Dakota

Norris turns her attention to the Great Plains of the American West, focusing on the part of South Dakota where her grandparents once homesteaded and where she later settled. Her account follows the seasons, the weather, the history, and the stories that have built up around this country over generations.

The landscape she describes is both bare and majestic, unforgiving yet generous, shaped as much by its past and its legends as by its geography. Norris asks how a person comes to know the world they see, and how that world in turn shapes the person who lives within it. Her measured, attentive prose moves between close observation and reflection, returning again to the idea that faith can be traced through any landscape, not only the places we expect to find it.

Norris is a poet and the author of The Cloister Walk, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her background in spiritual writing shapes this account, which offers readers a way to map their own sense of the sacred wherever they happen to live.