Norma Watkins

The Dry Version Norma Watkins has a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, which she teaches at College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg, CA. She’s has a memoir, The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure, and publishes short, quirky pieces for the St. Pete Times. The More-Than-You-Want-To-Know Version I was born and raised in Mississippi. Born in Jackson and raised at an eccentric 66-room hotel and spa owned by my mother’s family, where my friends were the black help and where I first learned to appreciate good food. I went to Ole Miss, quit after my sophomore year, got married at nineteen, and had four children. During those bearing years, I started back to school at Millsaps, a Methodist liberal arts college in Jackson. I was fortunate, blessed, to study creative writing with Eudora Welty, who taught only as a way to earn extra money to put her mother in a better nursing home (Ellen Gilchrist was a fellow student.). This was during the heat of the civil rights movement. My father was Governor Ross Barnett’s lawyer and a charter member of the Sovereignty Commission. I found myself in furious disagreement with my entire enormous family, including my husband, and all but a few of my friends. To my family, I was a communist, a fuzzy thinker, ruined by over-education, and playing the rebel to be different. I graduated from Millsaps with Honors in June of 1966, with many offers of graduate fellowships, all of which my husband said I must refuse because I was a mother. In July, I ran away with a civil rights lawyer, Bruce Rogow. He had come to save the State, but succeeded in saving only me. We headed to Florida where he had a job in a poverty law program and I snared a fellowship for a Masters in English at the University of Miami. My mother disinherited me, I was sued for divorce on the grounds of desertion, my in-laws accused me of “spigot love” (turn it on; turn it off), and I spent a lot of miserable years fighting my ex-husband over the right to see my children. In January of 1969, I completed the Masters with a thesis written as a two-act play (Dylan Thomas and William Faulkner meet in Oxford, get drunk and talk about life and writing, using only words they spoke in life.). Bruce and I, by then married, sold everything we owned and sailed off on the Italian liner Michelangelo for six months abroad. When we returned, I began a 26-year career teaching at the local community college, Miami-Dade. My field was English, but I quickly veered off course, first into alternative education—letting go of my role as the “expert” and instead, turning students on to learning and letting them become their own teachers. From there, I moved on to environmental issues. What good was it for me to expound on the seven levels of meaning in Faulkner if we weren’t going to have an earth to do it on? We built an environmental center off-campus on a lake. I interned with the Owner Builder Center in Berkeley, CA, and started one at the College. We created other programs in Natural Landscaping, Organic Gardening, Nutrition, Nature Studies for Dade County school children, and Wooden Boat Building. I wrote and produced a national cable television program, “Solstice,” 13-segments on building and living in a warm, humid climate, which was shown on The Learning Channel; and published 13-booklets to accompany the tapes. Divorced from Bruce (he was into saving, but not so much into keeping), I hired my then love and present husband as the host of the show. I was editor of our Environmental Demonstration newsletter and a frequent contributor to the Miami Herald on the subjects of home-building and remodeling. I began writing food pieces for South Florida magazine (the inspiration for my novel EAT), and finally began to write for myself. I earned my Ph.D. in 1976, with a dissertation on the effects of keeping a personal journal. The late poet and journalist May Sarton was on my committee. Part of the dissertation was a Journal of Two Years. She accused me of divorcing Bruce to give it a neat ending. Up each morning at 5:30, I’d write for two hours, then head off to work. My first novel was taken from the journal, a barely fictionalized version of my flight from Mississippi, called “Wingate.” It won an Individual Artist Award from the Florida Department of Cultural Affairs ($5,000—given to 5 writers each year). In l990, Les Cizek, my husband, wanted to come west and study furniture-making at the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program. Internationally known, the school is difficult to get into and he was accepted. I took a leave of absence without pay and spent two years writing. A second version of Wingate (as a child at the hotel/spa, Allison’s Wells). This was at a publisher’s request (no-go). I wrote a sci-fi novel, Great Mother of Big Apples, where everything I wished for the earth came true and it was a disaster. I wrote half of Loving Otto, a novel about a woman who grows roses and marries three men named Otto. In l992, we arrived back in Miami six days before Hurricane Andrew. Both our house and the Environmental Center were destroyed. We moved downtown, into an apartment in Little Havana. I began directing the Environmental Ethics Institute, a million-dollar-plus endowment we’d raised at the College to promote environmental principles throughout all disciplines. I kept writing. I published fiction and non-fiction regularly in the Miami Herald’s Sunday Magazine, “Tropic.” In 2009, I graduated from the MFA program in creative writing at Florida International University, working with short-story writer, Lynne Barrett (Magpies; The Secret Names of Women; and John Dufresne (Lousiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, Deep in the Heart of Paradise). In Dufresne’s novel course, I began the unpublished novel, EAT. One of my short stories, “Gravlax,” was selected as best short story and included in an anthology of Florida writers. I finished another novel, Old Testament Eyes, about a mentally ill woman who thinks she can heal herself by helping her father recover from a stroke. In l996, I quit the College to write full-time. We live in Fort Bragg, California, where my husband has an amazing woodworking shop, and part-time in Miami where all our children (we had nine between us, but two have died) come for winter vacations, and my husband is forced to work out of my son’s garage. For me, it’s easier; I can write anywhere. I’ve retired from the Board of the Institute I used to run. In Fort Bragg, I’m on the Board of our local Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. I teach Creative Writing at our small college. I publish short essays in the St. Petersburg Times (the Herald’s Sunday magazine folded). My memoir was published in 2011. I’m still trying to sell the second half, and working on an autobiographical novel about the three women who died for love of my father.