Lesbian Nuns, Punk Rock, and God with Margot Douaihy

Fr. Shannon is joined this week by author Margot Douaihy (@NeonMargot), and this is very exciting for him since he is a huge fan of her Sister Holiday series! Margot is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College as well as the author of the award-winning, nationally bestselling Sister Holiday series, as well as the poetry collections “Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace, and Girls Like You.” Her debut mystery, “Scorched Grace,” won The Pinckley Prize in Crime Fiction and was named a Best Crime Novel of the Year by the New York Times, Guardian, and others. In this conversation, Margot reflects on her Maronite Catholic upbringing, her queerness, and how those threads come together in her noir mystery series, which features a devout, tattooed, riot-girl lesbian nun navigating crime, desire, justice, and faith in New Orleans. She discusses subverting the crime genre, queering narratives of law and order, desire and celibacy, found family, and the sacred possibilities of storytelling. There is so much holiness in storytelling, and Margot’s work shows why art and community matter more now than ever.

Resources:

• Learn more about Margot at https://www.margotdouaihy.com/ 
• Buy her books: https://www.margotdouaihy.com/scorched-grace 
• Learn more and join the Community at https://www.queertheology.com/community/

This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.

(10s):
Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G Murphy. And I’m father Shannon, T l Kearns. We’re the co-founders of Queer Theology dot com and your hosts from Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news to LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here. Hello and welcome back to the Queer Theology Podcast. This week we have a special guest, Margot Dhe, And I cannot wait for you to hear this interview. Margot is the author of one of my favorite trilogies of books, the sister holiday series. It’s an incredible, incredible series, and we’re gonna talk a lot more about that on the podcast this week.

(54s):
And in general, I just think you’re gonna love this conversation with Margot. So here is Margot’s official bio, and then we will jump into the interview. Margot dw, he lives in North Hampton, Massachusetts and is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College. She’s the author of the award-winning nationally bestselling Sister Holiday series. In addition to the poetry collections Bandit Queen, The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace and Girls Like You, Her debut Mystery Scorched Grace, won the Pinkly Prize in crime fiction and was named a Best Crime Novel of the Year by the New York Times Guardian and others. Welcome, Margot. Welcome to the Cariology Podcast. I am so, so thrilled to have you here.

(1m 36s):
It’s gonna be so fun. Thank You. Thank you so much. I am just a huge admirer and fan of yours and thank you. The community that you nurture and care take with and among and co-create. I just think we need more, more community and kind of affirmation of Queer Theology and just expansive ways of thinking about the structures that give us comfort and grace Yeah. In life. And I’ll say it, especially now. Yeah. So yeah, I’m, I’m just very grateful for the work that you do, Shea. Well, Thank you. Appreciate that. And likewise, likewise.

(2m 17s):
And we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about the, what do we do now a little bit later, but I, I would love to maybe start out with, for folks who are not familiar with you and your work, we’re gonna talk about the sister holiday series here in just a minute. But I, I’m wondering if you can maybe just share a little bit about your life and also maybe, maybe a bit about your spiritual journey, however, however that makes sense for you. Absolutely. So I currently live in Northampton, Massachusetts, but I’m from Scranton, Pennsylvania. And it’s really hard to talk about my life as a, as an artist, as an educator, or even my aesthetic without my religious upbringing and my spiritual life.

(2m 60s):
And that’s connected to my ethnic heritage. I’m third generation Lebanese American, and our church was also our family kind of community heartbeat. So I grew up in the Maronite Catholic Church. So that is the Catholicism of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and the diaspora. It is campier than a Roman Catholic mass, I would say. Which, just saying something. It’s just saying there’s, it’s longer, there’s more gold, there’s more drama.

(3m 40s):
And we have these murals in our church, St. Ann’s of, in West Granton, of just, so, it’s just this incredible merger of the semiotics of the Middle East, cedar trees, Lebanon and Jesus Christ, and all of our saints. And it’s like the, you know, really fascinating. It was always really interesting to me. I apologize, my cat is also crying in the background part, part of my spiritual journey. I grew up just utterly fascinated by the, the world of just knowing there’s something greater, bigger that we don’t see, you know, the nice creed, what is all that is seen and unseen, that there’s always this, not even shadow side, But we are not alone.

