Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.adrianshirk.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-shirk-01425459/ * http://www.counterpointpress.com/authors/adrian-shirk/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017026407 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017026407 |
| HEADING: | Shirk, Adrian |
| 000 | 00503nz a2200121n 450 |
| 001 | 10446018 |
| 005 | 20170508134416.0 |
| 008 | 170508n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017026407 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Shirk, Adrian |
| 670 | __ |a And your daughters shall prophesy, 2017: |b CIP t.p. (Adrian Shirk) |
| 670 | __ |a Atlantic website, May 8, 2017 |b (Adrian Shirk is a writer and radio producer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Modern Farmer, Wilder Quarterly, and on Wyoming Public Radio) |
PERSONAL
Born 1988; married; husband’s name Sweeny.
EDUCATION:University of Wyoming, Pratt Institute, B.F.A., 2011, M.F.A., 2014.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Essayist, writer, teacher. Catapult, columnist; University of Wyoming, Laramie, graduate assistant instructor, 2012-13; Wilder Quarterly, assistant editor, 2011-14; WNYC Radio, production assistant, 2014-15; Wyoming Public Radio, cultural affairs producer, 2014; Pratt Institute’s B.F.A. Creative Writing Program, adjunct assistant professor, 2014-, internship coordinator, 2016–.
WRITINGS
Contributor of essays and columns to periodicals, including the Atlantic.
SIDELIGHTS
Raised in Portland, Oregon, essayist, columnist, and writer Adrian Shirk has published her debut book, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion, a hybrid memoir highlighting notable women in religious movements throughout history. Shirk is a columnist at Catapult, and writes essays and articles for various publications, including The Atlantic. As a teacher, she is adjunct assistant professor in the B.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Pratt Institute at the University of Wyoming where she teaches writing, English, and women’s studies. She also wrote and produced for radio stations WNYC and Wyoming Public Radio.
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy combines a memoir of Shirk’s travels around the United States on a spiritual journey looking for religious enlightenment, with historical research and commentary on remarkable women who have made inroads into religious doctrine, such as Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, and Marie Laveau, New Orleans voodoo priestess. Shirk also writes about lesser known women, such as Nadia Bolz-Weber, founder of House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. Shirk also weaves in personal experiences like her brother’s mental illness and observations on feminism and family relations. However, “the narrative is too autobiographical and scattered to fully deliver on that promise,” according to a writer in Kirkus Reviews. The writer added: “Some nuggets of insight are overwhelmed by a rambling, unavailing narrative.” On the other hand, Booklist reviewer Joan Curbow delighted in the variety of subjects as well as Shirk’s commentary and essays saying: “the panoply of writing also serves as a memoir of Shirk’s life and thought.”
Other famous women in the book include former slave Sojourner Truth and her travels speaking about optimism and the Holy Spirit; Aimee Semple McPherson and her Pentecostal faith healing, and Eliza Snow, a Mormon leader and one of Joseph Smith’s many wives. In an interview with Lorraine Savage online at Publishers Weekly, Shirk explained that as she researched many historical and current women she would piece together an essay about them, then realized after a year that she had enough material she could collect in the book. She added that women have not historically been able to influence religion as much as men, saying: “Women have not had the opportunity to shape religious practice or discourse in the public sphere, which is to say the actual church-official work of debating, ecumenical council, preaching, and becoming ministers. This has changed profoundly since the ’70s.”
According to Psychology Today writer Ariel Gore, “Immersed in the feminist literary tradition of personal-sociological hybridity, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy—at once spiritual biography and autobiography—explores connections between mental illness and religious opening, and highlights the American legacy of secular-religious alliances for social justice.” In a review in Publishers Weekly, a writer commented that in her stirring vignettes, “Shirk writes with sincerity as she calmly details events, observations, and conjectures.”
Writing in the New Yorker, Elisa Gonzalez said: “These accounts are brief, vivid portraits of women in the ‘spiritual avant-garde,’ and although Shirk struggles to unify these threads, her wide-ranging curiosity delights.” A reviewer online at the Diagram commented: “Shirk’s book is a tender, nuanced search not just for reliable biography, but for a depth of gaze into what those women did, felt, and thought.” The reviewer added: “The material is rich and perhaps because its connections run deep, moments of individual excellence can feel not yet fully webbed in.” Writing on the Sojourners website, Courtney Hall Lee remarked that Shirk’s book “is refreshing and compelling in both its unique structure and earnest voice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Joan Curbow, review of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion, p. 3.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy.
