Nora Gallagher

From Nora Gallagher’s upcoming memoir: “The sick? Not me. The dying? Never. You don’t believe me, I will bet you. You think, oh, no, not me. I know about being sick. I’ve had the flu. I’ve had a cold. No, those are not enough to get you into Oz. Because when you have a cold, unless you are unlucky or have a compromised immune system, you know that eventually, you will get well. Your time in the land of the sick is so short it’s like a layover. I saw Thailand but only from the airport. To pass into sick land you have to not know whether you are going to get out. That simple.”

Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have difficulty with anything that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence. We are caught in a restricted way of knowing. As Huston Smith says, the scientific method only measures those aspects of reality we can control, leaving out all those aspects that are beyond our ability to control. All things that exceed us in freedom, intelligence and purpose, things that cannot be ‘pinned down.’ ”

In her novel, Changing Light, Nora Gallagher asks: what would have happened had one of the physicists from Los Alamos decided to leave the Manhattan project and work against it? The result is a love story set in the summer of 1945 in the shadow of Los Alamos and the making of the first atomic bomb. In this talk, Gallagher explores writing and imagination and our capacity to find moral clarity by bringing to light a shadowed history.

Many of us have skewed ideas about how to write. Well-meaning professors who were not writers taught outlines, the three-point essay, and “ transition” sentences. Add church lingo and religious clichés and you’ve got writing that often ends up solipsistic or, worse, dishonest. This workshop puts many writing doctrines aside and replaces them with different, more active and alive methods of discovering voice. In addition, participants may find that faith can be clarified or revived by the practice of good writing.