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  Kathleen Tarr - From the Inner Frontier to the Last Frontier: Thomas Merton's Alaska Journey. Presented for the Tuesdays with Merton Series, November 9, 2021.

  Thomas Merton's journey to Alaska, a sojourn of seventeen days, has been rendered mostly as a "blip" within his remarkable biography. Yet the mysterious frontier suddenly surfaced to captivate him. Though short in duration, Merton's experience of the vast terrain, along with the talks he gave, were profound in spiritual insights. This presentation will explore that untold story, along with visual images of the places Merton experienced and photographic images taken by Merton himself. Kathleen Tarr, longtime Alaskan, lives and writes under the Chugach Mountains in Anchorage. She is the founder of the Alaska Chapter of the ITMS and author of We Are All Poets Here: Thomas Merton’s Journey to Alaska – A Shared Story about Spiritual Seeking (2018). Her essays have appeared in We Are Already One: Thomas Merton’s Message of Hope (2015) and Merton & Indigenous Wisdom (2019). She is a member of the ITMS board of directors, PEN America, and the Alaska Historical Society. She draws inspiration from contemplating the spiritual geography of mountains.
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  “From the Inner Frontier to the Last Frontier: Thomas Merton’s 1968 Alaska Journey"—ITMS Sixteenth General Meeting at Santa Clara University in California, June 27, 2019, by Kathleen Tarr.

  Kathleen Tarr is the author of We Are All Poets Here (2018). She earned her MFA at the University of Pittsburgh and serves on the board of the Alaska Humanities Forum. In 1968, Merton spent 17 days in the land of tundra, glaciers, rain forests, and sacred and majestic mountains—Alaska. An intimate interpretation will be offered about Merton’s short, yet profound, sojourn north. New spiritual insights and physical details will deepen our understanding of this mostly overlooked aspect of Merton’s biography.