New Yorker, October 23, 2017, Elisa Gonzalez, review of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, p. 97.
Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2017, review of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, p. 59.
ONLINE
Diagram, http://thediagram.com/ (April 1, 2018), review of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy.
Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ (August 22, 2017), Ariel Gore, author interview.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (August 11, 2017), Lorraine Savage, “Girl Higher Power,” author interview.
Sojourners, https://sojo.net/magazine/ (February 1, 2018), Courtney Hall Lee, review of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy.
Adrian Shirk
Writer Essays &c. Instructor
Adrian Shirk is an American essayist and memoirist (b. 1988). She is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Counterpoint Press), a hybrid-memoir exploring American women prophets, named an NPR Best Book of 2017. Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She’s a columnist at Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, among others. Currently, she teaches in Pratt Institute’s BFA Creative Writing Program, and lives on the border of the Bronx and Yonkers with her husband, Sweeney, and Quentin the cat
Adrian Shirk
Adrian Shirk
Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute University of Wyoming
Brooklyn, New York 211 211 connections
Adrian Shirk is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Counterpoint Press, 2017), a hybrid-memoir exploring American women prophets and religion on the edge. Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She’s a columnist at Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, among others, and she has produced radio stories for Wyoming Public Media and Pop Up Archive. She teaches women’s studies, English, and creative writing at Pratt Institute, and lives on the border of the Bronx and Yonkers with her husband, Sweeney, and Quentin the cat.
Experience
Pratt Institute
Internship Coordinator, BFA Writing Program
Company Name Pratt Institute
Dates Employed Jan 2016 – Present Employment Duration 2 yrs 3 mos
Location Brooklyn, NY
I assist a highly-skilled student community of writers with all of their internship interests and needs. This includes one-on-one advisement, professional development tutorials, teaching, curating panels, and facilitating connections between current students and industry leaders and culture-makers.
Pratt Institute
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Company Name Pratt Institute
Dates Employed Aug 2014 – Present Employment Duration 3 yrs 8 mos
Location Brooklyn, NY
Courses taught:
Bad Girls in Music, Art & Literature
Senior Studio
Junior Studio
Writers in the Workplace
Internship Seminar
Intro to Literary and Critical Studies I
Intro to Literary and Critical Studies II
WNYC Radio
Production Assistant
Company Name WNYC Radio
Dates Employed Sep 2014 – Feb 2015 Employment Duration 6 mos
Wrote and produced live interviews with authors, artists, directors, musicians, actors, and others for The Leonard Lopate Show. Assisted in booking guests.
Wyoming Public Radio
Cultural Affairs Producer
Company Name Wyoming Public Radio
Dates Employed Jan 2014 – Jun 2014 Employment Duration 6 mos
Location Laramie, Wyoming
Edited and produced first-person oral history narratives for broadcast and web; Pitched, researched, wrote, voiced, produced, interviewed for and mixed one-minute spots for broadcast and web; Wrote headlines, host copy and introductions; Produced member testimonial promos; Booked guests; Voiced underwriting credits
Wilder Quarterly
Assistant Editor
Company Name Wilder Quarterly
Dates Employed Jun 2011 – Jan 2014 Employment Duration 2 yrs 8 mos
Location New York City
Pitched, developed, interviewed, and wrote stories for print, as well as Wilder blog content; Conducted story research and fact-checking for the editorial team; Responsible for material and photo acquisition; Booked interviews and photo shoots; Performed manuscript review; Coordinated with contributors
University of Wyoming
Graduate Assistant Instructor
Company Name University of Wyoming
Dates Employed Aug 2012 – Dec 2013 Employment Duration 1 yr 5 mos
Location Laramie, Wyoming
Courses taught:
Freshman English
Intro to American Studies
Education
University of Wyoming
University of Wyoming
Degree Name Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Field Of Study Creative Writing
Dates attended or expected graduation 2012 – 2014
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Degree Name Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA)
Field Of Study Writing for Publication, Performance and Media
Dates attended or expected graduation 2007 – 2011
Skills & Endorsements
Editing
See 15 endorsements for Editing 15
Endorsed by Rebecca Golden and 1 other who is highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 4 of Adrian’s colleagues at Pratt Institute
Writing
See 7 endorsements for Writing 7
Endorsed by 3 of Adrian’s colleagues at Pratt Institute
Research
See 7 endorsements for Research 7
Endorsed by Harry Whitlock, who is highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 5 of Adrian’s colleagues at University of Wyoming
Accomplishments
Adrian has 1 language 1
Language
French
Interests
University of Wyoming
University of Wyoming
51,262 followers
University of Wyoming
University of Wyoming
45,953 followers
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
48,512 followers
WNYC Radio
WNYC Radio
6,542 followers
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
55,610 followers
Adrian Shirk
Adrian Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She’s a columnist at Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic and other publications. She has produced radio stories for Wyoming Public Media and Pop Up Archive, and she holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Currently, she teaches women’s studies and creative writing at Pratt Institute. She lives on the border of the Bronx and Yonkers with her husband, Christopher Sweeney, and Quentin the cat.
