Join us here on Substack TODAY, Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 12:15 p.m. Eastern for a conversation between Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John West and Here Below’s editorial director, Lisa Ann Cockrel, about the lie at the center of the internet and how a memento mori practice can revive our digital lives.

Stream it here

Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Cait West Talk Patriarchy and Politics

In her groundbreaking book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, traced the deep roots of militant masculinity and authoritarian power within American evangelicalism—the very forces that shaped ’s childhood and that now, alarmingly, command positions of power in our national government. As a historian whose work illuminates the dangerous intersection of gender, religion, and politics, Du Mez recognized in Rift something rare and vital: a deeply personal testimony that gives human dimension to the forces she has spent years documenting in her scholarship.

Du Mez recently spoke with West about the courage required to break silence, the chilling normalization of patriarchal ideology in American life, and what it means to build a life—and reclaim the sacred—after escaping fundamentalism.

The following is excerpted from the new paperback edition of Rift: A Memoir by Cait West

KKD: When you first decided to tell your story, who were you writing for? Were you imagining primarily women who were walking a similar path out of high-control religious communities?

CW: I first started writing down bits of my story when I was in college and felt like I had to get my memories down on paper. It was almost like a compulsion, like I had all these broken pieces rattling around inside me and I needed to get them out. I realized that not only was writing about my past cathartic, but it helped me make meaning out of the confusion of trauma. That’s when I began to imagine writing this story for others too. I remembered how it felt not to have anyone to turn to as I was working my way out of religious fundamentalism, and when I was writing the most difficult passages, I held on to the hope that if my story could help just one person who was stuck in a similar situation, it would be worth it. Even though I can’t provide any easy answers for getting out of high-control religion or abusive homes, I believe that telling our stories has a power for human connection and empowerment that can’t be underestimated.

When did you realize that the patriarchal and authoritarian teachings that had defined your childhood were taking hold far beyond your own fundamentalist circles?

After I left the Christian patriarchy movement, I became a member of what I thought at first was a “safe” church, but I soon began to notice how patriarchy was impacting everything from church government to how women were interacting with each other. I became somewhat of a nuisance, I think, as I became vocal about these things and started to question the patriarchal form of leadership. But it still didn’t feel as extreme as the church communities I’d grown up in.

Then the church hired a new associate pastor, who ended up being a proponent of Doug Wilson’s teachings (and would eventually join his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches). I felt bewildered that the toxic ideology of “biblical” patriarchy, which I’d thought I’d left far behind, was now infiltrating a church I had hoped would be a safe space. Soon, church newsletter reviews and small-group studies were focusing on Doug Wilson and Voddie Baucham books, and when I called this out, no one took my warnings of the dangers of Christian patriarchy seriously. Then the new associate pastor made homophobic comments from the pulpit and started talking about how Christians couldn’t be Democrats. All the red flags went flying, and I left the church shortly after that.

I realized that patriarchy appears in different forms. Having an extreme new pastor only highlighted the foundation that had already existed in that church: a patriarchal hierarchy in which women were required to be submissive. While this patriarchy appeared mild before (as complementarianism is just a softer form of patriarchy), it quickly escalated, not just because of the new pastor but because the roots were already there. I just couldn’t see them as clearly before.

This is just one anecdote of how fundamentalism can spread, and has spread, throughout the American religious landscape, and what’s concerning is how few people notice it’s happening.

What has it been like watching a pastor like Doug Wilson, who inspired your own dad, now attracting national attention, and for figures like Pete Hegseth, who attends a church in Wilson’s denomination, to hold such power in the current Trump administration?

I’ve talked with many other survivors about this experience, and for many of us, it feels as if we ran away from the danger only to find it chasing us out into the world. Doug Wilson has been a church leader for many decades, and he is one of the first patriarchal leaders I came into contact with, as he would visit my childhood church. Even the church school that my older siblings attended was inspired by his classical school system.

To see him in the news, platformed by mainstream media, has been upsetting, to put it mildly. On the one hand, I am grateful that light is being shone on this dark corner of the world, but on the other hand, I feel that more emphasis needs to be on the survivors who have escaped these types of churches, rather than just on the harmful teachings.

For Pete Hegseth to be in power, as part of Wilson’s denomination, has been devastating but not unexpected. This was the plan all along, and I was raised to believe in it. For Christian patriarchy leaders, infiltrating the government is part of the long-term plan to take back America for God. So, I wasn’t shocked as much as dis- appointed that voters have not taken seriously what survivors have been talking about for decades.

One of my early-childhood memories is being in the car when my family picked up Doug Wilson from the airport to preach at our church. He was this towering figure that my father respected. I had no idea at the time how Wilson’s teachings and influence would irrevocably change my world. But I like to think now that Wilson had no idea that the shy little girl in the back seat would grow up to speak out publicly about him and the patriarchal world.

You were once trapped inside this high-control religious world, but you found the strength to break free. What advice do you have for Americans today, now that we’re all living under the authority of such men?

The damage the current administration has done will not be reversed in a few short years, if ever. Every day, it seems a new crisis is evolving in our country, making it difficult to know what to do next. But this is an authoritarian tool to gain power and control over individual lives by overwhelming us and making us exhausted to the point we have no fight left.

One thing I think is important for all of us to do is to spend time focusing on our health as much as is reasonable. Taking care of our nervous system and mental health is extremely important in building resilience and strength to endure long-term oppression. We will not be able to sustain resistance if we are totally burnt out. And if we keep our strength, we are better equipped to help others in our communities.

Another thing we can do is engage with art, whether that is creating your own art or supporting artists you admire. We need writers and painters and sculptors and filmmakers and musicians and poets right now more than ever—to tell the stories of this time and to remind us of what makes us human and why we are fighting. Art may seem low on the list of priorities, but I believe it is one of the most powerful tools we have. The limited access I had to books and film when I was stuck as a stay-at-home daughter gave me hope as I could imagine a different life for myself and others.

We live in a time with easy access to many resources that can help us survive these troubled times, whether that’s learning from experts like Timothy Snyder or going to therapy to heal our nervous systems. And we need to use our skills and resources to resist because we know that authoritarianism, while it rewards a few privileged people, is ultimately harmful for most people and dangerous for democracy. Educating ourselves and others and facing the reality of growing authoritarianism across the globe is good, hard work, and I believe we can all do our small part in this resistance.

About the book

An essential story for understanding what’s at stake when women’s rights are stripped away

Cait West was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing. By the time she turned eighteen, the rules in her home were ironclad: no college, no career, no choices of her own. As a stay-at-home daughter in the Christian patriarchy movement, she was trained for one purpose—to serve the man her father would eventually allow her to marry. She learned to cook, to clean, to disappear. She learned that her body was a threat and freedom was sin. Her life would never be her own.

Until she broke free.

While dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale explore the extremes of patriarchy as fiction, Rift tells a true story of gender oppression—one that many American women are experiencing now behind closed doors at home and at church. Weaving together her own gripping story with lyrical meditations on the geology of displacement and fracture, West maps the fault lines of her own breaking: the isolation that kept her silent, the forbidden relationship that became her escape route, and the complex aftermath of choosing herself over everything she’d been taught to believe. Heartbreaking, hopeful, and blazingly honest, Rift is both exposé and invitation—a reminder that freedom and healing are possible for those determined to claim a different life for themselves.

