City-bred and Bennington-educated Kathleen Norris volunteered to spend a year or two in Lemmon,
South Dakota to settle her maternal grandmother Totten's estate and sell the farm for her family.
In Dakota, A Spiritual Geography, Norris wrote: "When my husband and I moved nearly 20
years ago from New York to that house in South Dakota, only one wise friend in Manhattan
understood the inner logic of the journey. The others, appalled...shook their
heads. . . . Had I lost my mind? But I was young, still in my twenties, an
apprentice poet certain of the rightness of returning to the place where I suspected I would find my
stories. As it turns out, the Plains have been essential not only for my growth as a writer; they have
formed me spiritually. I would even say they have made me a human
being" (Dakota 11).
Two earlier poetry collections, Falling Off and The Middle of the World, Bush and Gugenheim Fellowships, preceded the publication of Norris's widely-praised Dakota. It received the 1993 New Visions Award from Quality Paperback Book Club and spent weeks on the New York Times best seller lists. Norris continues to live and work in Lemmon. Perhaps we've chosen to honor her with the 1996 SDCTE Author's Award because she articulates what so many of us feel about Dakota.
"Ironically, it is in choosing the stability of the monastery or the Plains, places where nothing ever happens, places the world calls dull, that we discover that we can change. In choosing a bare-bones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power" (Dakota 203).