She is the author of:
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion
Girl Higher Power: PW Talks with Adrian Shirk
By Lorraine Savage | Aug 11, 2017
In And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Counterpoint, Aug.), Shirk profiles several American female spiritual figures, including Mary Baker Eddy and Sojourner Truth.
How did you choose your subjects?
The way that I chose a lot of the figures was haphazard and idiosyncratic because I did not know I was writing a book for quite a while. Every few months I would encounter a new figure by either reading, or talking to someone, or being in a class, and I would piece together an essay about the figure. After about a year, I looked at what I had and thought, oh, I have a collection of all these pieces, and what would happen if I tried to put them together? What resonances would I find?
What made you want to write about this topic?
The people I write about in the book are all radically different. There was this hope that pluralism and diving into the diversity of traditions can give—not a sense of “all of these religions are the same”—but rather that they try to identify common concerns, goals, and interests.
Did you have a favorite?
When I went to New Orleans to do research on Marie Laveau, something happened. Her life, her religious practice, the degree to which she was steeped in and defined by legend—she was basically ungraspable. I didn’t realize it until I was there that Marie Laveau the person was this graphical pastiche of stories and legends and religious practices. There was something about that trip that embodied this thing that I had been interested in within this project and that defined all of these different characters I had written about.
Do you think women have more influence over religious practice today than in the past??
Women have not had the opportunity to shape religious practice or discourse in the public sphere, which is to say the actual church-official work of debating, ecumenical council, preaching, and becoming ministers. This has changed profoundly since the ’70s.
Is there someone doing this work that you admire?
Nadia Bolz-Weber [founder of House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colo.]. She leads this huge congregation. She’s theologically orthodox. Here’s a woman who defies and breaks the barriers of all the types of people who have been left out of religious leadership, and yet she’s positioned as a religious leader.
A version of this article appeared in the 08/14/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Girl Higher Power
Shirk , Adrian: AND YOUR DAUGHTERS SHALL PROPHESY
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Shirk , Adrian AND YOUR DAUGHTERS SHALL PROPHESY Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 8, 22 ISBN: 978-1-61902-953-8
Women on the fringes of the spiritual world.In her first book, Shirk (Women's Studies, English, and Creative Writing/Pratt Institute) seeks to examine why American women have "had to find their own ways [to divinity] outside the prescribed patriarchal orders," but the narrative is too autobiographical and scattered to fully deliver on that promise. The author, whose eccentric family has roots in both the early Anabaptist movement and the Christian Science church, weaves her own journey of spiritual discovery throughout the book. Tied only to the edges of faith traditions, her journey leaves her mostly without answers. "If I have learned anything," she notes, "it's that the truth shifts. The modes by which to interrogate it must always change, and are always changing." Each chapter revolves erratically around a central theme. In some cases, those themes fit her thesis well--e.g., explorations of early Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and New Orleans voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. In some cases, the tie is more tenuous, as in her chapter on Sojourner Truth, in which Shirk compares Truth to her own grandmother. A chapter on Flannery O'Connor is obscured by a focus on New York City, and other chapters have little apparent bearing on the subject matter. In one chapter, the author spends pages on the subject of smoking, and another focuses on her brother's mental illness. Feminism, family relations, and other similar subjects come into play, but the digressions serve only to pull readers away from the author's main subject, and the occasional profanity sprinkled throughout seems forced. Rather than a book about women who have acted as spiritual leaders, this is a story about the author and her own search for identity. Some nuggets of insight are overwhelmed by a rambling, unavailing narrative.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 6 3/22/18, 9:08 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
"Shirk , Adrian: AND YOUR DAUGHTERS SHALL PROPHESY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427794 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c566ca8c. Accessed 22 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427794
2 of 6 3/22/18, 9:08 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy:
Stories from the Byways of American
Women and Religion
Joan Curbow
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p3. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion.