★ “A powerful meditation on what it means to be trapped and what it takes to break free.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In this beautifully crafted memoir, Cait West offers readers an intimate glimpse into growing up and coming of age in a world defined by Christian patriarchy. Written with unusual sensitivity and unflinching honesty, hers is a story of aching loss and gritty resilience, of brokenness, beauty, and hope.”
—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne and Live, Laugh, Love

“Rift is a gorgeously written, intimate portrait of a girl raised in Christian patriarchy. This close, inside view shows the reader what it is like to be stuck under male authority and feel oneself vanishing away. The inability to choose one’s own path in education, romance, and faith, even as an adult woman, leaves a wrenching void. Rift becomes a story of overcoming. Here you’ll meet a woman finding herself and the hard, brave steps it takes to break free, to heal a broken space inside.”
—Sarah Stankorb, author of Disobedient Women

Buy Now

Consider this our neon poster board: GO GRIFFIN GO.

Watch the video, then scroll down to learn more about the book where he tells his full story, along with early praise from Kirstin Valdez Quade and Fr. James Martin, SJ.

“The forest evolves, grows, survives. So will you.”

Griffin Oleynick was 28 when he moved into a thousand-year-old monastery on a mountain in Italy to become a monk. He had spent years preparing: his faith kindled over Dante in graduate school, seasons of prayer and discernment, a growing certainty that God was calling him to Camaldoli—to a life of poverty, scholarship, and silence in a forest at the edge of the world. For a time, it was everything he had hoped.

Then his novice master began to groom him for abuse.

After the Mountain is a rare firsthand account of clerical abuse of a vulnerable adult. But more than that, it’s a story of falling in love with God—and what it means to rage against, and persist in, faith. It’s a book for anyone who has been betrayed by an institution they believed in, anyone who has had their faith shattered but cannot quite let go of God, anyone who suspects that—despite everything—the world is charged with grace.

A spiritual memoir for our moment. A love story for all time.

Early Praise for After the Mountain

“After the Mountain is an unlikely animal: a spiritual memoir that somehow has the tension of a thriller. After all, the stakes couldn’t be higher: the well-being of a heart, the searching of a soul. Griffin Oleynick brings his piercing intelligence and open-heartedness to a story about shattered trust and healing. Tender, vulnerable, and closely observed, After the Mountain is a beautiful, beautiful book.”
—Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds

“Griffin Oleynick has written an honest, searing, compelling, challenging, and ultimately inspiring memoir about his long and arduous spiritual journey, which included a devastating stay in an ancient monastery in Italy. One of the many strengths of this unique book is not only the author’s luminous writing style (he is a scholar of Dante, after all) but his preternaturally wise approach to both joy and suffering. It’s a propulsive read, and a rare example of a spiritual memoir that is also a page turner.”
—James Martin, SJ, author of Work in Progress

After the Mountain is available for preorder now wherever fine books are sold.

Preorder Here

Join us here on Substack on Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 12:15 p.m. Eastern for a conversation between Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Here Below’s editorial director, , about the lie at the center of the internet and how a memento mori practice can revive our digital lives.

Stream it here

Over the last couple of weeks, authors from Here Below’s first list of books have been featured in The Atlantic, Commonweal, Wired, and Lit Hub. The first has been a leading journal of American ideas since 1857; the second has been a lively and indispensable magazine about church, politics, and culture for progressive Catholics since 1924; the third launched at the dawn of the internet era as most of us know it and has been a vital source of news and commentary for an increasingly wired world since 1993; and the fourth is a digital-era darling of the literary world that has been curating the best of contemporary book culture since 2015.

I love that Here Below Books (est. 2026) is carving out a space in the center of the Venn diagram where these publications’ interests overlap. Eschewing the binary between the sacred and the secular, one book, one byline at a time. Some highlights:

“In a classic comic about the state of modern infrastructure, a precarious Jenga tower is held up by a single block labeled ‘a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.’ AI—swarming onto rarely used Wikipedia pages, probing poorly run government websites, discovering zero-day exploits—has shown the web to be the frail, uncanny place that it has always been. Indeed, the most cloudlike part of this state of affairs is the absence of human agency.” — How Long Until the Internet Breaks? The web is much more fragile than it seems. John West in The Atlantic

“We met in his small, stinky barracks room stuffed with infantry soldiers eager to share their most recent poems. These were not the frail, intellectual boys you might imagine when you think of male poets. They were meatheads—more accustomed to pumping iron than quoting sonnets—but like me, they were hungry and, in their desperation, driven to distill their pain into, or by means of, beauty. I heard men read Auden and weep.” — Beauty at the Edge: Is poetry under a moral obligation to those who suffer? Kathleen Kilcup in Commonweal

“It’s not necessarily that people have gotten worse. ‘Dead Internet Theory’—the proposition that a vast majority of the interactions on the web are fake, bots talking to other bots—has accrued more supporting evidence recently. One cybersecurity firm concluded this spring that agents already outnumber human users, their traffic surging by 8,000 percent through 2025. No wonder seemingly everyone has at some point caught themselves scrolling through a wasteland of brainrot and asked, ‘What the hell am I even looking at?’ Underlying that question is another: ‘Is it always going to be like this?’” — Please Let the Internet Die: Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over. John West in Wired

“At the very moment AI is forcing us to ask what only a human writer can do, Americans are getting more interested in the inner life. Recent surveys show that about four in ten adults say they have become more spiritual, even as far fewer say they have become more religious.” — We Banned the Soul from the Building: On AI, Spiritual Life, and Sustainable Practices for Writing. Charlotte Donlon in Lit Hub

Thanks for reading,

P. S. Other things I’m paying attention to this week:

I’m taking an extended lunch break tomorrow to catch Game 6 of the WNBA Finals. Flavor Flav says it’s cool: “‘Thursday is a paid holiday. Because Flavor Flav said so,’ Flav, whose name is William Jonathan Drayton Jr., declared on Instagram and Threads. ‘Everyone should be able to watch Women’s Sports.’” — Flavor Flav gives everyone permission to skip work to watch Game 6 of the WNBA Finals. Tracy Brown in the Los Angeles Times

“We need friction to move. Without its resistance, Earth’s plates would be in constant motion. We could not walk, or drive, or even hold objects. Understanding how to achieve what we want, in a world requiring this resistance, has been essential in our development. Yet there is a deeper paradox at work, one that William James captured when he wrote that life is built ‘in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world’. Every advance we make generates new friction. We solve one problem, and friction presents another. We step forward, and new resistance awaits. This is what progress means: that we have moved into territory that demands new understanding.” — Traction! Tribologists study friction: what happens when things rub together. It’s indispensable, from the wheel to the paths of stars. Jennifer R. Vail in Aeon

— Throwing Yourself Into the Dark: A Conversation with Anne Carson. Kate Dwyer in The Paris Review

“We have to make good choices. We have no time to rush.” — ‘This Is Nuts.’ An OpenAI Insider Explains Why He Quit. David Robinson on The Ezra Klein Show

