What is Good Testaments?
Good Testaments is a Substack both for and about memoir — central to which is an interest in the experience of recovering from religious identity.
I want to evoke and reimagine the word testament, which is so often understood in the religious context. Still like a true believer, I hold that a testament is a sacred object, a memorial, a stone, which, when witnessed and believed, holds the power to transform.
And good because I want to reimagine and live out what goodness means to me, beyond the dichotomies, ideologies, mythologies, and histories of the church. Good because I still want to experience something like the divine, but I want to define what that relationship looks like on my own terms.
I think that all writers, but especially those who tackle memoir, show up to the page because they want to brush up against the divine: they are trying and hopefully able to understand, reclaim, and take back some power in their story. In doing this, they also take up one of the most difficult tasks in writing, which is trying to tell the truth according to their memories using their best moral compass, pressing through every emotion, from shame, wonder, heartbreak, and joy.
And I want to call this task, in it of itself, good. I want to call this work of this creation and re-creation good.
Views are my own
The views that are expressed in my blog are my own and not those of any organization with which I am or have been affiliated.
It’s free and it will be free
Even though Substack is a great place for writers to monetize their work, I have no intention to accept, and currently am not accepting, any form of patronage or sponsorship.
A bit about the author
Lauren is a writer and poet whose current work mainly explores and processes religious trauma.
Her writing has been published in DreamPop, The Mark Literary Review, Full House Literary Magazine, and Textual Cultures. She earned an MA in English from Georgetown University in 2019, where she was a Lannan Poetry Fellow in 2018.
From 2017 - 2019, she was the Project Manager for Connected Academics at Georgetown University, an MLA/Mellon Foundation grant that supported graduate students in the humanities in their efforts to explore work beyond the professoriate.
She currently works in public health communications and is based in Washington D.C.
