Nora Gallagher was born in New Mexico, the daughter of Julie Walcott Gallagher, who taught herself architecture, and David Gallagher, who learned the law at Yale Law School and in practice. (He favored bow ties.) She grew up catching crawfish on the irrigation ditch that ran past her house, riding horseback in the desert, and smoking illegal substances in high school which she subsequently quit to attend St. John’s College, a place one studied the Great Books of the Western World. At St. John’s, she read the Iliad in Greek, Plato in English and made lifelong friends.
She learned writing on the ground, first in San Francisco, where she was hired as a stringer for TIME Magazine. (Later, she asked her boss at the time why he allowed her in the door and he replied, “You were a good writer. I figured I could teach you reporting.”) Later, she free-lanced with the idea of travel: she went anywhere on someone’s dime. Prague, Nicaragua, Texas. Her essays, book reviews and journalism have appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Utne Reader, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and The Los Angeles Times.
After a book proposal on families in Prague was turned down by every publisher in New York and her agent at the time fired her, she took a look at some notes she was keeping regarding her so-called spiritual life. Those notes became Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith published by Knopf in 1998. A few years later, after walking straight down the wrong road to vocation, she published a memoir about that: Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace. Not knowing what to do next, she pulled out of a drawer notes from an image she had had many years before when walking on land she owned in New Mexico. She was near the Rio Grande, not far from Santa Fe, when she looked up and saw a mesa on the other side of the river and realized that Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was made in secret was just out of sight, behind the mesa. What would have happened she suddenly wondered, if one of the physicists working on the project in the summer of 1945 had decided to jump ship? Who was he and who would have found him? That became the novel Changing Light which is being adapted for film. Recently, Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the religion department at Publisher’s Weekly, asked Gallagher to write a book about communion for a series on Christian practices. Not knowing that taking communion was a practice, and not having been successful at any other religious practice, the idea intrigued her. The result is a book rather like a memoir about taking communion: The Sacred Meal, 2009.
A few more items: She is the editor of the award-winning Notes from the Field, published by Chronicle Books, 1999. A sermon is collected in Sermons that Work and a poem in the anthology, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. She was lucky enough to be a fellow at both the MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center.
She is preacher-in-residence at Trinity Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara, and sits on the advisory board of the Yale Divinity School. She is represented by Philippa Brophy, president of Sterling Lord Literistic, New York.
She lives with her husband, novelist and poet Vincent Stanley, in Santa Barbara and New York.
