Linda Norton
LINDA
NORTON is the author
of
The Public Gardens: Poems and History (
Pressed Wafer, 2011; introduction by Fanny Howe), a
hybrid work of poetry and memoir and a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for
poetry, and a sequel,
Wite Out: Love and Work, a memoir with poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2020). She is also the author of two chap-books,
Hesitation Kit (EtherDome, 2007) and
Dark White (Omerta, 2019).
D. Scot Miller, in the
East Bay Express,
reviewed Wite Out with new books by Ishmael Reed and other Oakland writers, calling it "a must for anyone trying to understand the nuanced aggression of systemic oppression and how it affects the afflictor and the afflicted in equal measure."
Wite Out was #2 on Small Press Distribution's list of nonfiction bestsellers for spring 2020 (right behind Marguerite Duras!), and is also on SPD's list of non-fiction bestsellers for
July-September 2020. The book was an SPD August staff pick; you can read Liam Curly's review and others
here, and Anthony Domestico's
Commonweal review
here. Find Marcella Durand's thoughtful
Hyperallergic review of
Wite Out, "Using Language to Investigate Whiteness,"
here.
In December 2020 PPOW Gallery in New York hosted a reading and "book party" for
Wite Out, where Eileen Myles and John Keene read with Linda Norton. Click
here for the video of that warm and wonderful event. Click
here for a February 2021 reading and conversation with Fanny Howe (emceed by Norma Cole) at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State. And here's
a panel discussion at the April 2021 New Orleans Poetry Festival, convened by Tyrone Williams, in which Linda Norton, Gabriel, Gudding, Jeanne Heuving, and Williams discuss issues of appropriation, inspired by
Zadie Smith's essay about [not]staying in your own lane.
You can read excerpts from
Wite Out here and at
SFMoMA's Open Space. Poet and professor Katie Peterson created an incisive and bracing
podcast about the book when she taught it to her grad students at UC Davis in spring 2020.
The prequel to
Wite Out,
The Public Gardens, was just reprinted for the fourth time; both books are available from SPD, or from your online behemoth retailer, or from your local bookstore (
Moe's at Bookshop.org is mine, and they will ship to you too).
Norton's poems,
essays, collages, and interviews have appeared in many magazines and in several
anthologies. In 2014, Irish writer Dermot Healy chose her memoir
"Pearl Paint" (part of Wite Out)
for inclusion in the annual Fish anthology
(published in Cork, Ireland).
In 2014 Norton's visual art (a series of collages called “Dark White”) was exhibited, with a grant from the US Embassy in Dublin, at the Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland. Her collages have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly and other magazines, and on the covers of books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, and other poets. She is also a lyricist, registered with ASCAP. "Landscaping for Privacy" and “Wet Psalm,” her collaborations with composer Eve Beglarian, are available on iTunes, etc., and on CD. Norton’s interview with Belgarian is on the Herb Alpert Award site.
Norton was a resident at the Guthrie Centre in Ireland in 2015 and at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas, in the summer of 2002. In 2014, she was awarded a William Dickey Fellowship at San Francisco State University and a Creative Work Fund award. In 2018, Norton was awarded a Ucross Foundation residency (with a Whiting Foundation travel grant) in Wyoming.
She has given talks and has been a guest writer at the Oakland Book Festival, Brown University (in C. D. Wright’s class), Harvard, UC Riverside (Fred Moten’s class), SFSU and CCA, the Athenian School, the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, the LA Times Book Festival, Moe's Books, the SoundEye Festival in Cork, the American Literature Association (Amiri Baraka Society), and many other places. She has conducted interviews for NPR's Storycorps Griot series and has an IMDB credit for her work as a researcher and writer for a documentary about the Alley, Oakland's last remaining piano bar.
Norton grew up in Boston and spent many years in New York.
She has lived in Oakland, California, for more than twenty years. In 2017, she
became a dual citizen of Ireland/EU and the U.S.A.
She is currently a writing instructor at the Yeats Academy, IT Sligo, in Ireland. From 2018-2020, she was a writing consultant/tutor for labor organizers in the Unite Here LEAD Project. She has also worked as an instructor at SFSU, where she received her MFA and Certificate in the Teaching in Composition in 2018, and a columnist at SFMoMA’s Open Space.
Starting with jobs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and at Yale University Press, Norton has had a long career
in book publishing, archives, libraries, and oral history. At the University of California Press, in the New York office, she was publicist for
books by Oliver Sacks, William Finnegan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, and many other
authors. In Berkeley as an acquisitions editor, she founded the New California Poetry series with Calvin Bedient, Robert
Hass, and Brenda Hillman, and published books by Rebecca Solnit, Lyn
Hejinian, Alan Lomax and Jelly Roll Morton, Wallace Stevens, Lorine Niedecker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
Janet McDonald, Carlo Rotella, Fanny Howe, Yunte Huang, Harryette Mullen, Donald Allen, and many other authors in a variety of fields.