(4m 31s):
You know, we have this kind of greater connectivity in the, it’s both exterior and interior in the connective tissue. And so growing up, it was just a huge part of my life. You know, I went to Catholic school and my teachers were nuns. And so there were all these just facets of my epistemology of like learning about what I thought I knew that were shaped by Catholicism, and not just Catholicism, but a really kind of intense discipline, like almost a disciplined, quite dogmatic take on Catholicism. ’cause these, the lines of it trace back to like the crusades.

(5m 15s):
So people like expanding the word out to, you know, all these areas and protecting kind of a very strict vision of Catholicism. And so also alongside of my fascination and what I thought was incredibly elegant and beautiful, and also carnal and dian and weird, and, you know, in noir in many ways of like sitting in a pew and seeing the, you know, body of Christ and thinking like about murder and murder mysteries and greater mysteries in the ways that they nest. But was also realizing that I was queer. And so that was not acceptable, you know, all of the things that you could just sort of like input into Gen X, you know, growing up in the Rust Belt.

(6m 4s):
And so I moved away from attending mass every week, you know, in, in sort of my, I guess, late twenties, thirties. But I’ve never considered myself non-religious, even though I don’t have the kind of freedom that I sort of used to have. It’s a little slippery and porous. There’s a lot of kind of porosity around it because I’ve never excised that really personal relationship that I’ve had with faith. And also the fact that I turn to Catholicism in ways that are really so instinctual, they’re almost pre-verbal.

(6m 45s):
Mm. And that’s always fascinated me too. I try to stay curious about it. And so merging all of that and all of those like influences and my deep, deep, deep love of mystery fiction and mystery narratives and the ways that they kind of invite you to puzzle through a space and time with someone. And so I knew I always wanted to write a mystery series, And I thought, who, how can I recast the typical hard boiled, hard-nosed kind of insider, outsider, obsessive investigator in a radically feminist and re comparatively religious lens?

(7m 30s):
And so Sister Holiday was born, she, the character is a 33, starts as a 33-year-old nun who makes a countercultural move to go from Brooklyn in sort of like this out and wild fun life. And she’s in a, you know, post punk riot girl band. And she makes a move to here’s my cat bear, to part of our Queer Theology to join a convent, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood in New Orleans. And so she, you know, puts herself in these put of investigation and her spirituality, her reli deep, deep religious faith.

(8m 13s):
She is pious, she is, you know, liberation theologists. So I wanted to create a transgressive interiority that felt really real to me and textured. So she’ll think of, you know, bikini kill lyrics or lunatics in the same breath as like, you know, Exodus or the Ians or, you know, various gospels Yeah. That they’re braided together and they’re not, so that we don’t have to choose how we kind of move through the world, that it’s just very much merged merger. Yeah. So she doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to a whole lot of people who believe that life functions better with like tidy categories and silos and partitions, and they could be only one thing in the world.

(9m 1s):
And so she is a mystery to herself. She’s a mystery to, you know, the sisters in her convent. ’cause you know, she’s, she’s tattooed stem to stern. She has to wear gloves and, and a scarf to, to cover her tattoos, to put the focus on the work and on the sacred and on God and not on herself. And so she’s been a really fun character to write. She’s been a really reparative character for me to write. And in many ways gives me just so much more appreciation for the nuns that I grew up with. Who are my teachers, who are my mentors. And always, I don’t want to curse on this podcast, but like, you know, no, you can a bad just badass feminists that prefigured my understanding of second wave feminism and even third wave.