By Adrian Shirk.
Aug. 2017. 272p. Counterpoint, $26 (9781619029538). 277.30092.
Shirk's collection of essays focuses on wellknown female religious figures like Aimee Semple McPherson, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, and the lesser- known Marie Laveau, a voodoo priestess, and Eliza Snow, one of Joseph Smith's wives and a Mormon leader in her own right. A thoughtful essay on the writer Flannery O'Connor is one of numer ous other delights found here. A book with such a wide range of subjects might be written by numerous authors, but Shirk authors this collection solo, occasionally adopting different styles and voices--even occasionally tapping into a quasi stream of consciousness. Shirk's own religious background ranges from family who are staunchly antireligious to her (many) mainstream religious experiences. Just when readers think they know what to expect, Shirk adds a nonreligious essay about the feminist takeover of a New York building in the 1970s. Readers could pick and choose essays, but they would be doing themselves a disservice, as the panoply of writing also serves as a memoir of Shirk's life and thought.--Joan Curbow
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Curbow, Joan. "And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American
Women and Religion." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 3. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862613/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=85597521. Accessed 22 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862613
3 of 6 3/22/18, 9:08 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy
Publishers Weekly.
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p59. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy
Adrian Shirk. Counterpoint, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-1-61902-953-8
Essayist and columnist Shirk embarks on a quest to discover the diversity of American women's spirituality across the centuries. A mix of travelogue, memoir, and spiritual journey, this eclectic collection of essays, remembrances, anecdotes, and histories reveals Shirk's desire to "overthrow the monopoly of the pulpit" in order to highlight the contributions of women philosophers, writers, and spiritual leaders who have inspired her. Traveling across the country, Shirk writes about Mary Baker Eddy's founding of Christian Science, Flannery O'Connor's Catholic beliefs, Linda Goodman's mix of astrology and religious doctrine, Aimee Semple McPherson's Pentecostal faith healing, Eliza Snow's writing on the role of women in the Mormon church, and Sojourner Truth's optimism and belief in the Holy Spirit. Shirk travels to New Orleans to research the life of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, visits the Lily Dale Spiritualism colony to commune with the departed, and attends a Lakotayuwipi healing ceremony. Shirk writes with sincerity as she calmly details events, observations, and conjectures. In these stirring vignettes, she mixes historical accounts, interpretations, and fictionalized encounters to provide insight into her personal journey tracing the steps of American women who have sought out an alternative spirituality. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 59. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720721/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=bbcd2e7f. Accessed 22 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720721
4 of 6 3/22/18, 9:08 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Briefly Noted
Elisa Gonzalez
The New Yorker.
93.33 (Oct. 23, 2017): p97. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, by Adrian Shirk (Counterpoint). In this memoir, the author chronicles her relentless quest for religious fulfillment, which leads her from a voodoo shrine in Louisiana to a Presbyterian church in Brooklyn. Along the way, Shirk explores her troubled family history, in which faith crops up as a "perplexing recessive gene." The book doubles as a catalogue of America's "divergent prophetesses," such as Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, the astrologer Linda Goodman, and the silver-tongued evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who faked her own kidnapping to spend five weeks with her lover. These accounts are brief, vivid portraits of women in the "spiritual avant-garde," and although Shirk struggles to unify these threads, her wide-ranging curiosity delights.
The Dream Colony, by Walter Hopps, with Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran (Bloomsbury). Culled from interviews with the subject, this compilation offers an amiable portrait of the influential gallerist, curator, and museum director. Hopps's analyses of artists' work, including that of friends such as Frank Stella and Edward Kienholz are enlivened by personal anecdotes: Jay DeFeo, who spent eight years on her sculptural masterpiece, "The Rose," which weighed more than a ton and was layered nearly a foot thick with paint, is distraught when it is removed from her apartment, while Robert Rauschenberg restlessly paints over finished works-even if they are already in someone's collection. The book takes us on an intimate tour through fifty years of American art history.
