rejection, so you do things that, in fact, will make sure that you're rejected because you anti social behavior, destructive behavior, or self destructive behavior. But I think fear is often at at the heart of it, and that's why I think having a community, having a family as a home base, where where there's total acceptance my mother and father, unconditional love, you know, beautiful example that, and like my dad said, We about Becky. He said we learn a lot about love from her, because sometimes it was hard to love her, but, but we but that was rock bottom. I think church communities often will provide that for people. And even if you have a job that you love and you're working in a little office with a bunch of other people that you know and trust. Anything that can can help alleviate those kinds of fears. Often jobs, there's a lot of competition, then it's a very negative atmosphere, but, but I had the good fortune to be in an office of like, four or five women when I first sourced out of college, and they were all mother hands. It was wonderful. You know you can find, we can find these, these communities, and make our own communities and sense, make our own families that help us deal because you're always going to get rejection. You're always going to get criticized for this or that or the other. And it's just knowing that there is that home base, there's at least a few people who know me. They love me anyway. That's that's essential. Walking through the loss of Becky, walking through the loss of your husband. What does it look like for you to deal with losses, deal with the grief, and then continue to say, I need community. I want to find community and and be intentional about being with others. Yeah, and I was caregiving, really, for my husband a great deal, to some extent, to my parents, although they had, they had assisted living available in their last years. And then for Becky. And I remember my dad died in 2002 and then my husband, just a year later, it was only 57 had enough medical history for a lot of people. And he's, he's a little bit in this book. I wrote more about him in the book on acedia, but and then my mom died in 2009 and Becky in 2013 so that was all of a sudden. I didn't, I didn't have any caregiving duties anymore, which was very strange, because I've been doing it for a long time. Hmm, and so I had to think about that, and being in a prayer chain at my church, was in my church congregation for confidential prayers, that people brought confidential prayers, and we would meet once a month, that was an important form of community for me that really helped deal with that odd period, because we I was caring, it was just through prayer, and then sometimes from action. There was, we had an elderly member that needed help to get to, uh, attendance with cancer treatment. I didn't have a car. I don't drive so, but she was in our prayer group, and we said, we're not going to let you go through this alone. And I had a friend who had a car, and so we people just, just signed up to take her once, a bunch of people would take her once a week. This was the church community doing those kinds of things. And there were other instances of that, that, and that's one of the gifts, I think, of church communities, is that people will step up to help provide when there's a need and it's it's beautiful. It's beautiful to see that, and the other real. It's odd because these people couldn't, in some ways, couldn't be more different from me. But one of my other big, main communities is Benedictine monks, two communities, one in North Dakota and one in Minnesota, St John's, I teach there at their School of Theology. The last couple of years for a week in the summer, inevitably, when I show up at St John's or assumption Abbey, a monk will come up to me, give me a hug and say, Welcome home. It makes no sense at all, but it feels that way and and what observing how they do community is really something, because they live with each other, day in, day out. They know you can tell, even I've been places long enough, you can tell who's walking down the hall by the sound of the footsteps. I mean, it's very, very intimate. And they just, they're there for you. I just had two friends who celebrated 50 years as monks to Saint Benedict on the July 11, and I was online watching, and I was celebrating with them. I was so happy to see that they're wonderful, wonderful, very different men, but, but they're wonderful guys and and I consider them real friends. And so that's the community I can turn to. In fact, my family, even my sister, who doesn't think too highly of church stuff when there's a big need in her life. She said, Get your monk friends to pray for me. And that's what Becky. Becky didn't quite understand when I was going to monastery. That was an alien concept, but when she found out that these are people who pray a lot, oh, well, then ask them to pray for me, that that that was her connection with them. And I showed her some pictures of them. She said, these are good looking guys. I said, Yes, I know the fact that they were playing for her that meant a great deal. So as you continue to work on this manuscript, work on this book, Rebecca Sue, what was the story that you wrote down that really moved you while you were writing it? Oh, there were so many, but one that just came out of the blue. It was fairly late in the process. In terms of writing, one of the things that happened with this book is I had to take 20,000 words out of the manuscript because the