California Medieval
A Convent Memoir
9781639640546
172 pages
Schaffner Press Inc
Overview
- LONG FORM: This memoir by Dianne Dugaw, the winner of the 2023 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature, is a poetically drawn ode to the author's early years as a novitiate nun in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1960s, the era when the Summer of Love first blossomed. A musically gifted child who grew up in a remote ranching community in Washington State, Dianne was ushered into the sisterhood upon graduating high-school, where she furthered her musical training and delved deep into the catechism and the daily rituals of convent life. In a series of beautiful vignettes that meld different genres and voices from poetry, to psalm, to descriptive observations of the hilly environment surrounding the nunnery, and its denizens, whether floral, animal or human, the reader is steeped in both the mysticism and the drudgery as well as the good natured humor and steadfast will required in such an existence, while also feeling the author's growing urge to venture beyond the cloistered walls to discover a wider world.