Norma Watkins

I was born and raised in Mississippi. Born in Jackson and raised at an eccentric sixty-six-room hotel and spa called Allison’s Wells, owned by my mother’s family.

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 attorney 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 only 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 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 taken a job in a poverty law program. I was given a fellowship for a Masters in English at the University of Miami. My mother disinherited me; I got sued for divorce on the grounds of desertion; my former 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. After I defended, Bruce and I, now married, sold everything we owned and sailed off on the Italian liner Michelangelo for six months abroad. 

When we returned, I began a twenty-six-year career teaching at the local 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”, turning students onto learning, and letting them become their own teachers. From there, I moved to environmental issues. What good was it to expound on the seven levels of meaning in Faulkner if we didn’t 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 one at the College, teaching sustainable home-building and remodeling. 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, a thirteen-part series on building and living in a warm, humid climate, which was shown on The Learning Channel. We published thirteen booklets to accompany the tapes. Divorced from Bruce (He was into saving, but not so much into keeping), I hired my then boyfriend 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 an unpublished 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 served 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 wrote for two hours, then headed off to work. Wingate, my first novel was taken from the journal, a barely fictionalized version of my flight from Mississippi. It won an Individual Artist Award from the Florida Department of Cultural Affairs ($5,000—given to five writers each year), but never sold.

In l990, my husband Les Cizek 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 thrilled to be 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). This was at a publisher’s request and the result was rejected. I wrote a sci-fi novel, Great Mother of Big Apples, where everything I wished for the planet came true and turned into 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, using the million-dollar-plus endowment we’d raised for the College Foundation to promote environmental principles throughout all learning 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 (Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, Deep in the Heart of Paradise). In Dufresne’s novel course, I began the 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 decides to heal herself by helping her father recover from a stroke. And others: Mother Died, about a woman so little missed that no kind words were spoken at her funeral; Two Sisters about orphaned girls who find their way to New York and to different fates.

In l996, I retired from the college to write full-time. We live in Fort Bragg, California, where my husband has an amazing woodworking shop. We make winter trips to Miami. Our children (we had nine between us, but three have died) meet us for winter vacations.

In Miami, I retired from the Board of the Earth Ethics Institute. In California, I retired from the Board of our annual Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. I taught Creative Writing for ten years at our small college in Fort Bragg and retired from that. The Last Resort, a memoir based on that journal, was published in 2011.The sequel, That Woman from Mississippi, came out in 2017. In Common, an autobiographical novel about the three women who died for love of my father, arrives in 2022.

My motto: The best work is yet to be done