(9m 47s):
So, And I import a lot of that, a little bit’s exaggerated, but it’s authentically true. So in the convent, the sisters, they don’t drive, they walk everywhere. They grow their own food. They’re anti-capitalist. They are, they minister at the prison, the prison birth project, you know, praying and playing music with people who have either just given birth or about to. And that was inspired by a lot of the social justice work that the Catholic nuns that I knew growing up were not only deeply invested in, but leaders, they were leaders in this work were reparations, community solidarity, mutual aid, like Catholic nuns.

(10m 34s):
You know what I’m saying? Yeah. You know, yes. It’s not that. But then at the same turn, it’s not monolithic. We have the res schools, you know, native American communities in which nuns are really colluded with the era of identities. And so all of these different facets kind of fed my interest in creating a mystery series. And particularly a very gritty r rated noir inflected mystery series led by a genuinely devout none who was also very, very idiosyncratic. Yeah. So long way of, of introducing you all to me and, and to this character of Sister Holiday.

(11m 14s):
Yeah, no, that’s so great. So yeah, so the first two books in the series are Out Scorched Grace and Blessed Water. And I gotta say, like this book is all of my niche interests wrapped in one. It felt like if someone was writing a mystery series just for me. So it’s, it’s been such a gift to spend time with Sister Holiday. I wanna pull out two different threads if we can, of course, specifically debut mystery series, start with and like kind of detective novels and not all of that, because like I am a huge fan of that genre and also often feel bad about my love of that genre because it’s so, yes.

(11m 56s):
You know, law enforcement and propaganda and kind of a often like law enforcement acting outside of the law to bring vengeance and what they would call justice, which is like not always justice. And so I’m wondering if you can just talk a little bit about like, wrestling with that genre and then bringing Right, this queer sensibility. Because, because the other piece of, of many mystery novels is that queer and trans folks are often the victims, right? Like queer or the, or the bad guys or the whatever, where we end up being cast in the kind of negative light.

(12m 37s):
And so you, you not only have this, this queer person who is the protagonist of the novel, I don’t, I wouldn’t say she’s always the hero, but at least like aiming towards heroics maybe and working within the genre conventions. Like how, how were you thinking about that as you engaged in this work? Well, fellow fan here, fellow genre fan. So I see you And I hear you on that. I’m a fan first. You know, as always

(13m 11s):
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(13m 41s):
And it’s true, there are so many of the kind of bestselling titles really propagate that a type of old formula that in many ways keeps it very tidy and straightforward, that there’s a good guy, quote unquote good guy and a bad guy. And there’s one recipe for satisfactory resolution. And I completely see the almost inverse of that. I think mysteries to me about asking questions, yes, about getting satisfactory, delicious feelings at the end that feel satisfactory in terms of the narrative, but really pushing and testing the boundaries and even the very questions of that undergird at all, what is justice?

(14m 26s):
What is criminality? What’s the crime behind the crime when folks make decisions? And then, you know, are, have to face the consequences of those decisions. When did it start? When did all of that start? Where are the structural institutions that in many ways actually create the conditions for combustibility and criminality, and why are they never brought into the question and equation of justice? And when we queer work and when we queer the conversation, we expand it, we test it, we contest it, so it all becomes a contested territory. And the, the mysteries that I love the most kind of are, they offer that familiar deliciousness within the mystery of like, ooh, clues and red herrings, and what’s a vital clue versus what is a misdirection and someone we can deeply invest in.

(15m 25s):
And you know, certainly in this case we have the anti-hero, flawed individual, but hopefully someone that, you know, you wanna follow into these bizarre situations. And so I love mysteries for the fact that we, when queer and trans authors, and I’m part of a really wonderful community, we’d love to share with your, your, the folks watching called Queer Crime Writers. And so, you know, Robin Geiger’s, brilliant series of legal thrillers based on her 30 plus years as an attorney. And the protagonist of her books is a trans woman whose name is Aaron McCabe.

(16m 6s):
And so, you know, bringing in all of these life experiences into like, so folks that read John Grham and Scott Ot, like will love her books, and we have this incredible, beautiful, rigorous trans lens that’s like shaping it. It’s, it’s just so perfect. So I see mysteries as an ideal place in many ways to, you know, ask really big questions, but keep it entertaining, keep it gripping. And, And I think it, the markets shows us, like readers want the new, within the familiar, they wanna know like, okay, if I’m going to the genre section or I’m watching a mystery on like, there’s certain little hallmarks I wanna hit.