Be My Wolff, by Emma Richler (Knopf). At the center of this linguistically and structurally complex novel are two siblings, one of whom is adopted, who are deeply in love. Rachel and Zachariah, both Russian, share parents and a mania for boxing. Rachel is a scholar of the sport; Zach is a frustrated fighter, benched by a clot in his brain. The couple invent a lengthy story about a boxer named Sam the Russian, which is written to create a lineage for Zach, an orphan. The novel, while long-winded, finds its stride in the quiet moments between Rachel and Zachariah, particularly when they reflect on the world they've built with their love, even as it shatters the lives of those around them.
Modern Gods, by Nick Laird (Viking). This roving, ambitious novel follows two sisters from Northern Island. When Alison, who has never left Ulster, discovers her husband's past as a
5 of 6 3/22/18, 9:08 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Loyalist terrorist, she finds herself lost in a moral labyrinth. Meanwhile, Liz, her anthropologist sister, travels to a remote fictional island in the Southeast Pacific, called New Ulster, to study an enigmatic cult. Laird, who grew up during the Troubles, is well acquainted with the gods and ghosts that populate Northern Ireland. The book can be overly didactic about the role myth plays in all human societies, but the taut prose propels the story and describes the process by which people "make a future by entering into ethical relations with the past."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gonzalez, Elisa. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 23 Oct. 2017, p. 97. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513041774/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=bb98484c. Accessed 22 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513041774
6 of 6 3/22/18, 9:08 PM
Briefly Noted
“And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy,” “The Dream Colony,” “Be My Wolff,” and “Modern Gods.”
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, by Adrian Shirk (Counterpoint). In this memoir, the author chronicles her relentless quest for religious fulfillment, which leads her from a voodoo shrine in Louisiana to a Presbyterian church in Brooklyn. Along the way, Shirk explores her troubled family history, in which faith crops up as a “perplexing recessive gene.” The book doubles as a catalogue of America’s “divergent prophetesses,” such as Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, the astrologer Linda Goodman, and the silver-tongued evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who faked her own kidnapping to spend five weeks with her lover. These accounts are brief, vivid portraits of women in the “spiritual avant-garde,” and although Shirk struggles to unify these threads, her wide-ranging curiosity delights.
At one point in Adrian Shirk's debut book, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, a nonfiction collection mixing memoir with the overlooked lives and contributions of American women of religion, the author mentions how the novelist Tom Robbins once lifted a passage written by her Aunt Robin and inserted it into one of his own novels. The passage in question is a cocktail list, both versions of which Shirk includes (Aunt Robin's version is better). Near the end of the chapter, Shirk writes of her aunt's struggle with mental illness and the "deeper, quieter fear about the particular kind of isolation I saw in her, the paralysis of a mystical impulse, creativity overtaxed by frenzy. Is this what happens when you know too much?"
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is both concerned with what we know too much of —the age-old stories of patriarchal systems stifling the contributions and achievements of American female mystics, religious leaders, and thinkers—and with what we know too little of. Shirk's book is a tender, nuanced search not just for reliable biography, but for a depth of gaze into what those women did, felt, and thought. As Shirk writes of Maggie and Kate Fox, sisters central to the spread of Spiritualism but whose communications with ghosts were determined to be a hoax, "Veracity has little to do with it."
In some of the book's finest essays—on Aimee Semple McPherson, pioneer of the megachurch, Marie Laveau, "the ostensible founder of American Voudou", and more unexpected subjects such as Flannery O'Connor and the aforementioned Aunt Robin—the stories of these women trace to the present day and reverberate in Shirk's own life. At the crux of Shirk's explorations is, as with many religious experiences, a sense of expectation. "I'm waiting, as I always am," she writes in her chapter on McPherson, "for a religious feminist to say that the moral framework of Christianity fundamentally compels her to support women, to dismantle the patriarchy as Christ did." She's looking for that intersection where "feminism became a spiritual journey of presence and transcendence both."
The material is rich and perhaps because its connections run deep, moments of individual excellence can feel not yet fully webbed in. In an essay on Sojourner Truth, for example, Shirk parses the different ramifications of a phrase Truth used in a famed 1851 speech. Did she say "Ain't I a woman?" or "Aren't I a woman?" The difference is a crucial one, having everything to do with appropriation, and so relates back to, for example, Tom Robbins' plagiarism or Shirk's own complicated feelings towards a second wave feminist takeover of a New York City building in the early 1970s. Shirk, a subtle, sharp writer, knows these connections exist, yet at times it feels as if the book's structure—its adherence to the alternation of memoir and biography—does not allow these connections to peal out as fully as they want to.