Here you can find excerpts from reviews of Wite Out.
From reviews of The Public Gardens: Poems and History
A memoir
of place (Boston, New York, Oakland and San Francisco) and of the
commons—gardens and libraries, streets and subways, marriage and family—and a
hybrid work of poetry and prose, The
Public Gardens is a documentary (with lyrics) of a life lived in, around,
and for books.
EILEEN MYLES: "The Public Gardens is a brilliant,
wonderful book, a sort of a wild institution, intense and readable. Linda
Norton looks at the world like a dog who likes to tear apart couches—repressed
but not for long. Though full of shame, this book is shameless. A life is
freely divulged as are the multitude of homeopathic bits from the author's
reading list. The overall experience of moving through The Public Gardens’s shuttling prose and
poetry is quietly breathtaking. I have felt and learned much from this book!
Her 'Gardens' are both organized and entirely disorderly—anything and anyone
from any point in history might saunter through, and that's the meaning of
public, isn't it? I find myself loving this writer's mind, light touch, and
generous heart and I, reader, didn't want to go when it was done. My bowl is
out. More!"
FANNY HOWE:
“Have you ever heard Dinah Washington sing ‘This Bitter Earth’? Have you
ever seen the movie by Charles Burnett called Killer of Sheep? This little
book, The Public Gardens, conjures up
the experience of that movie and that song, the fate of families and
neighborhoods in 20th-century America. Although the title of the book shows
that its ultimate point of reference is Boston, the work inside travels through
New York and Oakland. Part poetry, part notebooks, it is a model of the camera
made human, made humanist, a part of arm, leg, hand, a moving-picture taker
pregnant with literature. What she sees, we have all seen and passed by. But
she has paused to note it.
“Steeped in the language
of Scripture and Emerson, the poetry here is fresh and wild, cultivated and
desperate. Linda is Sicilian but everything in her is modern. She hates what
she loves. This makes her lonely, inspired, uprooted, still hunting, and blissed
out whenever possible. She documents her losses and loves, both as a free
person and a mother, and every word she writes has the bittersweet taste of
Dinah Washington."
PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN, Galatea
Resurrects
“She looks back on her personal history with tough self-reckoning which she
then crystal cuts to near sparkling perfection. Her bearing down on experience
to yield the truths of life lived has no fluff.
. . . Norton shares her losses: at the death of brother, the
unfolding of her marriage, historical readings/visions of society in her visits
home to family in Boston, and finally her relocation to California for work.
She's found what abides is observing moments of one's life, being aware of
what's happening as it happens. There's joy to be found round daily
business.”
ELIZABETH
ROBINSON, Otis Review “Norton’s
rejoinder to suffering, shame, loss, and the drudge of economic necessity
is to encounter the world with a keen interest that is by turns plaintive and
robustly humorous. . . . Right inside [the] gap of transition and loss, Norton
locates a site of empathy and mystery.”
STAN MIR,
Jacket2 “[Norton]
prefers the communal to the individual, a preference that provides shelter to
work without the burden of attention. Without a doubt, this communal impulse
shapes the interrogative quality of Norton’s writing . . . Norton’s skillful
writing in her journals shows the complexity of the AIDS legacy, and more
acutely, how layered Norton’s difficult memories are concerning her family. The
ability to weave these layers as honestly as Norton does in The Public Gardens is rare.
How often is one willing to look hard at one’s family and milieu, write about
them, and then publish it? Certainly, there are acres of memoirs published
every year that proclaim penetrating introspection, but few are as probing as
Norton’s.
“It’s startling how
continually aware Norton is of her past, and impressive to see her
determination to help shape a life that’s distinct to [her daughter], perhaps
one less burdened by class anxiety and built-in Catholic guilt. The care that
Norton takes with each of her subjects in The Public Gardens — the feminine, art making, and family life
to name a few — ought to have much influence on her audience . . . Her book is
an achievement built on her years of quietly working in the background, which
is to say this book is a testament to patience.”
______________________________________________________________________
The Public Gardens went through three printings and
appeared three times on Small Press Distribution’s bestseller list. In 2012, it
was one of five finalists, along with books by Carl Phillips and Dawn Lundy
Martin, for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry (though it’s half prose). John
Keene wrote about The Public Gardens
(and excerpts from Wite Out) on his blog. C. D. Wright included a quote from the title
poem, “The Public Gardens,” in her last book of poems/essays.
