The team at Snowfort Books is excited to welcome our next Writer-in-Residence, Kristen Holt-Browning, who will be living and working over the store later in the month. I recently spent a weekend curled up with Kristen’s novel, Ordinary Devotion (Monkfish Publishing 2024), and was completely enthralled with the story of its two female protagonists and their wildly different and yet somehow relatable lives.
In 14th century England, twelve-year-old Elinor is consigned to a life of religious servitude after her mother’s death, literally sealed away in a tiny stone cell with a holy woman, called an anchoress, who has voluntarily devoted her own life to seclusion and prayer. Dr. Elizabeth Pace, a 21st century medieval studies scholar, is trapped in much more modern ways, teaching as an adjunct and longing for tenure-track, pining for motherhood but realizing that role will make her career even harder to stabilize.
I reached out to Kristen with a few questions and she was kind enough to send some juicy responses …
We’re so excited to have you living and writing here in Westport soon. Can you tell us a little about what you’ll be working on during your stay?
Of course! I’ve started writing a novel that takes place in a fictionalized Catskills mountain town—so I think the Adirondacks will be a hugely inspirational location to work. I’m also a poet—my first collection, Watershed, will be published next year—so I may very well find myself drawn to drafting poems while I’m at Snowfort, which is of course fine by me.
I was so intrigued by Ordinary Devotions and particularly the new-to-me medieval world of abbeys and anchoresses. How did you come across that world? Do you have a background in medieval history yourself?
I do not, beyond a couple college classes a looooong time ago. But several years ago, I was reading a book about medieval women, and it mentioned that the 12th-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen “may have been enclosed with an anchoress as a child.” I had no idea what an anchoress was, and when I looked it up, I was honestly pretty horrified: both at the idea of locking oneself up in a cell for one’s whole life by choice as an act of religious devotion, and by the idea of subjecting a child to the same fate.
Clearly you had to do a lot of research to bring these two women and their worlds to life. Did you visit an actual anchorite cell in preparation for writing this book? (**insert shivers from this claustrophobe!**)
I did not! My kids were still young when I was writing it, so that kind of travel just wasn’t available to me. But at least I had YouTube! I watched several video tours of anchorite cells in England and Ireland that still exist, in various states of disrepair. I also reached out to a professor of medieval studies (Dr. Eddie Jones at the University of Exeter) who edited a very useful book on anchoresses. I asked him about details like, what was the heat source? How did they go to the bathroom? And, I visited The Cloisters, the beautiful medieval museum in New York City, a few times, just to get a general feel for medieval architecture (the museum buildings were designed and built in the style of a medieval monastery). So, I just cobbled together my ideas of the anchorhold based on this varied research and my own imagination.
This novel got me thinking about times my own life has felt deeply in between two realities. Elinor is in between childhood and adulthood, of course, but also suspended between the living world of her childhood and the death-like world of serving an anchoress. Liz is teetering between childlessness and motherhood as well as underemployment and stability. What kind of in-betweenness do you feel most keenly in your own life?
In my writing, I move in between genres: fiction and poetry. I also work as a freelance editor. Although I work in several different genres, I specialize in two very different ones: academic/scholarly nonfiction, and poetry manuscripts. And, I recently turned 50, so I feel myself very in between the beginning and end of my life. Like Liz, the medieval studies professor in Ordinary Devotion, I used to work really hard to control my life—five-year plans, extremely detailed to-do lists—and invariably found my best laid plans wrecked by a sick kid, or a snow day, or an unexpected deadline, etc. etc. It’s not easy, but I try to accept the chance and fluidity of life, to let myself live in between—well, everything. Of course I organize my days, and those of my kids, but I think I’ve gotten much better at recognizing the limitations of our perceived control over our lives, and thus much more comfortable existing with some degree of uncertainty. We can only do, and predict, and control, so much.
So well said. Thank you, for sharing, Kristen. I’m looking forward to welcoming you to Westport very soon!
Snowfort readers … we have copies of Ordinary Devotion in the store waiting for you, and I know Kristen would be happy to sign them at our Moonglow literary reading event on Thursday, April 30, when she will be reading and celebrating poetry and poets with us.