(16m 46s):
But I think the more we can bring bigger and kind of more on, I guess, unique questions and nuanced questions about justice and injustice, authority, agency, authenticity, gaslighting, who gets to create the story that we live in, who’s taking up real estate in our head and why, you know, who leverages deception and affect to gaslight millions of people to vote for them. You know, these are questions that queer and trans writer writers are asking all the time. And then in a mystery space, we get all of that with like, as sumptuous clue engagement.

(17m 31s):
And so I love it for that. And I, you know, I still see, still see, like if I sit on a panel at Thriller Fest, you know, with former cops and detectives, it’s sometimes interesting to see the power dynamics. You know, and having said that, a good friend of mine is a former prison warden. I just blurbed his book, James LAIs. And his work is what you would consider like classically propulsive and really reparative in asking also these big questions. So I think we’re seeing changes for sure in the mystery and crime fiction space, still have a ton of work to do, but I think it’s more important now than ever for, for queer and trans people and the crime writers of color, for example, which was yeah.

(18m 19s):
Like, you know, a big force in the scene. But more than ever we need, you know, new and fresh Voices. Yeah, yeah. Kind of piggybacking off of that, I, I’m curious as to your take on how, how subversion of gen genre can help to like, shift our minds and how we’re thinking about things. So, so again, like thinking in, in the prison and law and justice space, where many of us, I think I’ll speak like many white folks, have ideas right? About how the system works, how it should work, that may or may not be reality for people of color for Yeah.

(19m 2s):
Women and poor communities for indigenous folks, right? So I, I’m curious if you can just talk a little bit about how you maybe think genre and subverting genre and playing in genre can help us to, to reframe how we think about systems and, and maybe live into new ways of being. Does that question make sense? Oh, Of course. And it’s actually something I think about and invest in all the time. I believe that the art that we read and write not only reflects or should reflect the lives that we lead in our multicultural reality, but also I think influences new ways of thinking, new discussions.

(19m 44s):
So I think it’s this actually this kind of loop that’s quite self-contained, where the more we wanna seek expression and the more we express, the more new pathways open up for paradigms for thinking. And so, and there’s a lot of, you know, interesting theory if folks wanna read it, you know, there’s an interesting essay by literary theorist toter of called the origins of genre. And it’s, its main kind of argument is that genres or sub genres are new way, you know, forms of art are basically concretized by societal needs.

(20m 30s):
So for example, thinking like one example, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl came out in 2012 and is sort of spawned this new movement and crime narratives where their, you know, marriages get blown up and w you know, wives disappear themselves for various reasons to expand on their agency. And the, the sort of current is we want this, we wanna talk about this. Mm. We are living these lives. It is not so easy or sile to say that there’s one way to be in this world. That there’s one way to do gender, that there’s one way to do marriage, that there’s one way to learn.

(21m 14s):
We are, you know, we say multitudes. And so I think your question is spot on where subverting and reimagining tropes is giving new life, giving, helping people feel seen, which in turn lends to the next generation new voltage, new spaces to be, to be seen. And empathy where we can say, oh, you know what? I don’t know about that. Like, I’ve never, you know, you know, met a lesbian or something, but like, maybe I’ll through reading, I’m like, oh, I can hold space in this moment. Take that and apply it.

(21m 55s):
You know? So I believe it’s, I think that art is actually crucial. It’s not a privilege that, you know, it is a privilege of course, but I actually think it’s the stuff of life to keep kind of a way of, yeah. A way of thinking, a way of, of being in the world that is forward thinking and, you know, really kind of sacred actually. Yeah. Yeah. I, I wanna ask about desire and sublimation of desire and desire in religious spaces and in queer spaces. ’cause you have this right, really fascinating character in Sister Holiday, who is a young woman who chooses to take a vow of celibacy and join and join this, this convent.