“With ‘taste’ becoming such a single-minded obsession among everyone from tech bros to fragrance heads, soon, reading the ‘big books’ might be passé. And uncovering more niche, even semi-forgotten authors could be a status signal, proclaiming that you’ve tapped out of the monoculture. But take heart in the fact that no matter what you’re reading, it will be obscure to someone.” — Are We in a Reading Monoculture? BookTok promised us endless discovery. So why does everyone seem to be reading the same thing? Véronique Hyland in Elle

Listening to lots of Neko Case in anticipation of my first show at the historic Ryman Auditorium this weekend: “Case’s distinct voice is as mighty as a canyon; she often sings like someone hollering into a void and pausing to let her echo confidently resound.” — Neko Case Has Sung Hard Truths. Now She’s Telling Hers in a Memoir. Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times

Read Emily’s Sacred Texts essay below:

Join us here on Substack at 8 p.m. Eastern TONIGHT for a conversation with Emily Bernard about “The Fool,” the essay that launched our Sacred Texts series. Emily will read from the essay and talk with Here Below editorial director Lisa Ann Cockrel about the Tarot as an alternate theology, grief and the trouble with the language of lessons, Philippe Petit’s high-wire walking as a creative act, the great gift of receptivity, and more.

Have a question for Emily? Leave it in the comments below, and we’ll try to bring it into the conversation.

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, won the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose.

About Sacred Texts

In Sacred Texts, a writer we love explores a text that has been a personal lodestar. For our first installment, Emily chose not a book but a card: The Fool, the unnumbered figure who stands at the threshold of the Tarot’s Major Arcana. Moving from a hurricane in Jamaica to the loss of her brother, James, she writes about faith without guarantees, the discipline of beginner’s mind, and the balancing act of the writing life.

Here’s an excerpt:

Like other gifts of mercy in my life, the Tarot was a gift from James. He was a devotee of the I Ching and other alternate ways of knowing and approaching life, systems that did not insist that reason was the only reliable instrument for finding one’s way. James understood that a question might be answered through symbol, pattern, chance, intuition, or an image whose meaning changed according to the hour in which it appeared.

I have begun to think of the Tarot as an alternate theology. Not an anti-theology, and not a repudiation of scripture, but another language for mystery: a portable cosmology in which contradiction is expected, wandering is sacred, and no life is excluded from the story. Its figures do not demand purity before they agree to speak to us. The cards receive the frightened, the queer, the grieving, the skeptical, the estranged, and the devout. They do not ask first whether we are worthy. They ask where we are.

An alternate theology does not have to overthrow an older one. It may begin by opening a door the older theology has closed. It may restore mystery to someone who has been handed judgment in God’s name. It may say: You remain inside the sacred story. Your life contains symbols. Your body is not an error. Your journey has not been disqualified.

The Fool is the natural patron of such a theology because The Fool has no rank. In the Tarot of Marseilles, The Fool can speak with everyone: kings and commoners, popes and peasants, the powerful and the doomed. The Fool belongs nowhere in particular and therefore belongs everywhere. The Fool carries little and has room to receive. A small animal nips or paws at the traveler’s legs, either warning The Fool away from danger or urging the journey forward. Perhaps it is doing both. Every true warning contains an invitation. Every invitation carries danger.

Fr. Rohr provides Christian language for the same paradox in Falling Upward. We imagine spiritual progress as ascent: becoming wiser, safer, more accomplished, more certain. Rohr proposes that the deeper journey often begins with falling—with failure, humiliation, grief, the collapse of an identity that once seemed necessary. We do not rise by avoiding descent. We fall into a larger life.

Read the full essay

ICYMI: Former Tradwives-in-Training Talk Back

and Lourdes Torres () in conversation celebrating the paperback release of Rift: A Memoir, Cait’s stirring account of escaping Christian patriarchy.

“A powerful meditation on what it means to be trapped and what it takes to break free.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Join us here on Substack at 8 p.m. Eastern TONIGHT for a conversation with Kathleen Kilcup and Spencer Reece celebrating the release of Kathleen’s debut memoir, Between the Light and Me: A Memoir of Beauty and Violence. The two poets, both of whom have written memoirs, will talk about the entanglement of beauty and violence, hungering for God, and how grace finds us in unlikely places.

Kathleen Kilcup spent five years serving in the US Army as a Russian linguist. She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and an MA in religion and arts from Yale. Fr. Spencer Reece’s debut collection of poetry, The Clerk’s Tale, was selected by Louise Glück for the Bakeless Prize. His second, The Road to Emmaus, was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Praise for Between the Light and Me

“Kilcup vividly depicts the experience of vacillating between self-destruction and joy, relapse and recovery. Especially powerful is her framing of recovery as both a death and renewal . . . A stirring testament to redemption, faith, and rebirth.” —Publishers Weekly

“Kathleen Kilcup has written a searching and profound memoir, written in beautiful prose and packed with deep spiritual insight.” —Phil Klay, winner of the National Book Award for Redeployment and president of PEN America

“This is a propulsive, harrowing, and ultimately ennobling book. Kathleen Kilcup has been to the abyss and back, and her writing shines with the grace of one who knows she’s been saved.” —Christian Wiman, author of Zero at the Bone

“This memoir is both devastating and gorgeous. Kilcup tells an unflinching story of longing, both for God and for human connection, and the human frailty—what the author calls sin—that gets in the way. I savored every sentence, delighted in every page, and readers will too.” —Joanna Eleftheriou, author of This Way Back

EXCERPT

From Between the Light and Me: A Memoir of Beauty and Violence by Kathleen Kilcup

1 / Eugene, Oregon

Thunderheads gathering at the rear abyss of things, lightning, quick swizzle sticks, troubling the dark in-between. You’re everything that I’m not, they think, I’ll fly away, Lord, I’ll fly away. —Charles Wright, “Looking Around”

The church was red. Or, at least that’s how I remember it. A small adobe building with a blue onion dome tucked in among dripping trees on Blair Boulevard. Everything drips in Eugene. Wet clouds are pushed by Pacific winds into mountains that trace a north–south line along the Willamette Valley; then they drop south and sit in great, gray glops over Eugene. Whole months of gray and wet. The sky, not a sky, but a soaked cotton ball.

Against the gray and flat light and dark northern greens, the church rebelled. Bright, it said. Feast of color. Maybe that was some small part of the reason I found myself sitting outside the doors late one evening, a soft mist of rain falling. I think I might have cried there, but maybe I just sat and looked at the doors, believing, somewhat self-pityingly, that I could not cross that threshold—that fate and circumstance had conspired to press me to the outer edges of God’s love.

A small, elderly Orthodox priest (though maybe he was only fifty then) must have seen me from the window of his house next door.

He came out and sighed and asked if I’d like some tea. He did not seem pleased to extend the invitation, but I followed him into the yellow light of his living room, where his wife set out a glass teapot, inside of which bloomed a beautiful pink tea flower. I had never seen anything like it. So delicate and fragrant and at odds with the colorless isolation I had felt outside.

We chatted awkwardly for a few minutes. What could I say to these pleasant and good people about my life? The drinking and self-loathing and poverty and failure? The pervasive and self-confirming sense that I simply did not belong in the world?

