Steinke has a diabolical grasp of the willfulness of decadence, the ambiguity of sexuality, and the transmutability of identity. . . . [ Suicide Blonde is an] electrifying tale with the ambience of a Warhol or John Waters film. Edgy and powerful stuff.--- Booklist

The book is filled with imagery of decomposition, decay and decline: of cancer, of the South, of America, of religion, of death -- everything seems to be rotting in humid, fetid confines. Moral bankruptcy is blanketed in hypocritical religious and corporate righteousness. Just before I lost consciousness last September, my young surgeon, Dr. Katsuura, came in to join his team in his gown, cap and mask. His eyes were the last thing I saw before I went under. My doctor’s mask, standard surgical wear, also seemed like part of the uniform of a metaphysical astronaut, one positioned between my body and its pain, even its mortality. Last summer, when it was released, I read Flash Count Diary in a kind of ecstatic fury, and by the time I’d finished it, I wanted to hand-deliver a copy to every person I know. As I noted in my reflection on the book, reading it made me feel as if I’d spent the day “watching words explode like fireworks inside my own head.” Steinke’s intimate and honest interrogation of her own faith and spirituality, her relationship with her body and the larger world, and her creative drive and process tore me open in exactly the way the best art does. I couldn’t wait to speak with Steinke directly about the book’s foundations and creation. There is no point to religion; there is only faith. I do think faith is helpful. Believing in things that are impossible can be good for you. It can be bad for you too, of course. But a religious outlook is not magic fairy dust, it’s actually doing with less of a grid. Doubt is what fuels faith. I read a lot of theology and always have new religious ideas. At least new to me. And at the moment I am interested in animals, how they are alive but so separate from us. And how the mystery of what their inner lives could be like is so mysterious and beautiful. You can contemplate it like you do Melville’s whale, or the Christian cross. It’s endless and void-like and deep. I also really like the idea of getting away from capitalist or social value when it comes to meaning. Even traditional religious values. This is why people write stories to try to figure out where there is a saturation of feeling that makes meaning. True meaning for them as individuals not culturally or religiously ordained meaning. You might find this in weird places. Not where you think. This is why narrative is so exciting, it’s the place where some odd friendship is more meaningful than a long term marriage or a dead bird you see splayed in the street means more than the words of Mohammad or Jesus. It’s the locus of the real. Jesse is young in Suicide Blonde, but you were also very young when you wrote it, so do you think there are times for exploration and experimenta- tion, and that there is a sliding set of guidelines that come to form as you grow as a person in a complex relationship with religion and parents and different cities or settings?

What a brutal, beautiful book. I was tempted to lend my copy to my pastor because it so finely captures the part where the church decides that what they really need is to hire a band and stop all that depressing sin talk. Then I thought twice about giving this book to my pastor, as it is about horrible, unspeakable things. Image:It strikes me as we’re talking about this that being freed from the rigidity of doctrine and leaning into, as you’re saying, the unknown might also shape the form your writing takes. The form of Flash Count Diary is not linear or traditional. DS: Apophatic theology, or negative theology—seeing God through darkness—has always been the theology in which I’ve been the most comfortable. This is the theology of St. John of the Cross, which considers God through what cannot be known about God. As I said earlier, my dad has been a chaplain for thirty years, and his model of ministering to dying people has been formative to me. It’s a model that says you should minister to the dying with respect to their fears about the unknowns of death. You shouldn’t tell them that everything’s going to be okay; instead, you should listen to their anger and their sorrow. That’s been a strong influence on where my faith is centered. Unknowing is the best way to approach the problem of God. I just think there’s so much spiritual energy in doubt. I can’t believe that anyone gets behind spiritual certainty, actually. That kind of certainty seems so dangerous to me. It goes so wrong when people believe they are sure about what God wants. Dismantling the things you think you know about God and yourself and other people seems to me a better way to be theologically engaged. To question your beliefs. To question what you think you know about the way God moves in the world. For me the only way I can have a relationship with divinity is through the unknown, through mystery. If your idea of divinity is leaning into the mystery, you’re more likely to find grace in a variety of places. In my fiction I have tried to make traditionally ugly places beautiful and filled with grace—garbage dumps, malls. I’ve always had that impulse to try to see things not the way the world sees them, but to see the spark of movement and divinity in what is considered to be darkness, ugliness. That makes the most spiritual sense to me. With my own daughter, I have worked hard to make things more straight forward. I want to support what she wants, not force my agenda and longings on to her. She understands marriage is not a way to make a living, that she will have to figure out how to make her own way in the world. Of course, I am in a much more privileged position than my own mother was. There was a desperation in my mother’s hope for me, which I tried to capture in Suicide Blonde. I think she meant it as helpful but her vision of the world, as one in which women need men to survive economically, terrified me as it still does. I was raised to be half a person, a human that would complete a man. I raised Abbie to be a whole person right out of the gate. Steinke blends and explores the obsessions of her characters fearlessly, painting a vivid and terrifying portrait of Southern life in the 1990s; hers is a contemporary update of the classical southern Gothic novel. She references much pop cultural detritis on her sweeping canvas: everything from TV talk shows to the infamous Polaroid found in a parking lot showing bound-and-duct-taped abductee Tara Calico (although she does not mention Calico by name).