(22m 43s):
And I imagine that some queer folks listening might be like, upset by that, nervous about that. Like what are, like, what, what is this saying about queer desire and, and yeah, and, and the rightness of queerness, like within religious structures. And so I’m just wondering if you can talk about that a little bit. Oh, absolutely. I’ve had many conversations on this topic, And I think it’s great. I think it’s, you know, contested territory and there’s, you know, I think it’s wonderful. I love it if hey, love it or hate it. Just for me, the worst is if there’s no opinion, you know, or like, oh, what I, maybe I read it, I don’t remember.

(23m 27s):
So I think for me, you know, desire and, and again, you know, thinking about the passion of Christ and even the etymology of the ways that we understand that word, passion and suffering and desire, they, they bleed out. And they, And I wanted to, in many ways also noir asks us to think about things that, that lift off the page and they, they’ve moved beyond their contained spaces and they almost can deform and reform and all that stuff. So for me, I wanted desire to be for Sister Holiday, something that propels her forward and sets her back.

(24m 9s):
I want that kind of carnal lust that she has, you know, for her, the sort of ex love of her life, Nina as well as her contemporary Rosemary Flynn, to be a way of seeing herself and of feeling all of herself, and also something she has to continually question and, you know, keep alive. And I think that for some people it might seem like completely paradoxical to have this woman say, yes, I am like proudly lesbian And I am celibate. But I think there’s just something that there’s, when there’s something that doesn’t make logical sense and it can make authentic sense, I am in, I’m interested in investigating that.

(24m 57s):
And I think that plays out in a variety of different ways. It’s like, I’m also trying to explore what it means to take a vow. So she’s on this path to take permanent vows for a lifetime, you know, of devotion in a way that gives her complete access. So I think for the character, desire is part of that, part of the path for her. And so, so it’s sublimated in some ways, it’s deeply, you know, rolled around in another ways. And more than anything, I’m just, I think I’m trying to create a, a character who has misbeliefs about herself, and she has, like, that I think is part of her unraveling of the mysteries and solving of the mysteries.

(25m 45s):
So it’s like continually, like there’s the who done it or the why done it, you know, and divine ruin is, it’s a, a drug ring. You know, there’s like, each book has its own kind of ecosystem of crime and mystery. And for her it’s, you know, where, where also does need versus want kind of splinter. And that is, you know, not to make my answer cr too crazily long, but it’s also about addiction and asking about, I don’t know how we understand ourselves in moments of kind of when we’re in love and also feeling like, you know, within ourselves and then also outside of ourselves.

(26m 27s):
So it’s a multifaceted kind of multivalent quality that I want her to just richly, richly, richly explore in every kind of possible way. Yeah. And also like the things that give us pleasure in life, food, her friendships, like with Revo or Bernard or her brother and the world of New Orleans, like plucking a plumb off of the tree. And the ways that in, in some of the nuns that I’ve read a lot about, like Sister Simone Campbell and Sister Helen PreOn talk a lot about fire and lust and desire, and they talk about St.

(27m 11s):
Augustine’s, you know, relationship to that as well. I just, again, I just kind of go back to it. It’s not just one thing. Right. And I think people, different people have different ways of kind of living out that truth. Yeah. And so I wanted the character to play with that too. Yeah. And I will say as a reader, one of the things that I loved about Sister Holiday is that I never had a sense that she was wrestling with the rightness of her queerness, right? Like, it, that wasn’t a part of it. It was a, how, how am I gonna embody this in the world? And like, what does that look like for me to do in a healthy way? And, and asking them all of these questions around that. But it wasn’t a, I’m gonna, I’m gonna like, like that, that she still had doubts about whether her queerness was okay.

