Book Talk with Kelly Foster Lundquist: Beard
Writer and educator Kelly Foster Lundquist will bless the bookspace with a reading and talk about her debut memoir,Beard . Kelly will be in conversation with Samuel Ernest , local author ofCoarse Work. All are welcome; hope to see you here...
More about the book:
Kelly Foster Lundquist was nineteen when she met Devin at church camp in the late ’90s. Immediately inseparable, the two bonded over bootleg Tori Amos recordings and a sense of disconnection from the spiritual fervor of their fellow camp counselors. Devin was classically handsome and Kelly on the plain side of pretty, but they matched. Their twinned search for God, acceptance, and love would profoundly shape the rest of their lives.
In this striking debut memoir, Lundquist revisits her relationship with Devin twenty years after their divorce, as she investigates the “beard” trope in literature, culture, and her own romantic life. The straight woman who unwittingly marries a gay man is either a laughingstock or a fool—or both—in the popular imagination. And yet reality—much like desire—is more wild. Reality is midnight pad Thai, tenderness in Ralph Lauren sheets, ritual visits to Blockbuster, and beginning a PhD in queer theory while your husband secretly struggles to reconcile his double life.
A tour de force of empathy and vivid prose, Beard reckons honestly with the harm done to both husband and wife by churches that required rigid performances of gender and sexuality. In contrast, Lundquist learns to let go of brittle certainties as she embraces what her first marriage taught her about risk and redemption.
More about Kelly:
Kelly Foster Lundquist teaches writing at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. A 2013 Milton postgraduate fellow at Image Journal and Kenyon Review writers’ alum, her work has appeared in Last Syllable Lit, Whale Road Review, and The Academy Stories among other places. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University and an MA in English from Mississippi College, and remains a PhD dropout. Lundquist lives in a little red house by the Mississippi River with her spouse and daughter.
More about Samuel in his own words:
I am a writer and a doctoral candidate in theology in Yale’s Religious Studies department. Across my academic and personal writing, I weave together Christian theology, gay sexuality, and spirituality. I am an assistant editor at the Yale Review. I am starting a small press called Homodoxy for gay/queer literature and theology, new and old.
You can learn more about the press here and follow the press’s Substack, The Rearview, for monthly views, interviews, and reviews, here.