Hand, Elizabeth (April 17, 2007). "Raw God, Tiny Nun". The Village Voice. Archived from the original on June 18, 2012 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. Steinke, Darcey (June 3, 2014). "Meeting Kurt Cobain: One Writer's Story, 20 Years Later". Vogue . Retrieved February 25, 2020.

a b c "Darcey Steinke". The Media Briefing. Archived from the original on February 4, 2013 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. I do think love is the key when it comes to religion, not judgment or morals. I had this dream recently, and although I could not remember any details when I woke, the line “Lead With Love” was left with me. And I do think that’s true. Right now we need to practice radical hospitality and radical love, in all aspects of our lives. This means accepting the strange in ourselves as well as welcoming the stranger. I love how James Joyce describes God: “A shout in the street.”

Darcey Steinke: I identify with what you’re asking in this question. As a clergy child, you’ve seen your father preaching in the pulpit, but have also heard his complaints, so you can’t just throw yourself into the community of the church and think that it is some perfect holy thing. Image: There’s a closeness to the church for clergy children that breeds both familiarity and an inclination to question, I hear you saying. Since that time, I, myself, experienced a divorce and I saw how, by hard emotional work, it can be ok not just for the children of divorce, but for the partners as well. I mean divorce, as hard as it is, is not a problem, it’s actually a solution to a problem. So I don’t agree with Jesse anymore on this. I think divorce can lead to growth and healing, not only calcified pain. I mean everyone is always coming apart but everyone is also always coming together. Contributor Steinke: I suffer from matrophobia, the fear of turning into my mother. I used to think this was because of the kind of person my mother was or the choices she made, but now I see it more as the place my mother was in history and how history worked itself out through her body and her life. She had much less opportunity than I did. She got pregnant with me and felt she had to marry. My father left her when she was forty-five. She wanted more for herself, but did not know how to get that more. Much of this plays out in the mother daughter dyad. I think the mother-daughter relationship has really yet to be mined narratively honestly. It’s more alive, raw, and brutal than we usually see. Someone like Elena Ferrante has a hold of this.

a b Metcalf, Stephen (February 8, 2005). "The God Disillusion". The New York Times . Retrieved July 14, 2012.

If you come to this novel after reading other of Steinke's work, as I have, it'll seem like pretty tame stuff. This is not a criticism, as this is a very fine novel, but Up Through the Water is a sea change from some of Steinke's other novels, such as Suicide Blonde and Jesus Saves, gut-wrenching works awash in suffering and salvation. It’s a good question “what’s wrong with turning someone on?” On the one hand, I feel a sense of responsibility not to make sex “public,” so that sex isn’t “everywhere.” It is the age old question I think of causality—do more books about sex or drugs or suicide make those things more public and prevalent, or do they just expose the reality of the society we live in? But I do believe that making sex outside of marriage or drugs or violence (not that they are equal) common in writing has some effect (I don’t know how large) on making people more open to it, and as a Muslim, if I consider these things sinful, then am I contributing to the spread of these things in the culture I live in? In any case, this is a novel about summer love on Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks of NC--well, it's more than that, but that's the drift. In some ways it's a dual-directed work, a coming-of-age story of two teenagers (Eddie and Lila), and a having-come-of-age story of Eddie's mother and her two lovers at the time of the novel (there are many in the past). The focus, not surprisingly, is on desire and the ways that people strive to keep it alive (and under control, so that it doesn't push toward destruction) in their lives. Not a problem for the youngsters, at least in keeping it alive, more so for the adults. The novel swirls around the various pairs, as they navigate through summer days and nights, intersecting for a while and then swinging apart.This is a reenvisioned, fresh look at Agnes Martin, the enigmatic, influential, highly independent painter whose life and work have proved inspirational to audiences across many fields and disciplines. Accompanied by color reproductions of works by Martin, Agnes Martin: Independence of Mind presents a series of essays by living artists and writers commissioned especially for this volume. Contributors include artists Martha Tuttle, Jennie C. Jones and James Sterling Pitt, as well as authors Teju Cole, Bethany Hindmarsh, Darcey Steinke and Jenn Shapland. These contributors write about Martin's influence on their creative lives and work, and offer new interpretations that defy stereotyped notions about Martin's life. Longer essays are mixed with shorter, more anecdotal texts by a wider selection of artists. For those concerned about the title, be aware that this novel -- which I find to be a grand achievement in fiction -- has other things in mind; it's an ambitious examination of contemporary America... Steinke's writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Review, Vogue, Spin Magazine, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and The Guardian. [15] Teaching [ edit ]