The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved
Ethel Cain, God-wrestling, and the complicated art of the religious gothic
I'm in the midst of some pre-edit rewrites for my forthcoming novel Bird Suit, and I've been thinking a lot about how my relationship to religion has evolved over the course of writing a book that I've been recently describing as religious gothic. Not religious in the sense of evangelism, but religious in an exploration of faith institutions, their leaders, and their followers as complicated subjects.
At this point in both my writing practice and my spiritual formation, I'm not interested in writing a book that paints a picture of Christianity as a cure-all, ignoring the harm it continues to cause, but I'm also not interested in writing a book that paints all aspects of a particular church experience as negative.
Really, I'm not interested in the binary work of good vs. bad in my writing at all. I like characters with moral compasses covered in opaque glass. Desires and impulses that are muddy and swamp-like. Human beings do things that cause harm and create things that better the world, but these acts usually don't make them exclusively good or bad people. There are exceptions, obviously, but for the most part, we are complicated creatures.
I think that the 2021 Netflix limited series Midnight Mass does a decent job at capturing this, though religious horror and religious gothic live in slightly different spaces.
When I think of the religious gothic, I think of priests and parishioners in the thick of that mud, with the church as the site of hidden truth, both illuminating and painful. At the same time, the religious gothic adds existential stakes to its narratives: how could God allow this? What is the difference between God and His church? What does it mean for my soul and my sense of self when the church is both a place of harm and safety depending on who you are?
The American Indie Rock singer Ethel Cain is particularly skilled at building religious gothic narratives, most recently in her full-length LP Preacher’s Daughter.
The concept album follows the daughter of a Preacher living in the Southern United States as she navigates her often contradictory and confusing relationships to her father, her country, her lovers, and her God. There is sexual abuse and war and drug overdose and a journey to a certain circle of hell and, yes, a song about cannibalism, but there is also beautiful religious imagery, moments in which the character misses the church choir, and deeply moving depictions of the spiritual experience. Cain both critics and aches for her God –her album is the work of an artist whose deep understanding of the Church as an institution creates a space that is as nostalgic as it is traumatic.
I was not religious when I began writing Bird Suit in early 2019. I had grown up in a casually Anglican household whose only real connection to our community parish was my Nana being a chorister. When I was small, we attended church sporadically, then only for Midnight Mass, then not at all. I didn’t attend church again until I was 23, when my then boyfriend invited me to watch him sing in the choir at our University’s chapel. I didn’t expect the outing to impact me positively, but it did. The mass reminded me of my Nana, whose death the year before I had not taken the time to process properly.
My return to the Church was not one, definitive moment of conversion— it was slow, and confusing, and hesitant, and exactly what I needed it to be. It involved a lot of questions and doubts, nights spent wrestling with a God who I felt abandoned me through a tough childhood. I refused to hide my queerness, and found others in the Church who were queer and loved God, without any parts of them being contradictory.
My faith is an integral part of who I am now, but that slow journey towards it (a perpetual journey, with perpetual advances and doubts in equal measure) had an impact on my writing. I wrestled with God on the page, too. I began to write a more accurate book, using my newfound knowledge of scripture and liturgy, but the more I believed in God, the more questions I had, and the more questions my characters had, and the more complicated my book became.
I don’t think that every author owes the Church nuance and complication in their writing. Some authors paint Christianity as objectively and exclusively harmful, and they have every right to do that, as the Church has harmed and continues to harm people. Other authors will write a depiction of faith that is entirely positive, because their experience has been nothing but. Though I think there is a certain amount of privilege that comes with being able to depict religious institutions positively, likely because they were created for your benefit rather than your demise, I think that there is room for faith narratives that acknowledge harm while sharing experiences of redemption, transformation, and acceptance within the Church.
Bird Suit is—like I said earlier—muddy. There are religious characters who care deeply for the world and those in it, and there are religious characters who are hypocritical and cause widespread harm, and there are religious characters who want to believe, but don’t know how, and there are characters who aren’t religious at all. All of these characters do both good and bad things. There is liturgy in the book, but no evangelism. There might be miracles, but if they exist, they are the kind of small, everyday miracles that you, the reader, will get to point out and define for yourself.
There are prayers answered, and prayers unanswered, and coincidences, and scripture verses, and secular poetry, and tarot card readings. There are taxidermy petting zoos and late night hotel lobby piano lessons and true crime-themed dessert shops. There is straight sex and queer sex and group sex. There is intimacy as performance, and intimacy as worship, and intimacy as healing.
This is the kind of religious gothic that feels true and dangerous and important to me. And I hope that, regardless of your relationship with religion, you’ll approach Bird Suit with a posture of openness when it is released into the world in May 2024. I’m grateful for your curiosity. I’m grateful for the mud of it all.
With love,
News from The Marsh
1.) For Xtra Magazine, I wrote about my brief career as a cam model in 2019, shortly after I came out as non-binary, and how camming surprisingly helped me with my gender dysphoria.
2.) Starting March 20 2023, I’ll be teaching an 8-week intro to short story writing workshop for adults over Zoom through the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop. The class info will be posted sometime this week, so check my socials and the Lighthouse Website frequently. It will likely be Friday evenings at 6-8pm EST, 2 hour class slots, once per week for 8 weeks. There will be lecturing, writing exercises, and workshopping of stories.
3.) Applications are now open for the Youth Summer Writing Camps through The Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop.
This year I'm teaching my fiction course 'The First Chapter' as part of a week-long Middle School Writing Intensive in Denver, Colorado from July 17-21, 2023.
Applications to all full-day camps can be found here.
*You can use SummerEarlyBird for 10% off until March 1.*
The First Chapter: Fiction with Sydney Hegele
Do you have an idea for a novel but don’t know where to start or how to develop it? In this workshop, we’ll learn the foundations of character, plot structure, and setting through a variety of creative writing exercises(inspiration notebooks, peer interviews, collaborative scene-building, and more!). Later in the week, we’ll dig deep into the mechanics of setting-up a story in the first chapter, and every camper will write the first chapter of their own book. At the end of the week, students will get the chance to do a live reading, sharing part of their first chapter in front of a small audience. Each student taking the fiction specialization in the latter half of the week will receive a personalized list of future reading recommendations based on theirown fiction project. Students are encouraged to use their first chapters to continue writing their books at home after the week’s end.
4.) My poetry chapbook The Last Thing I Will See Before I Die is now available from 845 Press. You can purchase it here.
5.) The Pump will be translated into French by Kama La Mackerel and published by Les éditions l'interligne. You can read more about that here.
I update my events and publishing things frequently on my website, so take a browse there if you’re ever wondering what I’m up to. And, of course, subscribe to Marsh Mail if you want more of these kinds of musings in your inbox.
Sydney Hegele is the author of The Pump (Invisible Publishing 2021), winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their essays on life with Dissociative Identity Disorder have appeared in Catapult and Electric Literature, and featured by Lithub, the Poetry Foundation, and Psychology Today. Their novel Bird Suit is forthcoming with Invisible Publishing in Spring 2024, and their essay collection Bad Kids is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2025. They live with their husband and French Bulldog on Treaty 13 Land (Toronto, Canada).