editor, Cindy, Cindy bunch had IVP and I both agreed there was too much family detail, especially in the early things. It was starting to SOG bog down. And okay, that story can I'm really good at this if I because this, I think starting out as a poet really helps, because I can pare down really pretty easily. And so it took a long time, but, but we were both very happy with how it came out. And I was very happy for Cindy's pushing me on this 20,000 words. So that was a big deal. But there were a few, a few things that got added towards the end of the process. And I think the one that shocked me the most and made me weep again, was when I connect. I realized that my sister had a connection with the story of Mary of Egypt, who is not well known in the Western Church, but she's a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. And it's a Wild, Wonderful, one of these crazy, wild stories from the early desert of this woman who had been sexually promiscuous and, you know, and and lived a very dissolute life, and then suddenly turning completely around, because the Virgin Mary basically told her to get go to desert and straighten out. But she did. There's just the wonderful story this monk who he's gone to the desert to meditate and everything, and he sees this creature that he's not even sure it's human. She's Mary. Mary has been out in the desert. He thinks it might be a wild beast, and he approaches her and identifies himself as a monk, and even though she had this illiterate had no education in Scripture at all, she's quoting scripture to him. She's quoted saying things like the Lord's Prayer. So he realizes that this is a holy woman who has received. Receive this gift from God, and just, and it's a there's a lot of genre. There's whole genre of stories like that, of monks who find holy women who make them realize, Wow, I'm a pretty good monk, but this woman is really got the Holy Spirit in her. I mean, there's some really wonderful stories, and this is one of the best ones. So he kept he visited her off and on, and then finally, when he when she comes out one time and she's dead, and he buries her, although that the legend is that lions helped to bury her. I mean, you know, these stories are just so, so terrific of someone who's one with nature, in a sense that the lion come help the monk bury this woman and my sister, because she was bipolar, had that thing, I think doctors call it hypersexuality in her 30s. So she went through a lot of really scary sexual misadventures. It's, it's a miracle that she came through them. And when I realized that my sister's story mirrored Mary of Egypt's in, in some ways not identical, of course, but in some ways that here's this woman who's been through all of this bad behavior and suddenly is turned around. You know, I said, Oh, my God, that's yeah, this woke this works and so And my editor was thrilled. She really loved that connection. And I did too. And I again, that was one of the stories. When I realized that that there was a connection with Mary of Egypt, I just lost. I just because I'd been interested in Mary of Egypt for years, but never had connected my sister's story with her. And when I did again, I broke down weeping. I thought, Oh, wow, this is big help. I write about it, and I pushed through and I was able to write a little something. What else have you learned recently that have stuck with you from the Desert Fathers and mothers? Oh, in fact, that's probably going to be the subject of my next book, because it's such an amazing literature they left behind stories. A lot of them have never even been translated yet, from Coptic and Greek and Syriac and those ancient languages. But the ones that have been translated, there's a whole literature, and most Christians and most even educated people really don't know about them, partly because the stories really weren't available in English until about the late 70s. That's when they Benedict award a Scholar at Oxford, a nun. She's a sister, but she she published probably the first really popular edition. Thomas Merton did some things with them, but I remember discovering them and thinking, this is a whole undercover the root at the tap root of Christianity, before any divisions in the church. These people are there, and their wisdom is just universal. It's good psychology. Get away from any man who argues every time he talks. That's good advice. When they're full of these stories, the stories are very zen, like, in some ways, the master pupil, you know, teachings that they left us. But it's this wonderful literature. And my husband was well educated by the Jesuits, but he really didn't know much about them. And was stunned, because he thought of himself as really well educated, and he was, but that whole thing with the Desert Fathers and mothers. They lived from the second to about the sixth century in the Middle East, basically Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and they produced these stories that eventually were written down. It's oral literature, which makes it very immediate, and it's good technology, it's good psychology. And finding them was just so wonderful. And so that probably the subject of my next book, because I want there's been a lot more scholarship about them, and so I've depended on scholars that people think of them as all hermits, and they weren't. They weren't nearly as isolated as people think they were. They were they had a lot of business with townspeople and camel drivers coming in to pick up the baskets they woke to sell