My stuttering silence led the priest to furrow his long, caterpillar eyebrows. Then he pulled out an album that chronicled the church’s history. See? he said, his glasses reflecting light. Before it was a church it had been a chicken hatchery, then a tofu factory, and then a building owned and nearly destroyed by anarchists. When the church purchased the building back in the ’90s, it was covered in graffiti. There had been symbols of devil worship, pentacles and the sign of Lucifer. I nodded politely while he shared the vaguely interesting story with me and then thanked them for the tea and said that I had to be going—though I had nowhere to go.

. . .

For months afterward I drank tea out of a giant plastic yellow cup. The tea was cheap and herbal, and I filled the cup half full of almond milk and Splenda. I liked the way the yellow cup looked in my hand as I stood at the giant living room windows looking out over a sea of milky fog and pine. Crows swung silently around branches, their black bodies stark and swift against pale clouds.

I lived in the living room of a house I shared with three other women. All of us were poor, but I was the poorest. A few times I traded food stamps for rent, and then I would walk down to Whole Foods or Sundance, a fancy local grocery store. Rich people get things for free, and so, as long as I didn’t look homeless, I could eat by sampling the hot soup and cheese and bits of fruit. Sometimes I stole food outright. Like the time I picked up a loaf of bread and walked out the door; or when, at a gas station, I filled a cup with cheap, sugary coffee and then walked up to the counter where I pretended I’d left my wallet at home. The clerk comped me the coffee. I knew he would. I didn’t look like a thief. I didn’t sound like a thief. But I was.

. . .

It was 2009. The world was still reeling in the wake of the 2008 market crash, a fact that meant very little to me except that suddenly I found myself at twenty-five, a recent college graduate and Army veteran, in the unemployment building, sitting next to women who had advanced degrees in things like marketing and chemistry. I occasionally peeked over at other women’s computer screens to see what sort of jobs they were applying to and realized with a sense of doom that we were all aiming at the same secretarial positions.

I didn’t come from poverty. Both of my parents were the first in their families to go to college—and both eventually became professors. Dad had earned a PhD in intellectual history from Harvard back in the ’60s. Mom would eventually earn a PhD, too, though later, after long stints wiping baby bottoms and working part-time gigs to help make ends meet. No, we weren’t poor. We were idealists, which might be worse. It meant that financial and practical realities always took a back seat to the grand internal work of thinking.

The mortgage was a nuisance. Clothing, cleaning, and the clock were distractions from the lofty, atemporal thought plane. Although my parents never explicitly said so, we grew up thinking that most conventions of normal, civilized life were a little beneath us. And so my younger brother, Henry, and I were almost never on time for school. We showed up fifteen minutes late, disheveled, our homework half done and crumpled at the bottom of our backpacks.

I’m not sure any of our teachers or classmates got the memo about our superiority. My parents must have kept that secret pretty well guarded. All of which is some part of the reason that, in 2009, it didn’t bother me very much to find myself wearing the same unwashed blue sweater day after day. And though I didn’t like the feeling of precarity that came from unemployment, a part of it felt right to me. I remember sitting on a bench outside Whole Foods watching paying customers cross over the threshold into the warm, plant-filled, lavender-scented interior. From the smell of wet pavement outside to bright citrus and organic bathing salts inside. Order, beauty, health. And I thought, if one of these dumb jerks would just accidentally drop a twenty-dollar bill, they’d never notice, but it would change my whole life. No one did. I just sat there in my grime and self-pity, feeling morally superior to all the pleasantly dressed working folk who had their eyes on the last bag of organic cotton candy grapes.

. . .

I had lost my job as a barista after showing up drunk to work one morning. Or was it because I slept with my boss’s brother? Or maybe it was because I wasn’t actually a very good barista.

I really did want to do a good job. I’m pretty sure I gave it everything I had. But apparently what I had wasn’t much. Even when I tried to do everything right, I always seemed to mix up the almond and oat milk or forget to write something down or leave a bagel in the oven too long. One day, long before I got fired, I came in from taking out the trash, and my boss looked at me and said, I get the feeling you want to be somewhere else. It’s like you’re always dreaming. I stared at her for a minute before saying something rambling and confused about how much I did want the job.

And I did. It sucked, frankly, to try to do a simple job and fail. I wanted to whip out fancy drinks and have appropriately brief chats with customers. But too often I seemed to startle awake from a dream. My boss would catch me staring at the weird pattern of light reflecting off the display case. Or she’d sigh and look pointedly at the clock because I took twice as long as anyone else to sweep the front room. And I was always surprised to look up and realize that I had been sweeping somewhat artfully, with large, lovely swooping motions that were almost useless for gathering up crumbs.

So when she fired me, I suppose it should not have been surprising. And yet it was. A lot surprised me back then. I did not see what I didn’t want to see and then was shocked when the unseen somehow, unjustly, forced itself into view.

It was that way with Will. Before the blue sweater took up a more permanent residence on my torso, before I lost the job at the coffee shop, I had a sometimes-boyfriend. Thirteen years older than I, Will was a little ashamed of me and a little in love with me, while I was completely and insanely devoted to him. He was a playwright and taught at a little private college and had me over to his apartment and toasted bread for me in his oven and talked about Dante and Kierkegaard. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d crawl out of his bed and lie on the cold linoleum floor and watch the watery moonlight make strange and desperate patterns through tree branches against his wall, and I felt something like kinship with either the branches or the light, I didn’t know which.

Will was athletic and wide-shouldered. He looked more natural on a basketball court than in front of a classroom. He was sweaty and unsure and tried to cover up what he didn’t know with questions or charm. But I didn’t like to see that. What I liked instead was how much he liked me. I also preferred not to think about what it might mean that I was consistently attracted to older, professor-type men. I didn’t like to think about that at all.

Once, we biked along the Willamette River at night to a little pub, where we ate calamari and drank too much pale beer. And then, later, back in the summer night, he pulled me off the path toward the riverbank and kissed me and said it was like kissing strawberries and cream. It seemed like a terribly romantic thing to say, even though I kept picturing him trying to kiss a bowl of whipped cream and how messy it would be with cream up his nose, and I wasn’t sure I liked to be compared to that kind of thing.

It was spring and then summer, and so I often walked the mile or so to his apartment. When I left the Army some two years earlier, I had been given a flask that I carried in my purse as I walked. I took little sips of screwdriver as I kicked pebbles and let the wind between my knees and looked around at brightly flowered yards and old stonework and painted doors and broken sidewalks with bordering tufts of grass and sometimes birds and the rare blue sky open overhead. Walking and looking around were two of my favorite things. And drinking.

I’m not sure how conscious I was of needing something to drink in order to be around Will. But I almost always drank before seeing him and insisted that we drink when we were together. It did not seem possible to me to be both attracted to someone and sober around him. Sobriety and vulnerability seemed an acid mix, the sort of thing that leads to skin peeling off. That was the feeling of it. But with just a little gin behind my eye, I could hide all that naked skin.

There was something about the solidity of Will’s frame and the essential goodness I sensed underneath his fear. Something like the kinship I felt with either branch or moon. Or somehow both. And it was that, perhaps, that I hoped he could sense in me too.

The other thing, besides sex and booze and literature and philosophy and the vague sense that our relationship was a little taboo, was that he, like me, was a Christian.