(27m 59s):
And so I really appreciated that because I think that sometimes, And I I’m saying that because I think that sometimes people will pick up a book like this and be like, oh yeah, there’s gonna be a we that weird conversion therapy narrative. And that is not what’s happening here. Which I really appreciated. I really appreciated that there was like, she’s such a nuanced and interesting character in both her queerness and her religiosity, which I really, really Appreciate. Thank You. Yeah. Thank you for, for pointing that out. I, and for feeling that. And in many ways it’s like, and she jokes about it. She’s like, I’m a lesbian separatist, you know, if anything, and she plays with that, like the sort of lesbian lethario kind of character and as well as sort of like, again, the hard boiled jerk who’s like into the, the hot dames and like whiskey and that’s, that’s like her, yeah.

(28m 50s):
And so the cigarette and just the attitude and the brio is like, this is like the most lesbian character you would ever meet. And she’s hell of it. Wow. So I’m, you know, that, that really interests me too. And I also wanted to sort of take a pile driver to those notions of, again, like the ruling religious authorities that say what you can be and who you can be and who you cannot be depending on what your belief set is. Yeah. Sort of like an exact counter argument to that dogma.

(29m 31s):
And I get some, you know, I get a lot of folks that are like, oh, I’m a lapse cat Catholic and I’m queer, And I love this, this heals me. Thank you. And also folks saying like, no, she would, you know, it’s like a lot of debate about if you were truly to take a permanent vow, like all this stuff. But for, for me and for this character, her queerness is holiness, queerness is a, and to be queer and trans to be in the community is actually a promise of something better. To me, it’s the kind of a sense of like worship of possibility and hope. And I, you know, she has to defend that a lot in the books.

(30m 14s):
Yeah. Yeah. The same way we have to defend that. Yeah. I have, I have two questions more about this series. One is, I, I’m curious, you know, you’re talking about the cigarette and earlier, you know, bikini Keel and kind of the, the riot girl scene. I, I’m wondering if you can talk about the aesthetics of, of punk and Riot Girl and the aesthetics of Catholicism and, and honestly like of New Orleans and like how you thought about bringing all of that together. I think they were in an incredible conversation. Yes, Yes. The aesthetics of, you know, I’ve always, as I mentioned before, always had this vibe that Catholicism was kind of inherently noir because we wrestle with this question of, of kind of original sin.

(31m 7s):
And in noir all characters are fallen. And there’s a, you know, while I don’t, that’s not the guiding principle of the book, it’s like there are these questions of, if we’re all, we’re all together in this moment of trying to understand who we are, that there’s actually just something really special and pressurized and sacred about that. But the beauty and the theatricality and the maximalism of being in a Catholic church on Christmas at midnight, mass, I don’t know, it could get more kind of queer and theatrical and camp than that I’ve always felt seen in those spaces with like the, the dripping flowers and, and incense kind of knocking me out.

(31m 60s):
And in punk where you’re just kind of a sweaty col one of many, like a, a a thumb, you know, a collection of like bodies kind of worshiping the, the experience of art. You know? So whether it’s just like, and in for folks who don’t like, know punk or even post-punk and Riot Girl, it’s like, check out some videos of X-ray specs or bikini kill and like, just lat gray, whatever. But like, just some of those early groups where like people are just gathering in like basements and like gross venues and even like bedrooms and stripped down or just like, sorry, it’s like a pilgrimage.

(32m 48s):
A sense of power. A sense of power and community. And I feel that it’s like, whether it’s church upon a post punk feminist, like mosh pit, I don’t know. There’s just, there’s a lot of overlap for me authentically that I feel is like, so it just gives me so much power. Mm. Yeah. And, you know, comfort in a way of understanding a very, very hard world. Yeah. And, And I was, I was also really thinking about this community, right? This community of nuns and Sisters in the Sister holiday series, which is a, a very small community, right?

(33m 30s):
Which many we’re seeing, I think that across Catholicism, right, many of the, many of the communities of sisters are aging and shrinking. And to have this very small community that an outsider comes into, but also wants to join it, it just made me think a lot about community and how we’re forming community and how, how community works when we don’t all agree. And I wonder if, if you can say, just say a little bit about what, you know, why you chose to, to invent this tiny community of sisters in New Orleans and, and what the smallness of the group says and does.

