Rest in peace Gregory L. Norris

Greg Norris died on Monday, May 5. He was the most enthusiastic writer to attend my second independent writing workshop back in 2016. Since then, I have remained in touch with him and a writing group he started and mostly led for many years in Berlin, New Hampshire. I write mostly nonfiction about the land and environment. Greg wrote mostly fiction, stories of monsters and horror and aliens. He wrote twice for the journal Appalachia, which I edit. Once about a goldfish pond. Once about picking flowers and getting in some trouble for it. Both stories sketched his encounters with nature as a boy in New Hampshire.

Before the pandemic, I would attend the Berlin Writers meetings in a local office building downtown, when I was up in New Hampshire for my writing weeks. After the pandemic, the group moved to Zoom and was able to expand and embrace some of the writers who had moved away. Although I joined them only a few times a year, I drew on the optimistic inspiration Greg exuded. He had a way of helping by pointing out the strengths of a piece and then urging improvement from the strengths.

“Write, revise, submit,” he would say.

He wrote this blog post about my 2016 workshop, then called Writing from Nature. I held it that year at my in-laws’ summer cottage near Mount Monadnock, in southwestern New Hampshire.

I will miss him and his dedication to writing as a paying career. He was such a pro.