Catherine Coldstream spoke with Terry Gross about her years as nun in a Carmelite monastery. She talks about what drew her to the vocation, what it was like to live a silent and obedient life, and why she ran away. Her memoir is called Cloistered. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
On the Ted radio hour, linguist Ann Curzan says she gets a lot of complaints about people using the pronoun they to refer to one person.
I sometimes get into arguments with people where they will say to me, but it can't be singular.
And I will say, but it is.
The history behind words causing a lot of debate.
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This is FRESH AIR.
I'm Terry Gross.
Life in a cloistered carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England was almost the opposite of the life my guest Katherine Coldstream had lived before that.
She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris, where she studied composition, worked in experimental music, and performed on viola.
At the age of 24, after her father died and she was at rock bottom, she found God.
Entering the monastery meant starting a new life.
Cut off from the outside world, monastery life revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, singing hymns, work and obedience.
This new life seemed transcendent, but eventually she chafed against the obedience and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism and her questioning, the whole reality of her outlook and personality, were rejected.
She ran away, returned, and two years later went through official channels and left for good.
After leaving the monastery, she studied theology at Oxford University.
She's written a new memoir called cloistered my years as a nun.
Catherine Coldstream, welcome to Fresh Air.
Your book is so beautifully written, it's hard to imagine you deprived of spoken words for ten years.
I know you had a half hour each day where you were allowed to speak, but what was it like for you to not speak?
Well, it's a really strange thing, because we when I say we, the carmelite order is often described as a silent order.