(34m 17s):
Definitely. That’s another great question and one that is ever so pertinent right now, but it’s just like little, this little order there are at the start, there are four. And, you know, they talk about how at the height there were, you know, dozens. And that mirrors my own experience kind of growing up and seeing churches either combine or just shed congregants or clothes altogether. And then similarly, when certain sisters, you know, die that the, the ants kind of close. And so there’s just tho those trends that I think are on the macro context, but for me it was like, there’s so much truth in the LGBT community about found family.

(35m 2s):
And so many ways I thought the sisterhood of the Sisters of this blend blood could be a model for a different kind of a found family that also echoes the sisterhood of holidays band, you know, back in Brooklyn where there’s a lot of infighting and, you know, almost not like the opposite of group think and different personalities, distinct personalities, but can agree on a shared value, a shared greater purpose, something bigger to invest in, and, but also in a way that can hopefully use the beauty and glory of diversity to strengthen, not diminish.

(35m 50s):
And so in some ways it’s like allegorical, but it was also really fun to write all of these sisters to get, you know, and it’s just really fun to write. It’s really fun to hang out with these women and, and also explore their own paths. And in some ways I wanted to counter the erasure of nuns. They don’t often get the spotlight, you know, it’s like the pope and the bishops and archbishops. And I wanted to, in some ways, offer a counter narrative to that erasure too. Yeah, yeah. No problem. I’d love to zoom out a little bit and, and ask, you know, we are in, we are living in interesting times to put, to put not to find a point on it.

(36m 35s):
And I, I’ve been seeing a lot of narratives lately, even from artists saying, you know, art doesn’t change anything. And, and it wasn’t a why bother or we should stop creating, but there, there was this kind of sense of like, we should know that maybe a, a right sizing of the impact of artists, which I have some strong opinions about. But I’m, I’m curious for you, you know, like in this time, for you, what is the role of the artist and, and how are you thinking about art making in these times? At the risk of, again, sounding redundant, I just don’t think it’s ever been more important to stay close to the forces and the moments that give us a sense of who we are.

(37m 29s):
So comfort in a book that sweeps us away or entertains us, characters that shake us up, that stay with us. Beauty of slow moments. Like I just, last night my wife And I saw the new Kelly Reihart film called the Mastermind. It’s a, her aesthetic is like slow cinema. It was so slow and just, oh, it was almost just fetishizing moment to moment interactions. Art to me is about asking who are we? Who are we? What is why? You know?

(38m 9s):
And in many ways it’s these religious questions as well, like the divine mysteries and art is that direct portal in, it’s like, it’s direct injection of a way to explore the world, be with the world, be curious about the world, get weird about it, and in ourselves. And it’s, it can stay with us. I mean, I’m sure you, you know, you’re an artist yourself, like writing scripts and like the films that stay with us, the, the characters and the moments, and we might not understand why. And then like 20 years later we’re like, oh my gosh. Like, I think we once chatted about Terminator two. You know, I’m like, like the glory of, that’s why pop culture matters.

(38m 55s):
Art matters, subverting tropes matters, queer and trans art making matters. You know, the like more inclusive, like, we get, I think the, again, more kind of ju jumper cables to the soul. I think we get strength from art and art making. It gives us like a sense of purpose in a very, very chaotic, tyrannical, terrifying time. So I always think when I feel overwhelmed and which is daily, we could sit down and write something, even a line. It calms my nervous system.

(39m 36s):
It helps me like remember what matters in a way that is very real and embodied. And then when I read, you know, read something, it’s from your soul, into my soul, yes, from like one mind into my mind, but it’s actually very sacred. I think art is, is a sacred, sacred endeavor. And so I just think it’s more important, and maybe right sizing is in, it’s interesting to think about for sure. But I think in terms of gaslighting, tyrannical, author, author authoritarian narratives and affect, I think we can counter that with storytelling.