Read the rest of the first chapter

Heralded as a Southern Gothic masterpiece, Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro plunges readers into the forested borderland between Georgia and Alabama, a place where the line between divine revelation and insanity isn’t always clear. Quatro’s cast of characters includes the Prophet, a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions; Michael, a desperate teenager wearing zip ties around her wrists the first time the Prophet spots her; and a devil who dances around the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin. In her review for the New York Times, Melissa Broder wrote: “Just as the Prophet makes art out of detritus, Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter—sexual abuse, terminal disease, mental illness, poverty, suicide and American decay—into transcendent beauty. … [She] wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world.” Here below, Quatro tells us about three books that shaped her own vision.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury is my favorite Faulkner novel, though Faulkner himself called it his “most splendid failure.” He said that he tried to tell the truth of Caddy’s tragic story four times and failed four times. I’ve always wondered what might have happened had Faulkner gone ahead and written from Caddy’s point of view. And I decided to scaffold my novel using The Sound and the Fury as a guide. The Prophet’s section would be like Benjy’s, amorphous and visionary, moving in and out of various time frames and steeped in a singular way of seeing the world. Michael’s section would be like Quentin’s, narrated in first person and taking place all on one day. And the devil’s section would be like Jason’s, one long rant. I let the scaffolding fall away once I realized I didn’t need a fourth “Dilsey” section. The novel began to take its own shape from there.

Ezekiel
The biblical book of Ezekiel, with its prophecies of God’s majesty and judgment and apocalyptic images, was particularly important to Two-Step Devil. The Prophet is especially taken with the image of the wheels within wheels in Ezekiel chapter 1. He’s had his own visions of glow-in-the-dark “spinning circles” for his entire life; once he reads the Book of Ezekiel, he finally realizes what those circles are.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I’ve always been enchanted by the “Russian gentleman of a particular kind” who shows up in The Brothers Karamazov when Ivan is suffering an attack of brain fever. The gentleman appears stylish at first blush, but closer inspection reveals that his clothes are outdated. “There was every appearance of gentility on straitened means.” The gentleman-devil, who punctuates his speech with French, insists he has been much maligned. He loves humans. He wishes to become one of them, perhaps in the form of “some merchant’s wife weighing two hundred fifty pounds. … My ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith. …” Alas, he is consigned to negation; he is the indispensable minus—without his adversarial presence, humanity would be one long boring church service, “holy but tedious.” My dancing devil wears cowboy boots and a bolo tie and smirks: “No God without God’s opposite. No heaven without hell. I oppose you to give you the chance to live forever. … True, the myth of Satan is finished. But when the giants dissipate, the windmills stand.” Ivan first denies his gentleman’s existence and then finally hurls a cup of tea at him—as Luther flung his inkwell, and as my Prophet flings his guitar. Adapted from an essay about the many depictions of demons that inspired Two-Step Devil at Lit Hub.

Jamie Quatro is the author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize; Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Times Literary Supplement; and Two-Step Devil. Quatro’s fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Maison Dora Maar, and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Read more: “Ezekiel Machine,” an excerpt from Two-Step Devil, in Harper’s Magazine

Mark your calendar! Join us here on Substack at 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, October 13, for a conversation with Kathleen Kilcup and Spencer Reece celebrating the release of Kathleen’s debut memoir, Between the Light and Me: A Memoir of Beauty and Violence. The two poets, both of whom have written memoirs, will talk about the entanglement of beauty and violence, hungering for God, and how grace finds us in unlikely places.

You're Invited

Kathleen Kilcup spent five years serving in the US Army as a Russian linguist. She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and an MA in religion and arts from Yale. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tin House, Image, Salon, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She writes The Mess on Substack and lives with her family in Oklahoma City.

Fr. Spencer Reece’s debut collection of poetry, The Clerk's Tale, was selected by Louise Glück for the Bakeless Prize. His second, The Road to Emmaus, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Foundation. He is an Episcopal priest and has served in Honduras, Spain, and the US. He currently serves a parish in Wickford, Rhode Island.

“I genuinely believe our only site of solidarity is that we will all die.” —John West in conversation with Zach Seward, director of AI Initiatives at the New York Times, at last week’s NYC launch of The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in our Digital Age.

Join us TONIGHT on Substack at 7 p.m. Eastern for a conversation with Cait West and Lourdes Torres celebrating the paperback release of Cait’s memoir Rift. They’ll discuss what it’s really like to grow up as tradwives-in-training, the rising influence of patriarchal Christianity in US politics, the work of building personal intuition after high-control religion, and more.

Cait West is a writer, editor, and survivor advocate working to spread awareness about the harms of religious patriarchy and authoritarianism. She was featured in the documentary For Our Daughters, and her work has been published in The Revealer, Fourth Genre, Hawaiʻi Pacific Review, Newsweek, and elsewhere. Follow her at caitwest.com. She lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Lourdes Torres supports fellow survivors of abuse on their journeys to connect with their inner wisdom and operate from a deep sense of authenticity. In addition to value-alignment guidance, she offers courses on intuitive tarot and the ancient healing arts. Learn more here. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Here Below ICYMI

Described by one fan as The Artist’s Way for people with busy lives, Spiritual Direction for Writers by Charlotte Donlon offers practical rituals and gentle companionship for writers from all backgrounds: “People of deep faith and profound doubt. Those who write every day and those who write in stolen moments. Published authors and private journalers. This is a sanctuary, not a system—a space where your creative identity isn’t measured by output but nourished by attention.” Donlon reminds her readers that “all of life is the writing life.” And in this first installment of The Books Behind the Book, she shares three books that influenced her work as a writer, spiritual director, and spiritual director for writers.

Beloved by Toni Morrison
I was a sophomore in college when I first read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and I’ve reread it at least a couple dozen times since then. Morrison helped me notice connections between creativity and the soul before I even knew what that might mean. One way to grow in both areas is to move toward more freedom, which Morrison defines this way in Beloved: “to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.” While writing Spiritual Direction for Writers, I kept stacks of her fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and essays nearby. I kept an audiobook of Morrison reading Beloved closest.

Still Writing by Dani Shapiro
In between bites of pie at my last MFA residency, a friend suggested I read Still Writing by Dani Shapiro. And it was the perfect post-grad book recommendation. Within weeks of returning home, my writing practice had found new footing thanks to Shapiro’s sophisticated and expansive approach to the writing life that allows plenty of room for the whole self. This book was one of the lights along my path to becoming a spiritual director who works with writers.

The Carrying by Ada Limón
Several years ago, one of my first spiritual direction clients told me to skip the prayer at the end of our session because she wasn’t sure if she believed in God. I asked if I could read a poem instead, and when she agreed, I grabbed my copy of Ada Limón’s The Carrying and flipped to “Sacred Objects.” This prose poem about an encounter at a gas station became a perfect benediction for that client. And it was a key lesson that shaped both my own creative practice and my work with clients: the divine doesn’t need belief to show up in our lives bearing the gift of revelation.

Charlotte Donlon helps people explore themes of belonging through art and faith. Her essays have been featured in publications such as The Washington Post, The Christian Century, Image, and The Millions, among others. Spiritual Direction for Writers is her second book, and the very first from Here Below Books! Learn more at charlottedonlon.com. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Join us here on Substack at 7 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, September 29, for a conversation with Cait West and Lourdes Torres celebrating the paperback release of Cait’s memoir Rift. They’ll discuss what it’s really like to grow up as tradwives-in-training, the rising influence of patriarchal Christianity in US politics, the work of building personal intuition after high-control religion, and more.

