Episode #10: A Plurality of Intensities: Selah Saterstrom
Novelist and diviner Selah Saterstrom talks about growing up in a small town in Mississippi within a family of Christian mystics and diviners and the multi-ethnic multi-racial “spiritual church movement” of the Deep South. We discuss “knowing/unknowing,” dig into “divinatory poetics” and how it shares space with New Narrative, Affect Theory, Feminist hermeneutics, and Queer Theory. What does it mean to work on the edge of the knowable? What does a good divination session really look like? What is prayer and what is it for? How do we “respond in kind” in our writing when facing traumas, such as sexual assault and rape? How is writing a eucharistic event? And what is the relationship between beauty and “the dump”? Selah reads from her book Rancher and from her novel-in-progress!
This interview was conducted over zoom.
Texts and authors mentioned and discussed:
Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 2007
Bob Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative”, 2004
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 1995
Selah Saterstrom
Selah Saterstrom is the author of three novels—Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution—as well as two collections of nonfiction, Rancher and Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics. She teaches and lectures both in the U.S. and internationally, and she co-founded Four Queens Divination, a platform focused on mentorship in Divinatory Poetics and writing. She lives on Vashon Island with her wife and daughter.
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