Thanks to those who joined us for the rousing online conversation at our free Hearts & Minds webinar the other night. Jeff Crosby was a delightful and inspirational conversation partner as we talked about his book World of Wonders: Towards a Spirituality of Reading. We have this great new read at 20% off.

If you missed the World of Wonders program, you can watch this recording of it right HERE. A number of folks have exclaimed how much they enjoyed it. Thanks to Paraclete Press for putting all that together.

THIS COMING MONDAY (10-27) at 8:00 Eastern Time A FREE HEARTS & MINDS ONLINE CONVERSATION WITH KATHLEEN NORRIS

This coming Monday (October 27, 2025 at 8:00 PM, Eastern Time) we have another free webinar scheduled with none other than the great spiritual writer and memoirist, Kathleen Norris. You can register for that HERE. Once registered, they will send you the free link to join our conversation Monday evening.

The other day I mentioned that we were hosting an online conversation with her to a customer (himself an author) and he happily exclaimed “Oh my!” Those in the know realize what a big deal this is. Thanks to InterVarsity Press for setting it up.

I hope you’ve heard of her best-selling books; maybe you own some of them, such as Dakota: A Geography of Faith, The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, The Virgin of Bennington, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life, and, of course, her small classic, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work. She has also been a published poet for decades and we commend her collection Journey: New and Selected Poems (published by Pittsburgh University Press; $25.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00.) Just a year ago she released a co-authored book with the great Irish film buff, Gareth Higgins called A Whole Life in Twelve Movies: A Cinematic Journey to a Deeper Spirituality (published by Brazos; $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99.) Let’s just say that as a small town bookseller we couldn’t be more thrilled than to get to host a writer of this professional prominence at our little webinar. Join us, won’t you?

The new book means a lot to Kathleen and, actually, means a lot to Beth and me, too. Rebecca Sue: A Sister’s Reflections on Disability, Faith, and Love (IVP; $25.99 // OUR 20% OFF SALE PRICE = $20.79) is her most intimate and person memoir so far and it is both a memoir of Kathleen’s life with a disabled sister but also a biography of Rebecca, a good glimpse of her hard, colorful, and fascinating life.

In our BookNotes column last week announcing the recent webinar with Jeff Crosby and this forthcoming chat with Kathleen Norris, I lamented a bit about how demoralizing it can be to try to make a living as a thoughtfully Christian bookstore these days and that these sorts of author events recharge our own batteries, as they say. But I continued:

When authors like Jeff Crosby and Kathleen Norris offer their considerable talents to show up for folks, they serve you — their readers — and this is really what it is all about. We get to midwife a magic moment or two when you get to meet (and even type questions to) real authors with beautiful books. So we hope this inspires you, gentle reader (and Hearts & Minds friend.) This is for you.

I suspect if you listen deeply to your own internal dialogue these days, given your hectic pace and longing for a bit of sanity in these crazy days, you know this will be good for you, a fun hour or so to be inspired by folks with good stuff to say. We can’t wait to introduce you to our new friend Kathleen Norris, we talk books and faith and writing and reading. Beth and I hope you can schedule it now and register soon.  It’s going to be a blast and we all will be better for it, I’m sure.

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During this coming Monday’s “Evening with Kathleen Norris” she will discuss her new, most personal memoir, yet, Rebecca Sue: A Sister’s Reflections on Disability, Faith, and Love.

Norris became a New York Times bestselling author decades ago when, as a poet in the early 1990s she wrote her tender memoir about moving to Lemmon, North Dakota, entitled Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. A sublime reflection on the rugged Great Plains and her neighbors (in a “town so small the poets and ministers had to hang out together”) its fame didn’t deter her from her rural life. In fact, when she, as a Protestant, was drawn to Benedictine spirituality she wrote a truly remarkable, even stunning book called The Cloister Walk which remains, in my view at least, a modern spiritual classic. She followed with a wonderful alphabetical book about the faith, a fascinating look at her college years (The Virgin of Bennington) and then the memoir Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life.

Maybe her most beloved book is the pocket sized The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work, an eloquent look at the spirituality of the mundane, an ordinary sort of down-to-Earth embodied faith where there are “sanctifying possibilities” every day. It was a lecture delivered at a Catholic women’s college in 1997 and is good for anyone, anytime.

In all of these books she speaks of historic Christian faith in profound and yet approachable ways, being a pray-er, yes, who often sits in silence, but always a curious learner and creative poet (and film aficionado.) She has been likened to a rather contemplative Frederick Buechner (even before she wrote the fabulous alphabetical Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith; they both know their English literature, both were Presbyterian, both applauded as thoughtful people of faith by the mainstream, secular press. In any case, she is impressive and it is an honor to get to tell us about her sister and her remarkable emotional growth.

We get to talk with her for an hour or so at 8:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time) on the last Monday of the month, October 27th. Please pre-register so you can join us online and bring your questions!

Again, you can register  HERE.

Rebecca Sue: A Sister’s Reflections on Disability, Faith, and Love about which we’ll be talking, is compelling and fascinating. Rebecca Sue was such an incredible person and Kathleen is an upbeat conversation partner as she chats with us about her sister.