and things like that. They they had a lot of interaction with other people in this society, and they were just treated well. Here's the holy man who lives outside our village, and you go to him if you've got problems, that kind of thing. And so they're really interesting. And the literature. It's men and women. The literature is just outstanding and very contemporary, in a way. And that's what I'm that's what the new book. It's, it's still in the manuscript form. And when I sometimes I read it and I think, well, it's, it's pretty good, and other times I think, oh my gosh, it's best. We're going to find another editor and we're going to work with them right now. I'm just so thrilled to finally have Rebecca sue in hand as a book. It just really does strike me as a miracle, because it went it, it was in limbo. I would call it sort of in limbo for a good 10 years before I finally said I have to. Get I have to get back to it. So what do you hope for your readers of Rebecca Sue, this miracle of a book that you have well to meet a person that you probably wouldn't meet in your ordinary circumstances of your life, someone who's brain damaged, has a great, crazy sense of humor, a wild personality, difficult person, but really worth knowing, and me introducing her and introducing, you know, some of my family too, because we were all characters in this book, including my sister in law and some of my my family. Had a three generation household in Honolulu, so for a long time, I had my parents, my brother, his wife, their two little girls, my sister, her husband and their two kids, all in great big house, and Becky was living there for quite a while with them. So they grew up with her. So you get to meet, you get to meet the cast of characters. And then finally, as Becky developed into her 30s, social workers said, you know, unless she moves out of the home, she will never mature. She'll never have to learn how to live with other people. And so that she was she would still come over very frequently. When she was still healthy. She could take the bus to visit the family, or we'd go pick her up and take her to movies or take her out to lunch or whatever. So she was still part of the family, but for a long time. I mean, when I talk about the family being the kind of the home, the home the central for her, that's it's very much in the book, you really get a portrait of a family. I had Gareth Higgins on last year to talking about your book a whole life in 12 movies, and you're still writing a weekly newsletter around movies with with Gareth Higgins, so I'd be Miss to say, What have you been watching lately that is really stood out for you? I just, I just like, I just have been working on an essay, but we alternate essays each Gareth has an essay on the new Superman film this week, and I have a three things I'm thinking about, some things about profit motive that I found in The Economist stories. So in I think one of my next three things Colin will be about a book I'm reading about the early monks. In fact, my next week's essay will be about two really terrific series that I found, and I don't like to binge watch but I couldn't help it with these two. One of them is called the survivors. It's an Australian series set in a small town in Tasmania, so it's a really interesting locale and and basically, it's ordinary people. There's nothing supernatural. They're not superheroes. They're just ordinary people in a small town dealing with some tragedy and secrets and things. And it's just beautifully done. It's just so well done. Called the survivors. Then the other thing I saw I was I like Michael Connelly's mysteries, kind of hard police murder mysteries, and set in Los Angeles. This is about one of the characters he invented, a woman named Ballard, Detective Ballard, and it's called Ballard, and it's a 10 show series about she's been demoted at the police department for a number of reasons, partly because she's a woman, but and a feisty woman at that, but she's running a cold cases, and a lot of people are Looking down on this. But what two things really struck me about that series? I mean, it's obviously a police procedural, but one of the real themes of the of the series is compassion, that he and this one tired policeman who's volunteering to help her with cases, they take this case that no one wants, that people make fun of them because it's just a guy who's probably an undocumented alien, and he was killed and and nobody cares, but they have a video of him carrying a baby the last time he's seen he's carrying a baby, and they want to solve the case so they can find out what happened to that child. So there's real compassion there. And the other thing is compassion for women who've been assaulted, and it's really striking. So that's the theme. That's the theme of of my essay was called binging on compassion, because both of those stories really had compassion for ordinary people dealing with very difficult situations and and they both have elements of a police procedural, but there's so much more than that. And there's not a lot of silly action, certainly, certainly not in Tasmania. But, you know, action like guns and explosions and car chases and stuff like that. It's pretty minimal in the Los Angeles series. So that that really struck me, that something I wanted to write about, but I find so many interesting things. I found a woman who, in the teens and early 20s, was more famous as a director than Cecil B DeMille, named Lois Weber, and her stuff's available for streaming