Cait West is a writer, editor, and survivor advocate working to spread awareness about the harms of religious patriarchy and authoritarianism. She was featured in the documentary For Our Daughters, and her work has been published in The Revealer, Fourth Genre, Hawaiʻi Pacific Review, Newsweek, and elsewhere. Follow her at caitwest.com. She lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Lourdes Torres supports fellow survivors of abuse on their journeys to connect with their inner wisdom and operate from a deep sense of authenticity. In addition to value-alignment guidance, she offers courses on intuitive tarot and the ancient healing arts. Learn more here. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Annie Dillard and a Reading Life

Annie Dillard was among our most eloquent theologians, a nature writer whose real subject was often God. When she died last week, there was an outpouring of thoughtful obituaries. Among them was this lovely tribute in the Here Below inbox, one reader’s personal appreciation for the purchase Dillard gave her on life’s biggest questions. It’s also a blessing of sorts on our own work here below, one we’re happy to receive and amen. And to share with you.

Six weeks ago, I was standing in the Sistine Chapel. Two weeks later, 1,397 people died in a flood in Nepal, the result of a glacier melt attributed to global warming. Thousands are still missing. A year before that, Tatiana Schlossberg—thirty-five, a mother of two children under three, a runner—died of a rare blood cancer. The weather outside today is perfect.

I can’t hold it all in my head, the power and the glory alongside heedless destruction and violence. If you let yourself think about it, even for a minute, it’s too much—and yet, is there anything else worth thinking about? I’d argue not.

Annie Dillard is the one author I’ve turned to time and again because of her efforts to keep it all in view. Ever since I discovered her in college, she’s taken up permanent residence in my mind, in my soul, and on my bookshelf. (Technically only partly true: I invariably give away every copy of a Dillard book I buy.) Twenty years ago, I told someone that her book For the Time Being is what I think the Bible was supposed to be, but isn’t. I stand by that statement.

In For the Time Being she keeps turning over the notion that God knows and loves each of the 5.9 billion of us, and concludes that only a fully paradoxical view of God can make sense of it. Alongside those numbers she recounts a scene from Memoirs of a Cape Breton Doctor, in which Dr. C. Lamont MacMillan delivers a transverse-presenting baby girl who appears dead. He tries mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her for so long that he loses track of time. “I remember thinking during the last several minutes that it was hopeless. But I persisted, and I was finally rewarded when Anna MacRae of Middle River, Victoria County, came to life.”

She came to life. There was a blue baby-shaped bunch of cells between the two hands of Dr. C. Lamont MacMillan, and then there was a person who had a name and a birthday, like the rest of us. Genetically she bore precisely one of the 8.4 million possible mixes of her mother’s and father’s genes, like the rest of us. On Dec. 31, 1931, Anna MacRae came to life. How many centuries would you have to live before this—and thousands of incidents like it every day—ceased to astound you?

Like most of us, I came to Dillard through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It won a Pulitzer, deservedly so. It taught me that I’m probably never going to see a muskrat in the wild but, more importantly, it also made me feel differently. I looked differently. I breathed differently while I was reading it. It’s poetry disguised as prose, and you’ll never convince me otherwise.

I’m making this all sound very solemn. It’s not. Encounters with Chinese Writers is both very good and perhaps the premise of my favorite joke ever: Annie Dillard and Allen Ginsberg take a bunch of Chinese writers to Disneyland. Let that sink in.

I haven’t encountered a writer worth reading who isn’t essentially preoccupied on some level with the Problem of Evil. Even taking God out of it for a moment, explain to me why humans are so hell-bent on destroying ourselves and otherwise demonstrating completely batshit behaviors? You can’t, and neither could Annie Dillard. What she could do—what she still does—is hold your eyes open in front of the problem longer than anyone else. She might have even made the horror beautiful, a Guernica of print. Quoting Teilhard de Chardin in For the Time Being, she seconds, “If I should lose all faith in God, I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”

Today, I’d like to nominate Dillard as the patron saint of Here Below. Her books set the standard for the aspirations of your work: writing that defies categories, that confronts realities seen and unseen, that changes you. May her spirit, arguably animated by The Spirit, live on here.
—Jennifer Brenneman, via email from New York’s Hudson Valley on September 15, 2026

To work in book publishing is to tinker with time machines. Each book is a little transportation device—a physical artifact that takes time to create and can take each reader on their own unique journey—and the business requires that editors live months and years in the future. Today I’m wrapping up my developmental edit of a book that will pub a year from now. The project I hope to contract by the end of the month won’t hit shelves until 2029. Last month I contracted an academic book that’s not due until 2034. Just typing that date makes me feel like I’m living in a sci-fi novel.

Editors move backward in time, too, assessing what connected with readers and what didn’t, and trying to learn from both. The lessons are not always obvious! And the X factor is always time: Is what was true for last year’s frontlist going to hold for next year’s new releases? How should the past shape future strategy? If you hear me mumbling about lightning and flux capacitors and five-year plans, yes, you did.

But pub day is different; it’s an opportunity to show up fully in the moment and celebrate both what came before and what is still ahead.

After years of preparation, Here Below launched its first two books in the last two weeks: Spiritual Direction for Writers by Charlotte Donlon and The Internet Will Die, and So Will You by John West. And I want to take a moment to take it in. These are two very different books, but both Charlotte and John have poured years into their making—years of reading and writing and honing their ideas in order to share them with others. The results are impressive. Jamie Quatro called Charlotte’s book “essential.” Brian Merchant called John’s book “haunting, personal, and singular.”

Both books have gorgeous covers masterminded by our art director, Heather Brewer, and made wonderfully tactile by our head of production, Alexander Bukovietski. The cover for Spiritual Direction for Writers is printed on a luxe textured cardstock. The feel was so important to us that when the printer made the initial print run on the wrong stock, we insisted they reprint before fulfilling preorders and stocking bookstores. We regretted the delay, but we thought the enhanced reading experience was worth it.

I loved Erin Jia’s illustration for the cover of The Internet Will Die, and So Will You from its earliest drafts. And still it was a delicious surprise to get my first finished copy, slip off the dust jacket, and discover that we’d embossed the title on the hardcover beneath. The last time I’d experienced that delight was when I received my contributor copy of The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad and slipped off the dust jacket to find a colorful composition notebook underneath. Here Below is here for this kind of beautiful analog media.

I was at our company HQ in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last week. And on Thursday—John West’s pub date—I pulled both his and Charlotte’s books off the bookshelf in the lobby where we display recent releases. The publishing equivalent of touching grass. And I confess that I found myself verklempt when I noticed that someone had already stamped LIBRARY COPY on both books. Meaning, this is the copy we are going to keep in our company’s archive of all the books we’ve published, and there will be more. Here was the present—and also the hoped-for future. The work of so many hands in my hands. All of us over here just tinkering with time machines.

