Kris Norbraten
ORP: What inspired you to begin writing or creating? Has that source of inspiration changed throughout your life?
Kris Norbraten: In August 2014, I was co-guiding a climbing/backpacking trip of middle-school girls in Wyoming when, on a well-known rock feature, our group was ground struck by lightning. It was a severe situation with long-term repercussions too tedious to recount here. One of the upsides, however, was a wormhole into writing. They say when the brain undergoes an event too extreme to process, the verbal centers are incapacitated, and the event becomes too difficult to relay with speech. I found this to be true, and still do. But I began to write a story—about a woman struck by lightning, and the uniquely broken person she found to help her cope—and I've been writing ever since.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
KN: Vulnerability — as artists and writers — means we must. For real art to occur, we must tell the truth. Even if it is fictionalized or made poetic, or done in paint or ceramic or electric guitar. The most vulnerable moments in my writing — many of which I've approached then turned away from—are those that reflect most accurately the heart-rending events in my life. Times of exposure and abandonment, times when people saw more of my skin and soul than I wanted them to see, times left crying in a movie theater bathroom stall. Many of those stories are yet to be written because true vulnerability, though it makes the best art, is just freakin' hard.
ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk? Do you have any habits that you believe help or hinder your creativity?
KN: Notecards. Lots of notecards. Sometimes written in the dark, in the middle of the night.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
KN: Perhaps this is not so much advice as a concept, derived from a college English course called "Thinking and Writing." There's plenty of instruction about getting one's butt in the chair, facing the blank page, practicing, reading good work, etc, but from this title I learned that it's not only acceptable but necessary to spend time thinking. This can look like "doing nothing" or a waste of time to the common viewer, but wandering around thinking is essential to my process.
ORP: How does writing/art influence your worldview, and how does your worldview shape your writing/art?
KN: Everything — humans, relationships, nature, civilizations, even outer space — can all be observed through the lens of beauty/brokenness, a carryover from my intense theology days. All dynamics hangs in balance in varying requirements of reconciliation. Stories explore this: life is going along; something occurs that disrupt the status quo, after which the character's life is no longer the same; steps are taken to reconcile what was damaged; a new harmony, or even healing, emerges. Whether the context is time-hopping the multiverse, navigating a relationship with a parent, or kids trying to save their neighborhood while running from an Italian mob family and raiding a sunk pirate ship—is usually some form of love. This framework captures both my worldview and my art.