and on YouTube. So I did it. I did two Book Two, she was quite prolific as a director, and so I did two. Essays on her, I found Iranian cinema, which has to be one of the wonders of the world, where these kept getting put in prison and hassled by the government, and they forbidden to make films, and then they kept making them anyway. And they're wonderful movies, and they're mostly available for streaming. So I mean, I just it's been a whole Gareth. I owe I owe a lot to Gareth because he kind of opened up. I've always loved movies, but I never really written about them before. And when we started this little weekly soul Telegram, this weekly thing on substack, it's been just so much fun, because it I do, and I do have to sit through a lot of junk, but as I say in the book, Becky nearly liked all kinds of movies, so I used to sit for a lot of bad movies with her. So I kind of, I know what that but I'm always really grateful to find something that that really is is transcendent, that really transcends the genre and really makes you stop and think about life and and you can find them in amazing places. I mean, I thought an LA detective story wouldn't, wouldn't do that for me, but it did beautiful. There's, you know, one question I like to ask at the end is, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, Kathleen, what advice would you give? Slow down, be more careful about who you're hanging out with. Because I was in New York City, and I had that wonderful nest of women that I was working with at the Academy of American poets, these mother hens. I was also on the on the edge of the, like the Andrew Warhol scene, with other writers and people, a lot of whom were doing really serious drugs, which scared the hell out of me, literally. So I mean, I didn't do that because I just found that too scary. But just kind of slow down, look where you are and where do you want to go and and one of the things for me, and I this is one of my bet, my sister being firmly in angels, and I kind of do too, but certainly the Holy Spirit, because there's no reason I really survived all that. And one of the great ironic things is that I was living in Manhattan, there are churches on just about every street corner in Manhattan. It never occurred to me to go into one was literature had sort of replaced religion. For me, it's a spiritual pursuit. So that made some sense, and it worked for a while. Worked until I was kind of in my mid 30s and and then it just no longer worked that way anymore. And I did go back to church, and I sort of reconnected with the faith of my childhood. But, yeah, it's just crazy. And there was one church that had been in my neighborhood that I'd been interested in going to, partly just the architecture, was called Church of angels, of all things on West End Avenue. By that time I got back, that beautiful church had been destroyed. I was terrified. I was just horrified. But I went up to find them, and they were on a second floor of a nondescript building. And they had, they said, the congregation had got one of those beautiful 19th century buildings that they couldn't keep going, and the congregation was dwindling when they and they a lot of their woodwork from that church ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So you still visit some angels and the pulpit and some beautiful things, but they started doing really kind of a street corner ministry the second floor of this nondescript kind of building. They got known for doing a lot of charitable work in their congregation group, and I had a one time visiting with them. So it's a wonderful story, but when I was in my 20s, the idea of going to church, I wasn't rebelling against anything. I had just drifted away and writing made a good substitute, until it didn't. And so, yeah, I would probably say, slow down. Maybe go inside one of those churches and see what's in there. Well, Rebecca Sue is going to be available in September, and you can get that anywhere books are sold. Is there anywhere particular that you'd like to point people to to get Rebecca Sue or any other work, or is there anywhere else you'd like to point people to? Well, I think if you can, if there's an independent bookstore in your area or a good Barnes and Noble, try that Amazon were Israeli convenient, but I'd much rather have people support their independent bookstores. And one good thing Barnes and Noble has been doing, they have been buying some really great independent bookstores, like the tattered cover in Denver, and they're keeping their name. They're they keep they're going to help keep them going. And so there may not be quite as independent as they were, but they're not going to close. And Barnes and Noble, apparently has been doing that around the country. So I would recommend either Barnes and Noble or your local independent store for books, great. Well, Kathleen, thank you so much for this conversation. What a joy and a privilege to be able to talk with you and talk with you about Becky, to see who she was and to meet her through you and your words, your your story, your book, is just beautiful and.

Joshua Johnson: 51:19

Is beautifully written. And so thank you for for the work that you put in for many years to be able to do that and give us this story, so that your family doesn't just get to meet Becky. We all get to meet Becky, and we could learn through her story and your story. So thank you. It was a fantastic conversation. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. You

Unknown: 51:54

you.