“As a kid I spent a lot of time in bookmobiles and libraries. I went to four different elementary schools. Libraries were the one continuity. And from early on, through books, I projected a life—I daydreamed north. This is makeshift psychologizing, but perhaps part of it was that such open, vast spaces, such a sense of mystery and severe, compelling landscapes, served to counteract the claustrophobia of an inwardly collapsing home life.”
Howard Norman was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1949, to a Russian-Polish-Jewish family who eventually moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. With an absent father, a mother who secretly kept other children to make money, and a childhood best friend who suddenly died of a rare blood disease, Norman had anything but a happy childhood. Eventually Norman dropped out of high school and moved with friends to Canada. While there, he worked on a fire crew in Manitoba which was mostly made up of Cree Indians. Norman was fascinated by their culture, as well as that of the Inuits and Algonquins, and he was especially intrigued by their stories and folktales. Finding his calling among the Cree, he decided he would write about the wilds of Canada and its tribes. These stories became the basis for his children's books such as The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese and Trickster and the Fainting Birds. Norman's first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were both finalists for the National Book Award. The Bird Artist was named one of Time magazine's Best Five Books of 1994, won the New England Booksellers Association Prize in Fiction, and brought him a Lannan Literary Award. Norman has also edited Northern Tales, Folktales from Canada, Greenland and Siberia, and a collection of arctic folktalks, The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese, which was made into a children's play. In 1978, Norman put together a collection, The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems of the Swampy Cree Indians, and won a Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by the Academy of American Poets.
• Where the Chill Came from : Cree Windigo Tales and Journeys
(1982)
• The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems of the Swampy Cree
Indians (1982)
• Owl Scatterer (1986)
• The Northern Lights (1987)
• How Glooskap Outwits the Ice Giants : And Other Tales of the
Maritime Indians (1989)
• Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad (1989)
• Northern Tales (1990)
• The Bird Artist (1994)
• The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese and Other Tales of the Far
North (1997)
• The Museum Guard (1998)
• Trickster and the Fainting Birds (1999)
• The Haunting of L. (2002)
• In Fond Remembrance of Me (2003)
• The Chauffeur: Stories (2004)
• My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries, and
Preoccupations (2004)
• Between Heaven and Earth: Bird Tales from Around the World