Why then choose to write this book in part as memoir? The subtitle—"Stories from the byways of American women and religion"—gives some clue. If these are stories of figures overlooked in one way or another, Shirk's chronicle of her own spiritual search within her family, as well as the stories about that family that can or can't be told, serves as both an alternative and a parallel to the untold or mistold stories that came before. This is not to say that Shirk does anything so forward as position herself in the same role as these prophets, leaders, and spiritualists, but the detailing of her own inquiries—her movements through faith and her attempt to balance a "moral Christian framework" with an intersectional feminism—gains significance as an act that is both redress and revelation. [TM]http://thediagram.com/17_5/rev_shirk.html
Where the Spirit Calls
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion, by Adrian Shirk. Counterpoint Press.
By Courtney Hall Lee February 2018
Print
I RECENTLY attended a conference at Princeton Theological Seminary called “Telling Our Stories: Breaking the Mold, Taking Risks, Paving the Way.” Immersing myself in a group of women of faith remembering their trailblazing predecessors and sharing their faith journeys was particularly synchronistic as I was reading Adrian Shirk’s well-received volume And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion.
Shirk’s work is refreshing and compelling in both its unique structure and earnest voice. The book is a delightful hybrid of creative, narrative chapters featuring a diverse array of historical women intertwined with Shirk’s own spiritual memoir. In both instances, Shirk captures a voice that is insightful, sharp, and unlike anyone else’s I’ve read.
Read the Full Article
You've reached the end of our free magazine preview. For full digital access to Sojourners articles for as little as $2.95, please subscribe now. Your subscription allows us to pay authors fairly for their terrific work!
Subscribe Now!
Already a subscriber? Login
Related Articles
The Persistence of Patriarchy
Trail Markers of Doubt
Spiritual Gifts Are Not Bound by Prejudice
✖
s it Time to Bring Back Mysticism?
Adrian Shirk's new book explores spiritualism, diagnosis & avant-garde agitation
Posted Aug 22, 2017
Is social justice ready to get reacquainted with religion? What can Mary Baker Eddy, Marie Laveau, Sojourner Truth, and Linda Goodman teach us about how to live a full life now? Ariel Gore talks to Adrian Shirk about civil rights, mental illness, and radical communion.
Adrian Shirk
Source: Adrian Shirk
Adrian Shirk is one of the great millennial thinkers. Her new book, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion, offers both history and inspiration for finding new ways forward via the spiritual quest.
Immersed in the feminist literary tradition of personal-sociological hybridity, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy—at once spiritual biography and autobiography—explores connections between mental illness and religious opening, and highlights the American legacy of secular-religious alliances for social justice.
Ariel Gore: You begin And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy with a thought-provoking chapter on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. And here you bring together so many of the themes the entire book explores: Women in religion, family, physical illness, and mental illness.
In looking specifically at your brother’s schizophrenia diagnoses, you write, "For most of my adult life, the lines drawn around that illness and my brother seemed too simplistic, or didn’t seem to illuminate the complicated guy I knew, whose entire life couldn’t, as far as I was concerned, be described away in a sweep of psychosis. Where was the margin of error? Where was agency? And where did it all fit into the larger ecology of our family? And what . . . what was illness anyway?”
Can you talk more about your view of the link between mysticism and mental health/mental illness?
Adrian Shirk: Mary Baker Eddy was such an important figure for the sense-making of this book. Her biography and her religion really helped me to articulate some of the most essential questions I began with but could not quite say.
Hers wasn't the first essay I wrote, and even when I did begin it, she didn't immediately light the way for me. I had to return to this essay over and over again for, literally, years, and tease out new stuff each time. I mean, that's just a writing truism I guess—it wasn't until very late in the process that I realized what a compass Eddy had been.
She helped me knit together a lot of things, like you say: what was going on culturally and spiritually in America in the late 19th century, the role of pathologizing Victorian women and the way that new theologies offered a way out of that paradigm, the role of (perceived or real, or both) madness and marginalization as a pathway to connecting with God or a god.