Thanks for reading,

P.S. In addition to publishing our first books, Here Below published our first original essay here on Substack last week, Emily Bernard on grief, creativity, and the Tarot’s Fool: “Standing outside the orderly procession of the Major Arcana, The Fool waits at the threshold, not yet committed to the story but destined to enter it. Once inside, The Fool can appear anywhere. That is the point. Beginning is not an event but a condition.”

John West, author of The Internet Will Die, and So Will You, was interviewed by Elizabeth Taylor of the National Book Critics Circle at last weekend’s Printers Row Literary Festival in Chicago.

New and Forthcoming from Here Below

The Fool

by Emily Bernard

In the summer of 2021, my husband, our two daughters, and I traveled to Jamaica for vacation. I think of Jamaica as a sister island to Trinidad, where my father was born and raised. The two are not so much alike as related: daughters of the same sea, shaped by colonialism and African survival strategies, including improvisation, faith, and the particular genius each has employed in the making of culture from catastrophe.

The catastrophe of colonial rule as well as natural catastrophes, like extreme inclement weather. Hurricanes, for instance. In the summer of 2021, Jamaica experienced two significant tropical events, two “acts of God.” Hurricane Elsa passed just north of Jamaica in early July. In August, while there with my family, Tropical Storm Grace crossed the island, hailing down wind and rain, ruining crops, damaging various man-made structures, and corrupting power sources.

The vacation was also a working retreat for me. I had traveled to Jamaica with an assignment: a series of daily reflections and prayers for a book called God in Us. The commission asked me to draw upon the lectionary and to make scripture speak in the present tense. I had come to the island to write about the divine presence within ordinary human life, about God not as a distant ruler stationed above us but as a force already housed in the body, the breath, the imagination, and the human capacity to love.

At first, the assignment intimidated me. I was accustomed to writing essays, lectures, criticism, memoir. A homily seemed to belong to another order of language, sanctioned by training I did not possess and an authority I did not claim. I worried that I did not know enough scripture, that I lacked the necessary vocabulary, that I was trespassing in territory reserved for ministers and theologians.

But the pastor at my church helped me prepare. He lent me several volumes that he consulted when composing his own sermons, and I found the exchange delicious. I began to imagine the two of us as fellow writers, practitioners of the Word, each facing the same old and impossible task: to take language inherited across centuries and make it speak again in the present tense. I was not pretending to be a minister. I was beginning to recognize that writing itself had always been a kind of ministry for me.

Once I began, the work came easily. The scriptures I needed were already inside me. I had, in fact, been paying attention all those Sundays. Stories I could not have formally summarized rose to meet me when I needed them. I discovered verses lodged in my memory. To my great surprise, I knew the Bible better than I realized.

The divine word was not something I had to import into myself from a distant source. It had been entering me for years through repetition, music, ritual, boredom, longing, grief, and attention. Scripture had accumulated in me almost without my knowledge. Writing the homilies was not simply an act of research. It was an act of retrieval.

For one entry, I composed this prayer:

In a culture driven by the promise of newer, better, and easier, let us remain faithful to the eternal truths embodied in the lessons of the cross. Teach us to cherish our trials as opportunities for growth and regard our sacrifices as occasions to remember all that Jesus endured in order to fulfill His destiny on earth.

Reading those words now, I hear the person I was before I weathered a second hurricane—my older brother’s disappearance and suicide. Before that disaster, I believed that difficulty could become instruction, that sacrifice might contain meaning, that suffering could be transformed rather than merely endured. I was writing toward a truth that Fr. Richard Rohr would later help me name: sometimes we fall upward. Sometimes the loss of the life we imagined becomes the beginning of another life, one formed less by achievement than by surrender, humility, and a deeper capacity to receive.

But grief has made me more cautious about the language of lessons. I no longer believe that every trial arrives as an opportunity, or that suffering is bestowed upon us for the sake of our improvement. My brother did not die so that I might grow. His death cannot be justified by the person I became afterward. To say otherwise would be to turn catastrophe into a transaction and James into an instrument of my spiritual education.

I know what his death is not. What it is, I am genuinely unsure. I feel adrift between safe islands of assumptions about what anything means anymore. Like The Fool of the Tarot, I find myself embarking upon a new journey, one without guarantees.

Still, the prayer contains something I continue to believe. Suffering may not possess an inherent meaning, but meaning can be made in its aftermath. A fall may not be ordained, but the fallen person may yet discover another direction. The cross does not make agony beautiful. It declares that agony is not the end of the story.

• • •

We had been warned about Tropical Storm Grace. Friends and family worried over our safety up until the moment we boarded the plane. But we are Americans, though all four of us arrived from different ports. To be an American is to assume lights will go on the moment you flip a switch. We expect and enjoy the harnessing of wild things, like electricity. We assume nature itself will bend to our will because we have so often found a way to contain it.

I hardly ever think of myself as an American except when I have made a mistake that, in hindsight, appears to me to have been a result of hubris, naiveté, shortsightedness, or unprocessed emotion. These are among the qualities my father identified as quintessentially American. I am his child, and I usually agreed with him, even when I did not want him to know that.

How foolish it was to travel to Jamaica during the swell of a hurricane, I thought, watching the waves gather speed and force from behind the glass doors of our vacation rental home. While my family slept, I watched the water approach the outdoor furniture, creeping up the back steps that trailed right into the ocean. What can I do now?

I made a promise to myself: if the waters got so many feet closer, traveling at the same velocity, I would rouse the children and alert my husband. Run! I would command. We would never outrun the water, but we could show God we were serious about staying alive.

I plotted out the last moments of our lives with an eerie interior calm. I accept my fate, I thought. I accept my mistake. And if this is how it ends, well, it could be worse, I considered. Because the roiling sea was extraordinary. I could see in its thick waves the angry debate unfolding between it and the moon, whose spotlight accentuated the storm’s drama. It was fascinating, terrifying, and real. This is life, I thought. This could very well be death, too.

I thought then, and think now, of the hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston understood that weather is never merely background. The hurricane is atmosphere, plot, theology, history, and judgment at once. Before it arrives, the people on the muck continue to entertain the old human fantasies: that money can purchase exemption, that strength can guarantee survival, that race and class can establish a reliable order of value, that experience has taught us what the world will do next. Then the wind returns with such force that light itself goes out. The people sit together in darkness, reduced and enlarged by their helplessness. Their eyes are watching God because there is nowhere else to look.

The storm does not generate equality; Hurston is too wise for that consolation. Human hierarchies return as soon as the water recedes. But for a terrible interval, the storm exposes those hierarchies as inventions. The lake moves. Animals know before people do. Earth becomes water, shelter becomes trap, and the human body loses its special exemption from nature. The world does not end. It ceases to honor the categories by which people believed they had mastered it.

That is what the storm in Jamaica offered me in miniature. The glass door appeared solid until the water made it seem theoretical. The moon, wind, and waves held their furious conference while I sat inside performing the arithmetic of escape. Nature does not become meaningful because it obeys us. It becomes meaningful when our obedience to reality begins.

• • •

I return to Jamaica now in my mind because memory is an artist of arrangement. It places one event beside another until a pattern appears. Memory shows me the woman behind the glass doors, awake while everyone else sleeps, watching danger approach and calculating the moment when she will have to call out. It shows me another woman two years later, waiting for her brother to return to himself, trying to determine how close the water has come, when to wake the family, when to run, when to accept that no human being can outrun the sea.

