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. The diary of a death wish . . . Suicide Blonde doles out some bitter, valuable lessons.--- New Yorker Steinke: In my generation, most women were cut off from their mothers. In part because our mothers had lead lives that were limited because of what was possible for women at the time they came of age, and what was possible for my generation was more. And we resented our mothers for accepting limitations. I see this as wrong now, of course. I just read my mother’s journals—she has been dead for five years—and in one way they are the sad writings of a divorced women who blamed her problems on everyone else, but in another important way they are like The Handmaid’s Tale, a story of a woman beaten down by patriarchy.

Rail: It’s so great you mentioned your daughter, because I was so interested in the passage in Suicide Blonde where Madam Pig asks Jesse “who told you that you have to do what you don’t want? [...] Your mother?” I don’t have a daughter, but I’ve been obsessed with the idea of having one for a few years now, and I am obsessed with writing about my own mother and her family. The motif of a complicated mother-daughter relationship is so common in literature written by women. It is empowering in the way that writing about female companionship is, in that it creates a semi-separate world where women are exerting such tremendous influence on each other and supporting each other against a greater (usually patriarchal) force or pulling each other down further. Why do you think we write so intensely about these semi-separate worlds and our relationships with our mothers and other women?Steinke teaches creative writing at Princeton University, the American University of Paris, and in the graduate programs at New School University and Columbia University. She previously taught at the University of Mississippi, where she was a writer-in-residence, and at Barnard College. Steinke lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the investigative journalist Michael Hudson, and her daught Darcey Steinke is the daughter of a Lutheran minister. She grew up in upstate New York; Connecticut; Philadelphia; and Roanoke, Virginia. She is a graduate of Cave Spring High School, Goucher College, and the University of Virginia, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. She also completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts". EMP Museum. Archived from the original on November 17, 2011 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. Rail: I do think love could save us a lot of problems in our current political climate—but I’m going to throw a Jesse at you here and say, “even love has limits.” This might be totally separate from the sort of love you’re talking about but do you agree with Jesse when she says that the story of Adam and Eve “has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that human relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough?” 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 most powerful member and opinion-leader of the congregation, Mulhoffer -- a well-to-do furniture tycoon and lover of the TV advertising that made his fortune -- wants the church to become a TV ministry and open health spas and such to serve the members. To paraphrase him: people who don't watch enough TV are troublemakers.

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 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. Evolutionary biology traces the emotive face from a time before language and links it to the growing complexity of our early social groups. The better early humans were at conveying feelings, the more successful they were at the co-operations that pushed civilization forward. Some scientists have suggested that homo-sapiens greater facility for facial expression is what allowed us to overtake the less facially dexterous Neanderthals. RADICAL BODIES: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955—1972 By Kaitlyn A. Kramer a b Metcalf, Stephen (February 8, 2005). "The God Disillusion". The New York Times . Retrieved July 14, 2012.I can imagine you (reading these words) into being”: The documenta 14 Reader By Thyrza Nichols Goodeve Sandy uses her childhood stuffed animals and the flying horses and unicorns in her fantasy novels to cope with the trauma of her kidnapping. As she becomes increasingly unhinged, these characters come to life. They are as real as her kidnapper. As real as Jesus. Sandy’s ordeal is brutal. Or said another way, it is realistic. The violence is not gratuitous or titillating. It is devastating.

Our first introduction to Sandy is through a sermon by Ginger’s father. “Her mother says she has a dreamy side, that she collects stuffed animals, reads fantasy novels where horses fly and fairy princesses wear gowns made from flowers.” To Ginger’s father, Sandy is Christ-like, and the community must accept its complicity in her abduction. Everyone must “come to terms with the evil that resides within us.” Needless to say, the customers in his church are not entertained. Rail: I remember last year there was a celebration at The New School for Toni Morrison where different actors, singers, musicians, and artists were performing readings or songs inspired by her work. I noticed that a lot of the performances were actually of sex scenes and I was so amazed because while they were so physical and descriptive and clear they were also so spiritual and beautiful—they weren’t pornographic or disturbing in the least. That, for me, as a writer and a woman, was so inspiring.

"When I look at masked people my brain still feels like its malfunctioning."

DS: Yes, but I also sometimes feel very nostalgic for the years when my father was in a parish. We lived in the rectory. We played in the church, and when we wanted to talk to our father, we could just run upstairs to his office. Eventually, after I turned eight, he trained to become a chaplain and didn’t have a church again after that. But those years before are romantic and sentimentalized in my memory now. 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. Also, I wear a hijab so I definitely think twice about writing anything that is particularly descriptive about any part of my body that I don’t show in certain public settings, but even for men or women who don’t wear hijab, I don’t know how I feel (morally/Islamically) about describing or talking about sex or bodies in a way that can—to put it simply, turn people on. “Is that Islamically appropriate, to test people’s hearts that way?” that’s the question I always ask myself. In the Islamic tradition, any sex outside of marriage is considered a sin. So when I say “test people’s hearts,” I really mean “make life harder for people who are not happily married by showing them how great sex and physical intimacy can be?” I do not think sex in itself is shameful—certainly not the desire for it, since one of the greatest gifts God promises the people of heaven in the Islamic tradition is sex and companionship—and a lot of other pleasures that are purely physical. But as a Muslim, I have come to think of the pursuit of pleasures outside of a set of guidelines as sinful. I know that different Christians have different ideas about the pursuit of pleasure (sex or otherwise) both within and without sets of guidelines, but what grounds you personally? Hand, Elizabeth (April 17, 2007). "Raw God, Tiny Nun". The Village Voice. Archived from the original on June 18, 2012 . Retrieved July 15, 2012.