(40m 22s):
I think that’s really it. We’re in a quote unquote post fact moment, which is horrifying. So what do we do with that? Yeah, more art, more storytelling, storytelling that can break through. What does that mean? I don’t know. Keep it weird. Keep it authentic. I, I, I think my belief in it is more, more powerful than ever. And yet, you know, I, I’m not saying that I think like books are gonna get out of, get us out of an apocalypse, but like anything else, I just, it’s each individual person and how do we reach, you know, the individual soul through that soul work, you know?

(41m 10s):
Yeah. I, I’m curious, you know, as you’re, as you’re working with students right now and, and they’re experiencing overwhelm or like, how do I write at a time like this? What are, what are the things that you’re telling them? And many of them are so distraught in the same way that I am. The first I I say is I am with you. And we’ve always had our challenges and problems. We live in an extremely imperfect society with power structures and systems that incentivize greed and vice. You know? And now we’re in a moment of, instead of virtue signaling, virtue signaling, it’s vice signaling.

(41m 53s):
So who can be, you know, kind of more aggressive and incendiary, et cetera. So the first is like, I, I’m with you a hundred percent and that I understand this moment. And so I think my, my response is to say, how can the anxieties or the fear that you’re, you’re living through right now be channeled into the work that you’re creating? How can you, you know, be with it and not abandon yourself and allow this space to be one of empowerment, curiosity, fuel companion.

(42m 36s):
You know, we’re never alone. If there’s a book around, we’re never alone. We have, we’re with somebody, we’re in somebody’s head. You know, we, it’s somebody reading, being in sister holidays head, me being in someone else’s, you know? So I, I offer that to the students as well. And I, it’s the easiest question in the world to say, you know, what’s a book that’s changed the course of your life? And they’re like, rattling off, you know, a billion books. It’s like, okay, well now you are, you are part of this living ecosystem. You will be one of the books that then somebody else in a few years says, that book brought me back into myself.

(43m 23s):
That, that, that character is living in my head forever. And so it’s, it’s again, that I kind of a belief, belief in the fact that we’re all kind of creating something that will live, outlive us as well. Like our books and our art. They outlive us. Yes. I wanna close by, you know, traditionally when we do interviews, we ask, what’s one thing that’s bringing you joy lately? And so if you wanna answer that, great. But also I wanna ask, what’s one thing that is bringing you hope lately? Moments like this, moments like this and the fact that when you step outside of the social media corners, quote unquote, and the, you know, the glowing rectangle that is like forever bringing attention downward that just, we’re, we’re human animals.

(44m 21s):
And we are, I think, beautifully kind of raw and vulnerable in the ways that humans have always been. And that’s also the, that’s also hope because the joy is real. You know, the like at five minutes of a spontaneous dance party with, with friends is like the most electrifying thing in the world. And so that the ability to just take a walk with somebody and be reminded of the kind of sacred beauty that is just moment to moment awareness and also, you know, wonderfully subversive books.

(45m 4s):
And, and again, I’m gonna point to Robin ge legal thrillers with just the, that the success of the series, you know, named New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year, the her last book. That gives me so much hope that, you know, when it comes down to it, that people want, you know, we wanna, we wanna move towards, towards healing and the light, and that we can still hold space for that in all of our, our messy contradictions. Well, thank you so much for being here. I I wanna tell folks to again, go out and get the Sister holiday series, the third book in the series, divine Ruin comes out in January, January 13th, 2026.

(45m 51s):
The first two books are out now. And so, like, this is a great time. If you haven’t read the series to go pick up the first two and then you won’t have the wait, so the third one, because it’ll be ready for you. And so yes, get these, get these series. And thank you so much for taking the time to, to talk today and to, to share your heart and, and where your head is at. This has been a really lovely conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. The Queer Theology podcast is just one of many things that we do at Queer Theology dot com, which provides resources, community, and inspiration for L-G-B-T-Q, Christians and straight cisgender supporters. To dive into more of the action, visit us at Queer Theology dot com.

(46m 33s):
You can also connect with us online on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. We’ll see you next week.

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