Norma Watkins

The Dry Version

Norma Watkins has a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, She is the author of The Last Resort, a memoir which won a gold IPPY for best nonfiction published in the southeast in 2011 and which the Washington Post called "Splendid in every way." A second memoir, That Woman From Mississippi (2017), describes the consequences of exile; an autobiographical novel, In Common (2022), explores the lives of two women besotted with her father. An upcoming novel Mother Fell (March '27), is the story of three women locked into differing versions of the past, until a mother's fall exposes the past as a great deception.

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 to study creative writing with Eudora Welty, who taught only as a way to earn the money to keep her mother in a good nursing home

This was during the heat of the civil rights movement. My father was Governor Ross Barnett’s lawyer and 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 decline because I was a wife and 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 turned to teaching as a subversive activity, and letting students become their own teachers. From there, I moved on to environmental issues. What good was it to expound on the seven levels of meaning in Faulkner if we weren’t going to have a planet 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 a branch at the College. We created other programs: 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,” thirteen segments on building and living in a warm, humid climate, which was shown on The Learning Channel, along with 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). I completed a 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. AJournal of Two Years became part of my dissertation. Sarton 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.

In l990, Les Cizek, my husband, wanted to come west and study furniture-making in a Fine Woodworking Program (Now the Krenov School). He learned to build furniture and I wrote. Another version of Wingate (as a child at the hotel/spa, Allison’s Wells); a sci-fi novel, Great Mother of Big Apples, where everything I hoped for our planet came true and became a disaster.

In l992, we arrived back in Miami six days before Hurricane Andrew. Both our house and the Environmental Center were destroyed. We moved downtown and I began directing the Environmental Ethics Institute, an endowment to promote environmental principles throughout all disciplines.

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, My Darling Boy). In Dufresne’s novel course, I began an unpublished novel, EAT. One of my short stories, “Gravlax,” was selected as best short story and included in an anthology of Florida writers.

In l996, I quit the College to write full-time. We returned to Fort Bragg, California, where my husband has an amazing woodworking shop, and we are ruled by three cats.

I served as a founding board member of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, and now serve on the board of our local writers club, Writers of the Mendocino Coast. For ten years, I taught Creative Writing at our small college here. I'm working on getting four novels out while I'm still on this side of the grass: Mother Fell (March '27, Wordrunner Press), Old Testament Eyes, Never Orphans, and Eat, which is still fighting me.