Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers, Edited by Susan Scott, Foreword by Alison Pick.
Publisher: Caitlin Press, 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-987915-9-38
$24.95, 240 pages
Reviewed by Lori Sebastianutti
When I was the managing editor of a national infertility blog, the Executive Director gave me free rein to highlight voices as I saw fit. I created the schedule, coordinated the topics, and nurtured the writers using editorial experience, empathy, and compassion.
She left me with one stipulation, however. “We don’t publish anything that discusses politics or religion.”
I was crushed. Not simply for the writers but for myself.
As an Italian-Canadian, raised in a Catholic home, my faith and religious practices have infiltrated all aspects of my life, including a decade-long infertility struggle. Were there not important stories in there to share with the world?
The E.D. was not alone in her directive. As a writer, I’ve listened to podcasts where editors explicitly tell listeners that they’re not interested in publishing work that focuses on religion or faith. Understandable in a secular society. Except that for women, silence distorts, and leaves us facing one more void.
Was there anywhere I could turn for hope that my stories were worth telling?
Enter Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers, edited by Susan Scott. This groundbreaking collection rectifies this invisibility with powerful writing that complicates simplistic notions of spirituality, religion, faith, ceremony, and practice. The anthology features 28 vivid personal essays by queer, non-binary, racialized, Indigenous, immigrant, and settler women, trying to reconcile lived experience with centuries of iron-clad tradition.
Several voices speak to the many familiar crises gripping organized faiths: patriarchy, homophobia, misogyny, and a history married to settler colonialism.
Whether in the collection opener, “Unfinished Journey,” by Jagtar Kaur Atwal, or “Mother and Child,” by Dora Dueck, Christianity’s failure to embrace queerness is on full display. The forbidden fruit of female sexuality blossoms in “My Uterus is a Tree,” by Victoria poet Meharoona Ghani, and in “A Real Woman,” by Toronto novelist Heidi Reimer. Zarqa Nawaz’s “Writing from the Inside” and Sigal Samuel’s “The Kabbalist in the Kitchen” take on patriarchy with wit and warmth. And the hard, necessary work of decolonizing faith courses through “In a Canoe, Chasing my Métis Grandmother” by Carleigh Baker and “Star Women” by Jónína Kirton.
Where I feel Body & Soul ultimately shines is in the stories of women who freely choose a spirituality that suits their lives. In “Bad Jew, Good Jew,” Ayelet Tsabari proclaims herself an atheist at age 10, after the early death of her father: “it is in writing that I grasp for the unknowable and the sacred, and search for meaning, for something bigger than myself.” Similarly, Betsy Warland’s “Twenty Pages and a Razor Blade” claims that the sacred is contained within the narratives of our lives, and that we often turn away from them out of fear. “When we finally surrender to them our surrender is a sacred act,” writes Warland, and “what’s left out, or obscured, is often what’s needed.”
After I finished Body and Soul, I sat down and wrote an essay that centred on a crisis of faith I had been reckoning with for years. The courage of these 28 women inspired mine, and gave me permission to set myself free.
Susan Scott’s bold call for luminous, wildly diverse stories that move both “skeptics and seekers” is what’s needed right now. Stories of the inner lives of women are the stories of our collective past, our urgent present, and a future filled with hope.
About Lori Sebastianutti:
Lori is a writer and teacher from Stoney Creek, Ontario. Her essays have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Hamilton Review of Books, and The Humber Literary Review. You can read more of her work at https://lorisebastianutti.com.