The 19th century was so chock full of over-diagnosis, of gaslighting and criminalizing women's absolutely reasonable responses to the chaos of modern life, and the censure and stripping away of meaning in women's lives—for white women, at least. Here Mary Baker Eddy was saying, Don't worry! You might feel crazy, you might feel sick, but you're not! It's all an illusion! Of course, women of color in America were, still are, under-diagnosed, and under medicated, and under-considered. So there's this shadow side to Eddy's theology, too, just like there's a shadow side to the new age healing paradigm I grew up in which puts the onus on the afflicted.
I wouldn't draw any direct or concrete connection between mental illness and mystical experience, as there are as many varieties of illness as there are of "wellness," but I did see lots of patterns in the lives of the prophetesses I wrote about, lots of places where madness, or things associated with it, entered into the making of their religions.
All those Spiritualist teenagers on stage speaking in trance lectures, Marie Laveau conducting the energies of spirits in real time, the intergalactic communication of Linda Goodman, the depressive anxiety of young Aimee Semple McPherson and her near-manic Pentecostal ministry later which, when you look at her CV, makes it look like she never slept. I don't think these acts or abilities necessarily portend illness, it's just that they mimic what we associate illness with—and if we grant that, then, yes, there's this possibility I present that illness can also be a kind of pourousness, an openness, an information download, a mirroring of the world. It is not just that; it is not always that; it is maybe not that at all. But it is a question I open. Sometimes the way we look at illness, or the way the world asked me to look at my brother's diagnosis, felt reductive. Not wrong, just flattening.
And then, yes, Eddy also helped me find my way into my family's story, and into my own, and into the reasons why it was worth considering my own spiritual autobiography alongside the spiritual biographies of these other women. By comparing (kind of) my ancestor's Christian Science and the liberal humanism I grew up with, I was taking a, perhaps, more obviously problematic ideology under consideration while also problematizing liberal humanism, its "limits" in understanding the supernatural or the mystical, and its limits, too, in terms of the aiding and abetting of a kind of relativism that seems benign at first, but which can get in the way of articulating a really robust ethics.
Ariel Gore: Right now it’s so refreshing to read about the religious left, and about feminist spiritual questing across the religions. Why do you think the left so often shies away from talking about faith as a life-guiding, and sometimes politics-guiding, part of life?
Adrian Shirk: I think because fundamentalism has for so long been the most vocal, most visible, manifestation of religious life and thought—in America and elsewhere—the left, the progressive religious, have been scared to align themselves with a theological view of the world lest they get lopped in with the hateful crazies. Sorry for the pejorative use of 'crazy' there, but it's what comes to mind.
It's so terrible, though, that this has been the case—because this distancing, the sloughing off of religion as a source of ethics, justice, resistance, has allowed for fundamentalism to continue to grow louder, to monopolize religious thought and discourse.
There have been times, of course, where the religious left has done amazing work! I think of things like the Sanctuary movement in the late '70s and early '80s, where there was this glorious secular-religious alliance between churches (many reservation churches, and many in border towns) to provide refuge for victims escaping (mostly American-fueled) conflicts and coups in Central America. I think of the profoundly spiritual resistance movement of Standing Rock.
I think of the Civil Rights movement, King's movement, whose religious underpinnings are often stripped away or sanitized when we retell its history, but there, too, is this amazing moment of secular-religious alliance for social justice. And of course there's the role of the progressive religious-secular alliance during the abolition movement, the women's rights movement in the 19th century, the fusion of those two movements in the person and ministry of Sojourner Truth. I write about this part of her legacy in the book. Not that these are perfect movements, but they model different ways in which faith has been powerfully politics-guiding, and not that long ago. So I think--because religion and mysticism has been somewhat blotted out of our cultural memories of these movements, the religious left and even the left in general, forgets that there's this tremendous history or tradition of this alliance.
Ariel Gore: You merge the personal and political, the essay and the memoir, the historical and the present, the religious and the pop-spiritual so that we’re left with the reality that these distinctions are fairly arbitrary. Can you talk about the process or decision to let the scope of this book be so vast?