For a long time, my brother and I lived inside the weather of his disappearance. There were moments when he was physically absent, moments when he returned, and moments when his body was present but some essential part of him appeared to have gone elsewhere. I waited. I sat on a porch and watched for him to appear. I imagined his figure turning a corner, stepping out of a car, coming toward me with an explanation that would calm the seas inside. Faith can make a fool of a person. It can keep her on the porch long after reason has gone inside. But the one thing The Fool has in spades is faith.

The Fool is not really the first card in the Tarot. Strictly speaking, The Fool is not part of the sequence at all. The card has no number. Or rather, it has every number. Standing outside the orderly procession of the Major Arcana, The Fool waits at the threshold, not yet committed to the story but destined to enter it. Once inside, The Fool can appear anywhere. That is the point. Beginning is not an event but a condition. We begin every morning. We begin every sentence. We begin again after love, after failure, after grief. The Fool is less a character than a way of moving through the world.

I began to study the Tarot in the wake of James’s disappearance. It became a way of searching for him when I didn’t know where to look, of listening to him long after we had stopped communicating effectively. I could not ask the cards where he was, or when he would return, or how his story would end. But I could sit before them and practice another kind of attention. Their images gave form to what ordinary language could not hold. Through them, I remained in conversation with the part of my brother that had taught me to distrust the borders of the visible world.

Like other gifts of mercy in my life, the Tarot was a gift from James. He was a devotee of the I Ching and other alternate ways of knowing and approaching life, systems that did not insist that reason was the only reliable instrument for finding one’s way. James understood that a question might be answered through symbol, pattern, chance, intuition, or an image whose meaning changed according to the hour in which it appeared.

I have begun to think of the Tarot as an alternate theology. Not an anti-theology, and not a repudiation of scripture, but another language for mystery: a portable cosmology in which contradiction is expected, wandering is sacred, and no life is excluded from the story. Its figures do not demand purity before they agree to speak to us. The cards receive the frightened, the queer, the grieving, the skeptical, the estranged, and the devout. They do not ask first whether we are worthy. They ask where we are.

An alternate theology does not have to overthrow an older one. It may begin by opening a door the older theology has closed. It may restore mystery to someone who has been handed judgment in God’s name. It may say: You remain inside the sacred story. Your life contains symbols. Your body is not an error. Your journey has not been disqualified.

The Fool is the natural patron of such a theology because The Fool has no rank. In the Tarot of Marseilles, The Fool can speak with everyone: kings and commoners, popes and peasants, the powerful and the doomed. The Fool belongs nowhere in particular and therefore belongs everywhere. The Fool carries little and has room to receive. A small animal nips or paws at the traveler’s legs, either warning The Fool away from danger or urging the journey forward. Perhaps it is doing both. Every true warning contains an invitation. Every invitation carries danger.

Fr. Rohr provides Christian language for the same paradox in Falling Upward. We imagine spiritual progress as ascent: becoming wiser, safer, more accomplished, more certain. Rohr proposes that the deeper journey often begins with falling—with failure, humiliation, grief, the collapse of an identity that once seemed necessary. We do not rise by avoiding descent. We fall into a larger life.

Catastrophe can destroy without redeeming. But falling can strip us of the illusion that our knowledge, virtue, or achievement will keep us from the human condition. My brother’s death returned me, unwillingly, to beginner’s mind. It taught me how little I knew about him, about marriage, friendship, work, love, identity, and the self I had mistaken for solid ground. I became a novice again. The Fool.

Beginner’s mind is not ignorance. It is the discipline of approaching experience before deciding what it means. The longer I write, the less expertise interests me as a pose. Every essay begins with not knowing. The first sentence is not a declaration of mastery but an admission of need. Certainty closes the door too quickly. Curiosity keeps it open.

• • •

The tightrope is a governing metaphor in my writing life. I think of Philippe Petit, the poet of the wire, making a straight line out of air between the Twin Towers. He carries no cushion and accepts no net. Every step is an act of authorship, of worship, of the Self. He is the master of his fate not because he controls the wind or conquers gravity, but because he understands that balance is not stasis. Balance is motion: the body tipping and correcting, surrendering and resisting, losing its center and finding it again.

From the ground, the wire appears fixed, almost serene. From the wire, there is no serenity. There is the tremor in the cable, the pressure of wind against the body, the minute redistribution of weight through the foot, the long balancing pole dipping and rising in response to forces invisible to everyone below. Balance is not a destination Petit reaches. It is a series of negotiations. He survives because he is receptive to change.

This is what life has taught me, though I spent much of my life longing for equilibrium as if it were a permanent address. I wanted the marriage settled, the children safe, the work recognized, the family whole. I wanted to arrive at balance and remain there. But there is no remaining. Balance is temporary, not a status but a working toward. We are not sculptures. We are bodies in weather.

Petit is alive to the risk of life and the danger of death. He greets them both proudly, brother and sister, each giving meaning to the other. Faith is not the belief that one cannot fall. Faith is the willingness to take the next step while knowing that one can.

Experience is what happens to the body after it has learned that the ground may disappear. It is caution that has entered the muscles. It is fear transformed into a manner of walking. My brother’s death gave me such a gait. It did not leave me standing on firmer ground. It taught me there was no firm ground.

To revise is to shift the balancing pole. A word moves from one side of the sentence to the other. A paragraph leans too heavily on explanation and must be counterweighted by image. A scene threatens to collapse under the burden of meaning, so the writer lightens it with humor. The body knows before the intellect does when the line is wrong. Something wobbles. The writer stops, breathes, and corrects.

Balance is a practice. The writer must learn to live inside instability, to proceed without proof, to trust the line as she walks it.

• • •

The writer and The Fool share the same gift: receptivity. The Fool keeps walking before there is proof. The writer keeps writing before there is meaning. The Fool waits on the porch because love has not yet exhausted its faith. And when the wire short-circuits—when falling becomes unavoidable—The Fool discovers that descent, too, may be part of the journey.

Not because every fall is blessed but because life continues to ask something of the one who survives: another breath, another sentence, another adjustment of weight. The next step does not redeem the loss. It testifies that the walker remains alive.

The Fool stands between earth and air, carrying water in the body and fire in the spirit. The Fool does not conquer the elements. The Fool enters into relation with them. Like Petit, The Fool survives not by achieving dominion but by practicing attention. That may be my deepest definition of balance: not control, but conversation. It’s a theology that guides me now.

The body converses with the wire. The wire converses with the wind. The writer converses with language. The living converse with the dead. Neither side remains stable, but each keeps the other alive.

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book, Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, won the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Bernard has published work in The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Harper’s, Oxford American, and O, the Oprah Magazine, among other publications.

9/10 – Asheville, NC: Charlotte Donlon at Nurturing the Creative Life: A Workshop

9/12 – Birmingham, AL: Charlotte Donlon at the Alabama Writers Cooperative Annual Conference

9/13 – Chicago, IL: John West at the 2026 Printers Row Lit Fest

9/15 – Montgomery, AL: Charlotte Donlon in conversation with Alabama Poet Laureate Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble at NewSouth Bookstore

9/15 –Kingston, NY: John West at the Night School Reading Series at Rough Draft Bar and Books