I noted that this book really does mean a lot to us. Beth and I met in the mid-1970s while working at Camp Harmony Hall (in central Pennsylvania), a camp run by the Easter Seal Society for kids in wheelchairs. (If you saw the award-winning documentary, Crip Camp, that came close to our experience there.) I was a Special Education major in college and Beth used to direct a group home for the intellectually challenged and severally disabled. Oh my, how we were captured by this riveting story.

Rebecca Sue is not as notably luminous as some of Norris’s other poetic writing but what it may lack in descriptive creative nonfiction tone it more than pays off in poignancies, tenderness, and really important insight. It is a no-nonsense, intelligent recollection of living with a mentally handicapped (and, we eventually learn, narcissistic and bi-polar) younger sister. Becky, as Kathleen calls her, knew she had experienced brain injury at birth and was unable to live on her own. She was colorful and creative and feisty; she was self-centered and giving, artful and smart, wise and intellectually what they used to call “slow.”  She was jealous about Kathleen’s literary fame and religious stature. More than once she said “you should write a book about me and that way I could be famous, too.”

This book, Rebecca Sue, is Kathleen making good on that promise made so many decades ago. It is a book she obviously had been writing most of her life.

(As we will surely discuss, though, a lot of serious research and reckoning goes into a project like this. She interviewed former caregivers, requested medical records, saw the notes written in the hands of doctors and psychiatrists. There were police records, too. She has the long lists of drugs — some things never change —as Rebecca was dosed and dosed. She dug up old journals and boxes of letters. Some of it caused her to break down and sob.)

Kathleen and her siblings moved around a bit when the kids were young (her father was in the Navy band and there is some lovely stuff about him in the story, and certainly her mother as well.) They finally settled in Honolulu, although Kathleen soon left, famously attending Bennington College in 1965. She got the writing bug, became a published poet, and worked (naturally) in New York City.

In those years Rebecca Sue and Kathleen were nearly daily pen-pals, corresponding regularly and talking on the phone — we called it “long distance” back then — quite often. We learn about Rebecca’s rather immature boy-crazy style, and, more deeply, her longing to be fully loved (beyond the extraordinary love and support offered by her family.) There are awkward episodes of romance, obsession, gratuitous sexuality, too much drinking, gross abuse. (It isn’t vividly portrayed, but gut-wrenching to remember that some guys would literally take advantage of an obviously mentally challenged young woman.) The obstacles of independent living for dear Becky were almost everywhere. That this emotionally volatile woman would soon take a liking to Kathleen’s husband, himself a poet, was a great blessing and a blessed example of a common grace in their lives.

We learn much in Rebecca Sue and, as in any good memoir, we are taken in by the narrative of the author’s life just like in a novel. This is a collection of stories, impressions, remembrances, and the plot deepens as Becky navigates romances and schools, group homes, sheltered workshops, poor-paying jobs, and a ever-growing avalanche of medical issues, hospitalizations, social service agencies, and the complex arena where physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual challenges collide. Of course she worried as her own parents aged. I’d say Kathleen had a front row seat to all the drama, but she was not an observer but a participant.

The lovely text we are given, Rebecca Sue is about Becky, born in 1954 in Bethesda MD with perinatal hypoxia, raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. She lived quite a life in her 60 years and you will be glad Kathleen introduces you to her.

But it is also about Kathleen herself and what she learned — sometimes the hard way — from her disabled, troubled, and often-ill sister. It is her most intimate book, yet. It is about faith and love and forgiveness and grace and grit and family and sorrow and art. I think it is, in a way, about all of us.

Publishers Weekly did a great interview with Kathleen Norris about the new book. She was asked that standard question what she hopes readers will discover in the book:

I hope that readers will encounter my sister as a full person who refused to let her disabilities define her. It strikes me that my sister’s transformation from a self-absorbed person to one who genuinely cared about others is, in a sense, the normal transition we all make from adolescence to adulthood. For my sister, narcissism was a good defense mechanism, a useful and maybe even necessary protection that served her well for years. When she finally began to shed it and take more interest in other people, it was a revelation.

But Becky wore her narcissism so transparently that it was easy to forgive her. When I once tried to tell her about something good that had recently happened to me, she interrupted me with an emphatic, “No! I go first! My story is more important than yours!” I hope readers will be able to laugh at themselves as they hear Becky say out loud what many feel but prefer to keep hidden.

Our online “An Evening with Kathleen Norris” event at 8:00 (EST) on 10-27-25 is going to be a marvelous opportunity for all of us to learn from Kathleen as she tells us about what she understood as a fairly ordinary family learning to love each other well, or at least the best they could. It will be about the writing life, about memory, about God and grace. It is a way for all of us to meet her late sister, Rebecca Sue. And it will, I assume, offer a healthy bit of encouragement to those in the disabled community, or the broader community of loved ones and caregivers and friends of the disabled or mentally ill.

Do you know anyone who might find such a conversation valuable about this online event? Could you please share this and let them know? My hunch is that we all know someone who is caregiving for a handicapped or chronically-ill loved one. We invite them to this conversation, confident that it will be an inspiring time. The book is captivating, and Kathleen is a born storyteller. It’s going to be good.

Please join us for this online webinar, Monday night, October 27,2025, “An Evening with Kathleen Norris.” We’ll start at 8:00 PM Eastern Time. You have to pre-register online; when you sign up you’ll get a link to join in. REGISTER HERE. 

The book, Rebecca Sue, of course, is still 20% off. We look forward to sending book out and serving you well. Thanks for your interest. See you soon!

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