Counterpoint Press
Source: Counterpoint Press
Adrian Shirk: I'm always left wondering how many choices I made at all, that were conscious at least. I actually agonized a lot over its genre and over my un-fitness as a historian or theologian or whatever other disciplines I dragged into this with me. But at some point, late in the process, it seemed that the book was at least allowed to be as messy and wide-reaching as the actual history of American women's religion-making. The scope is as big as it felt to me. The vastness was incidental. I did not design the book, it felt quite out of control, still does in a way—I just followed my nose, trailed after the figures that left me feeling rattled in a good way, and I drew on whatever resources were readily available. So, for instance, Eliza Snow came up in a class I was taking, and I followed her toward that Mother in Heaven revelation with the guidance of two amazing professors (Eliza's revelation, not mine!). I met someone who grew up in Lily Dale, and so I stopped off there on my way back to Wyoming. I found myself in Western Massachusetts, near a town where I knew Sojourner Truth used to live and work, and though I wasn't sure what the hell I was going to tell about her, I just showed up. I heard something about Aimee Semple McPherson on the radio and was riveted by her story, and checked out every book on her in my university library.
I had no idea if I could make sense of all of these things living together in a single book, but like with any project, I just had to kind of trust that things would come together. A mentor of mine at one point said, "Listen, it all makes sense together in that it is all coming from the same person's mind," and it took me a long time to internalize that. But then just last year, I had a student who was working on a creative nonfiction manuscript and who was worrying over its overarching themes, or whether one essay was going to align with another, and I found myself parroting the words of my mentor—and thinking, well, I guess I believe this to be true now.
Part of what made that possible was fleshing myself out more clearly as the narrator—if what makes sense of all these things together is the fact that it's all coming out of the same mind, then it is necessary to give context to that mind. Hybridity comes out of necessity. If there is a narrator, a subject, then she is big enough to contain everything: the personal and the political, the historical and the present, the sacred and the profane.
Ariel Gore: Has your sense of women’s role in politics and religion changed in the last year? I mean, isn’t it all enough to make you an atheist?
Adrian Shirk: Haha. Less so than ever, actually. And I had an unusually swift publishing experience. I was actively writing, adding, editing right up until my manuscript delivery date (that's what they called it). And I delivered it one month after the election, with a publication date set for nine months after that (so much BIRTH-related stuff I hadn't noticed before!), so I did have a sense of the political climate into which it would be born. And when I delivered the manuscript to my publisher on November 30th, the project of spiritual questing, of women's history-making, of divine justice-seeking, felt more important than ever. It felt more important and more prescient than it had at any other time in my writing of the book. And so in this way, that is not what the book is about so much as it is where the book took me.
I was in fact so much less clear on the project's potential significance when I started. The book unfolded and wrote itself in tandem with my life, as I was living it, as the world spun—so there was so much I was getting clear about regarding religion, feminism, geo-politics as I lived, and the book charts that.
I became a teacher during these years, which felt like a warp-speed growing up experience—and I found a queer-interracial-interclass-intergenerational church in the Bronx during this time, which I hadn't even considered might exist. My father-in-law got really sick, and my husband and I became de facto caretakers/care proxies. My grandmother, who I was very close to, died suddenly. America elected a fascist. Michelle Alexander left her position at Ohio State's law school to teach and study at Union Theological Seminary in New York, not because she is religious, but because, she said, “I no longer believe we can ‘win’ justice simply by filing lawsuits, flexing our political muscles or boosting voter turnout. Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power…This is not simply a legal problem, or a political problem, or a policy problem. At its core, America’s journey from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration raises profound moral and spiritual questions about who we are, individually and collectively, who we aim to become, and what we are willing to do now.”
I name all of these experiences in particular because I could never have anticipated them, and yet this wouldn't be the book it was without all of that—I wouldn't have learned much of what I needed to learn to make sense of why thinking about women and religion mattered.
After I submitted the manuscript, one month after the election, I remember walking around in the cold to the subway on the phone with my friend, and all of this stuff about the book was clarifying to me under these conditions: the intensity of need for a radical religious communion, for alliances across the line of secular and religious, how messiness is the scourge of fascism, the avant garde the agitator of authoritarianism, especially when it comes to religion, and how these women I had just spent years writing about were avant-garde agitators in that way, even though very few of the figures considered themselves political.
And I felt very fiercely at that moment that the left needed an extremely deep renewal of its rhetoric of ethics, something that the religious left can help bring depth to, again, vis a vis the Civil Rights movement.
I mean, the right has known this all along. They've been doing this for years.
Adrian Shirk's And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is out today from Counterpoint.