So let us welcome back to Tucson Maddie Norris.
And this one took me a little while:
a sorcerer, a non-fiction caster who draws on inherent magic
from a gift or bloodline.
Sorcerers carry a magical birthright conferred upon them
by bloodline, otherworldly influence, or exposure
to unknown forces--
I'm sorry if I'm telling you stuff you already know--
and in the case of Maddie Norris, possibly all three.
Hurt into literature-- I mean, sorcery,
maybe by the death of her father,
or maybe by the great beauty and strangeness
of the medical illustrations in the book
she spent time with after his death.
She wields an otherworldly power honed by exquisite sentence
training and long running in and well beyond the wilds of Tucson.
Her primary ability is wisdom.
There is much to be had-- much to be said
and to be had about grief and loss
and how to be and to stay open to feeling,
how not to be simply afraid of pain, but to fear it
and to embrace it anyway.
In her book, The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays,
a deeply ensorcelling text that is not for novices to pain.
But if you're here, you're probably not.
As a visiting assistant professor
at Davidson College in the fall, she may or may not
tell you that one can't study sorcery
as one learns a language any more than one
can learn to live a legendary life.
"No one chooses the power of literary sorcery,"
Maddie Norris writes.
"The power chooses the sorcerer."
And the power has chosen the Maddie Norris.