106 inner self, to think deeply about the interior journey which, ultimately, is the most important journey of all. Everything up to that point of first coming across Merton was external and clouded by family problems, job roles, obligations, earning a living, fitting in and being somebody. In other words, there wasn’t time to think about my relationship to any Higher Power, or to the Supreme Lyricist. MBH: I can see how that book, and his work, must have been a lifeline for you as a writer! That you came upon that book when you did is, dare I say, miraculous? As writers we have to keep our eyes open for those serendipitous moments, and you certainly did. But to devote the sustained time and energy to create a full-length book takes an incredibly tenacious interest. What was the one most important thing about Merton and his work that kept you entranced enough to complete this book, and to continue working within his legacy?
CIRQUE No need to recite all the tragedies about assassinations, protests, upheavals, racial strife, but it was the year from hell, when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and of surging and violent protests to the Vietnam war. Before I tell you why it’s so significant that Merton came to Alaska, I have to confess I’ve been obsessed with 1968 for a long time as it was a pivotal year in my life, too, when I was coming of age as a very young teen and watching the world crumble around me, the sadness and chaos saturating the news, and the ongoing conflicts in my own family. As I’ve written, an inner restlessness seemed to form in me during those unsettling times that I’ve never quite shaken off. At the same time, however, I remember how I soaked up all the great rock music I heard on the radio, and I admired the hippies from afar on television. I wondered just when the heck my life was going to get going. I wanted to grow up fast, break some female barriers, and to high-tail it out of the then-rust-belt of Pittsburgh to all the cities that seemed more exciting.
KWT: You said it, a lifeline. Quite simply, Merton became my spiritual guide, not just a writer I admired. I related to his paradoxical ways, how he seemed to be traveling in two different directions at-once, creatively Alaska’s mood in 1968 was practically synthesizing ideas, experiences, and the opposite of the rest of the country. learning incessantly from others and The Prudhoe Bay oil discovery was from whatever he laid his hand on to announced in June and the young read. He may have been an acclaimed state was jubilant about its economic Kathleen Witkowska Tarr monk, a Roman Catholic priest, and a prospects. Of course, Merton didn’t great and revered writer, but he was clearly as mixed up pay attention to oil pipelines, but he was sensitive to as me. And he was a humble seeker until the day he died women’s issues and the growing feminist movement. universally human. In this surreal, disruptive, paradoxical year, Merton shows MBH: And there was the Alaska connection, too. What’s up in Alaska on his way to Asia. After 27 years of monastic the significance of Merton’s time in Alaska? life, Merton was finally given permission by his superiors to leave the monastery for more of an extended period of KWT: Well, I don’t have to tell you about Alaska’s time, other than for jaunts to doctors for his bad back and surroundings and great silences as a magnet for artists, bursitis, or for an occasional meeting he was sanctioned poets, dreamers. And wayward monks! This is another to attend. (During the 1950s, on the pages of his journals, question that requires some background and context. and through letters to his religious superiors, he explored Thomas Merton spent 17 days in Alaska in autumn of 1968 the possibility of leaving Kentucky to go into deeper while on his way to Asia. The year 1968 has gone down solitude in more isolated contemplation, by perhaps in history as one of the most horrible years in twentieth trying to become a Carthusian). century America. The whole country suffered some kind of political or cultural neurosis as one crisis after another Though 1968 was volatile and fraught with violence, smacked people in the face and crushed their spirits. Merton himself was going through a kind of transcendent