Now "Good Testaments" — A Note on Renaming This Substack
From "Off the Shelf" to "Good Testaments" — to introduce more critical posts on memoir as a genre, and to focus on personal essays on the post-religious experience
Dear friends and readers,
Over the past two years of writing on this Substack, I have become very aware of the divergence that can happen between an initial creative intention and the end result of that intention.
It is like when you sit down with your pencils and sketch paper and tell yourself that you will draw a landscape with a foreground, a background, and a middle ground — and somewhere on the page, a tree. And instead, you just draw a tree. No mountain in the background against a sunset; no flowers in the fore. Instead, the tree — resembling no particular kind of tree — takes up the whole page. Its branches are tangled, its leaves are cartoonish. No, you did not intend to draw this tree. But you like how it turned out, and you would like to draw another.
I always had the intention that Off the Shelf was primarily a way for me to make the work of writing an act of returning to (or taking back or working against the delay of processing) parts of the past, but I didn’t think it meant that my focus was on the genre of memoir. I loved memoir, but I convinced myself that my worthiest goal should be to work on refining a style more under the name of criticism: some blend of research, reportage, academic writing, and then, yes, a little sprinkle here and there of personal writing. Yes, that would be good.
But then, immediately after starting this Substack, I realized I had to recover from grad school. As I began writing, I stepped into a new awareness of what I actually wanted to do. What I found was that I had been exhausted by the restrictive usage of “I” in the academic style. I loved the research process, but I didn’t feel most like myself within the overall professional project of academia, which was largely focused on generating an aesthetic of knowledge absent of the personal voice.
So now here I am. For the past two years, I have found myself writing strictly memoir here. This is the central object that emerged — the tree with many branches, many leaves, many potential ways it could go. But it is without a landscape. How can it have roots? How can it grow?
Which leads me to the point of this post. I want to rename this space. I believe that names are important, especially when they allow for evolution. I want the name of this Substack to more intentionally tie in the threads and questions that I plan on writing about in the long-term. And if you have been reading what I’ve been publishing here, we might agree that the central thread is me processing my religious upbringing and education. In fact, having this Substack is what made me feel permission to start writing about it, as of a few years ago, when I published The Beginning of Literacy.
Names are also hard. I’ve landed on the name Good Testaments as a way of bringing together my personal and critical interest in memoir, while evoking and reimagining a word — testament — that is so often heard in the religious context. Still like a true believer, I hold that a testament is a sacred object, a memorial, a stone, which, when witnessed, when believed, holds the power to transform. I hope to use this Substack to keep experimenting with my own personal essays, while also introducing more posts that ask what memoir is doing in the world. This might look like doing book reviews, interviews, or simply pondering on a question that has come up in my reading.
And good because I want to reimagine and live out what goodness means to me, beyond the dichotomies, ideologies, myths, and histories of the church. Good because I still want to experience something like the divine — but I want to define what that relationship looks like on my own terms.
I think that all writers, but especially those who tackle memoir, show up to the page because they want to brush up against the divine. The memoir writer is trying — and hopefully able — to understand, reclaim, and take back some power in their story. In doing this, they also take up one of the most difficult tasks in writing, which is trying to tell the truth according to their memories using their best moral compass, pressing through every emotion, from shame, wonder, heartbreak, and joy.
And I want to call this task, in it of itself, good. I want to call this work of this creation and recreation very good.
To everyone receiving this in your inboxes: thanks for sticking with me these past few years and reading and listening through so much evolution!
For readers everywhere, if this project sounds interesting to you, I hope you will come along for the journey.
Good Testaments is and will remain 100% free. If you subscribe, you can expect a new, thoughtful essay around these topics with an audio voiceover in your inbox every two to three months.
Lauren
I love this shift! I have a lot of squirmy feelings around the word testament, so I'm looking forward to seeing you tackle that word and the whole world of memoir/story/truths head-on!