[citation needed] The family moved several times, and Norman attended four different elementary schools, including in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Working in Manitoba on a fire crew with Cree Indians, Norman became fascinated with their folkstories and culture.

He spent the next 16 years living and writing in Canada, including the Hudson Bay area and the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

How Glooskap Outwits the Ice Giants, The owl-scatterer, and Between heaven and earth are written for juvenile audiences.

[3] He received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for The Wishing Bone Cycle.

[11] In On the trail of a ghost, an article published by National Geographic, Norman writes about Japan's haiku master, Matsuo Bashō's 1200-mile walk in 1689, and the journey's epic log, entitled Oku no Hosomichi.

[12] His book, My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries & Preoccupations was published under National Geographic's "Directions" travel series.

[14] Norman now teaches creative writing in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

In 1989, in the same issue of International Journal of American Linguistics, the American Indian language scholar Robert Brightman published an article titled "Tricksters and Ethnopoetics" in which he argued that the trickster cycle which appears in "The Wishing Bone Cycle" was originally recorded by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield from the Cree story teller Maggie Achenam in 1925 and that Norman took Bloomfield's prose version and rewrote it in more poetic language.