The Literary Lives of Mid-Century Nuns

I spend a lot of time in the archives of literary magazines. There’s something tenuous and beautiful about these often shoestring, sometimes short-lived, always ambitious publications. If you want to understand the contours of American literature for the past 100 years, there is no better place to watch the evolution of writers than in these magazines, where future legends begin their careers with one-line biographical notes.

I wrote my new book, The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America, because I kept on coming across poems by nuns in these magazine archives. Some of the poems were devotional and traditional. I say that without disdain; these women wrote with measured skill. Yet more often than not, the poems were stylistic, satirical, and subversive.

One day, during my archival research, I came across the Winter 1960-61. Although the magazine was based in Seattle, its writers hailed from across the country. Founded the previous year, the magazine had already published , , and . In this issue alone, luminaries like , , , and published alongside lesser-known writers like and , a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary.