Hannah Faith Notess is the creative writing editor for The Other Journal and editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University and was last year's Milton Center Fellow in Creative Writing at SPU. Her poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review, The Christian Century, Poet Lore, and Slate, among other journals. She lives in Seattle. Hannah Notess’s writing has appeared in Image, The Christian Century, Slate, and Crab Orchard Review, among other journals.
Notess’s poems come from a posture of humility, and are enlarged by the religious sensibility rather than limited by it. They are full of great affection for the people she encounters, for the land, for the community. Her first task seems to be to love the world, to look with humility and wonder at the people and places she encounters, and then to render them truthfully.
Click here to buy a copy of Notess's book Jesus Girls, from which she reads an excerpt below.
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I love Jesus' Girls. I'm sharing it right now with a pastor friend of mine. While I do not share most of the experiences in it, there are things I recognize. The essays articulate a certain restlessness in my heart and ambivalence to my church experiences growing up. This essay is my favorite. I read it out loud to my husband because everything you described, I knew. It resonated. Thanks for your honest beautiful writing.
Your book was a soothing balm to me. Reading these stories--from which I could easily assemble large pieces of my story from bits, snippets, and chunks of theirs--and hearing women give voice to the questions, doubts, and "heresies" I think about every day was wonderful and liberating. I thank you and them for the simple honesty that is found in the pages of your book! Be blessed,
Erin
Just a little note to invite you to our book club discussion over at the High Calling (http://www.thehighcalling.org). We have been discussing the essays from The Spirit of Food every Monday morning and tomorrow we will be discussing yours! We would be so honored if you would stop by and leave a comment and join in the discussion. We have been having some good conversation around this thought-provoking book. Please contact me if you have any questions.
Thank you so much.
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