Nora Gallagher

Annie Dillard has said that Nora Gallagher's writing "describes church life and spiritual life with absolute accuracy." Gallagher is the author of two memoirs, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection, and a novel, Changing Light. She has received many writing fellowships and her readings and lectures include events at the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena and the Quest Project (Methodist Bishops Annual Retreat) in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She recently preached at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Seattle and in September 2006 she took part in the "Growing in the Spiritual Life" Conference in Atlanta, GA. She is available to lead retreats, give readings, teach workshops, present at clergy days or other special events, and deliver keynote addresses and lectures.

Gallagher's upbringing in New Mexico, close to Los Alamos, gave her inspiration for her novel, Changing Light, which was published by Pantheon Books in February 2007. Along with many people in her Cold War generation, she grew up in fear of imminent attack by the USSR with accompanying bomb scares, drills in school, and shelters. She was particularly afraid of the atom bomb living so close to where it had been tested and stored. Gallagher has come to believe that the use and ownership of the bomb by the United States solidified the country's power as a nation among nations and that the US has become fat with that power. Gallagher's novel, Changing Light, posits the chance of a different outcome: what would have happened had one of the physicists working on the bomb decided to leave the project and work against it? Someone could have left the secret city under the cover of night, she realized, and swum across the river. Who might have found him?

Along with her books, Nora Gallagher also assigns and edits environmental essays for Patagonia, Inc. (an outdoor clothing manufacturer that gives 1% of its profits to the environment).

She is the editor of the award-winning Notes from the Field, published by Chronicle Books, 1999.

Works by this Speaker

Changing Light

Nora Gallagher’s elegant debut novel, Changing Light, is a love story set in Los Alamos during the summer of 1945, in the shadow of the creation of the first atomic bomb.

During the last summer of the war, in the beautiful New Mexico desert, a man and a woman come together: Eleanor Garrigue, a young painter from New York, and Leo Kavan, a neutron physicist. The story begins when Eleanor finds a delirious man lying by the river near her house. She takes him in and cares for him. In this novel of secrets, we learn before Eleanor does that Leo is AWOL from Los Alamos after witnessing a fatal radiation accident that has forced him to confront the moral implications of his work on the bomb. And we know, too, what Leo does not know: Eleanor is married, and has fled to New Mexico to escape her husband.

As Eleanor and Leo slowly reveal themselves to each other, their pasts and the present unfold in tandem, taking us from the heady art world in New York to Einstein’s Berlin, from the bomb labs in the English countryside to the hidden city of Los Alamos. Nora Gallagher perfectly evokes the veil of secrecy and tension surrounding the Manhattan Project, the constant hum of fear alongside the remarkable fearlessness of the scientists in the laboratories.

As Leo and Eleanor privately struggle with the losses the war has pitched into their lives, the two find unexpected solace in each other. Their story is all the more poignant because it can only flourish in a brief interlude–an interlude of brilliant madness and irrevocable change. As the scientists engage in literally “changing light,” Leo and Eleanor are connected and changed in unexpected ways by the brutal radiance of the war and their fierce love.

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Practicing Resurrection

In the highly praised memoir Things Seen and Unseen, Nora Gallagher reflected on a year of spiritual renewal and the fact of mortality with uncommon wisdom and grace. We rejoin her in Practicing Resurrection as Gallagher searches for direction in the wake of her brother’s death. A desire to reclaim her own “wild life” and a sense of the sacred in the world compels her to assess everything: her marriage, her writing career, and her commitment to parish life. A profound testimony to the urgency of living with meaning, to the natural world’s solace and sacredness and a beautiful and often harrowing account of the search for vocation. Gallagher bears witness to the way death yields new life.

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Things Seen and Unseen

"Gracefully written and moving ... Things Seen and Unseen starts with Nora Gallagher entering the labyrinth of her life ... and ultimately it leads to the center of her being."--The Boston Globe

It started with an occasional Sunday, a "tourist's" visit to a local church. Eventually Nora Gallagher entered into a yearlong journey to discover her
faith and a relationship with God, using the Christian calendar as her compass.

Whether writing about her brother's battle against cancer, talking to homeless men about the World Series, or questioning the afterlife ("One world
at a time"), Gallagher draws us into a world of journeys and mysteries, yet grounded in a gritty reality. She braids together the symbols of the
Christian calendar, the events of a year in one church, and her own spiritual journey, each strand combed out with harrowing intimacy. Thought provoking and profoundly perceptive, Things Seen and Unseen is a remarkable demonstration that "the road to the sacred is paved with the ordinary."

"Like Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace, Gallagher is renewing the language of ultimate concerns."--San Francisco Chronicle

"The deep serenity that suffuses Gallagher's work, the lyrical cadences in which she writes, do not blunt the sharp edges of what she discovered in her quest for meaning."--Los Angeles Times

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