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Anna Gazmarian is the outreach coordinator for The Sun. Her debut memoir, Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in April 2024. She lives and writes in Durham, North Carolina. You can follow her on Twitter: @anna_gazmarian.
As someone who grew up in Southern Baptist and nondenominational churches, I felt seen when I read Virgie Townsend’s work. “Heavenly Bodies” is an excerpt from her debut short-story chapbook, Because We Were Christian Girls. . . . Virgie’s stories capture the complexities of growing up in a strict religious setting, while also showing the friendships and nostalgia that can come from those communities.
When I first read the essay Kate Vieira sent us, “All-American” [May 2023], I fell in love with how she invites readers into a subculture that I previously knew nothing about. I’ve never been someone who cares for cheerleading, but the universality of this coming-of-age piece struck a chord with me. . . . During our interview, we bonded over the messiness of memoir and motherhood.
Our interview this month with Jaclyn A. Siegel [“The Strong, Silent Type,” by Sam Risak] focuses on masculinity and male body image, and part of that discussion addresses muscle dysmorphia that is characterized by an obsessive focus on muscularity and associated with weight lifting. But there’s an aspect of weight training that can be beneficial to everyone. The writer Casey Johnston has been advocating that idea for several years, after discovering that picking up heavy things in deliberate ways could improve her quality of life. In the past year her newsletter, She’s a Beast, has become popular enough (23,000 subscribers) to land her a book deal about her experiences with weight lifting.
Although I still identify as a Christian, I am endlessly unpacking and discarding the church teachings of my childhood. My belief in God is no longer built on the fear of what will happen to me after I die.
February 2023Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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