Writer Showcase: Karen Swallow Prior's Best Work
A summer interview series, volume 10.
I’m going to be very honest with you all today— I was nervous about approaching today’s featured guest with my request for an interview. Dr.
, better known on Twitter as The Notorious KSP, has been one of my literary role models for quite some time now. Imagine my delight when she agreed and told me to call her by her first name! Karen is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, Fierce Convictions, On Reading Well, The Evangelical Imagination, and her most recent title, You Have a Calling (which I reviewed here). In addition, she has written for The Atlantic, Christianity Today, The Dispatch, and hosted the podcast Jane and Jesus. She currently writes at here on Substack. Karen’s writing on faith, literature, and the beauty to be found in good books has been foundational for me in figuring out how I want to read and write. Her literary citizenship, and the way she kindly interacts with newer and less experienced writers, has also been foundational for me. (We first met on Twitter! I’m not there anymore, but I cherish many fond memories of bookish fun on that platform.)What do you write about?
I have two or three sort of parallel tracks at
: I have an ongoing series taking readers through a survey of British Literature, and I intersperse those installments with more personal reflections and updates from the writing life (including interviews with other writers).So I end up writing about a wide range of things, but they all flow out of my lifelong study of literature. Literary criticism isn’t far from cultural criticism, so I end up writing about all kinds of texts, even the textures of life, politics, and other human arts. Perhaps what threads all of my subjects together—whether literary, historical, cultural, or personal—is the mode of interpretation and analysis.
Why did you choose this theme/topic?
I had no real plans when I started writing on Substack. I began the newsletter because I was facing a major and traumatic shift in my life when my decades-long academic career suddenly ended. I needed to process that (which is a lot of what I write about) but not far into beginning at Substack, I realized that in my previous life, I’d have been starting a new semester of British literature. I realized I could create a new “classroom” and “teach” the same works on Substack, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. We are going much more slowly though! Two years in and we are still in the seventeenth century.
How long have you been writing on Substack?
My first post was published on August 1, 2023. I post weekly, more or less. It sure adds up quickly!
What other bylines have you had in the past?
I have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, The Atlantic, Religion and Liberty and lots of other places. I am currently a contributing writer at The Dispatch and a columnist at Religion News Service.
Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.
“Lessons from Loving and Losing a Pet,” published some years ago at Christianity Today, is my most requested article and one of my own favorites. As any animal lover knows, losing a beloved pet is its own particular kind of grief. Loving a pet is its own particular joy. The end of the article is probably one of the best things (I think) I’ve ever written:
Animals show us what our own fragility looks like before God. When we mourn these lesser creatures, we taste, I think, a bit of God’s sorrow over us in our human frailty. When we love fellow humans, we love as equals. When we love an animal, we bring with that love all the might and grace of one both in and above the world of that creature. It is like the love God has for us, with all the joy and grief we bring him. As human is to divine, so animal is to human. I think perhaps we are no more like God than when we love an animal.
“The Case for Getting Married Young” at The Atlantic was an early piece that put me in the national spotlight. I think its points need even more consideration now than when I first wrote it. In this article, I share my own experience of getting married at age 19, and now 40 years later, I see my marriage as the cornerstone of all my husband and I have built together. Marrying young isn’t an option for everyone, of course, nor is it wisest for everyone, but it seems less and less to be even considered, and I think that is a loss.
More recently, over at The Dispatch, I wrote about the problems with medically assisted suicide. This was one of the hardest essays I’ve written because I wrote it fresh from the holy and sacred experience of caring for my mother during her terminal illness and witnessing firsthand the vulnerability of all who are dying:
What lies ahead for the dying—as well as the living—is certain pain and suffering, helplessness and dependency, fear and uncertainty. It is not possible to live without suffering. But thanks to palliative and hospice care, choosing death isn’t the only means of ending the pain of living. In a world of limited time and resources, all the energies that go into legalizing medical aid in dying are ultimately diverting resources that could improve and expand end-of-life care.
This RNS column, “Don’t Go into a Relationship—or an Institution—Thinking You Can Change Them” is a highlight in my ongoing journey of processing my own church hurt (which many of us have gone through):
I thought for a long time I could help the church (or at least my slice of it) change. I could take a community and denomination rife with racism, cronyism, misogyny and abuse and change it.
How foolish I was.
Who is one other Substack writer you admire?
Well, this is perhaps a very niche choice, but I’m going to mention Evangelical Think Pieces by
. Matthew writes some of the best satire and hilarious humor pieces (some of them are NSFW), but if there is anything evangelicals like me need, it’s a sense of humor and willingness to see the errors of our ways. And to laugh ourselves into correction.Amy again. Typically when I interview a writer for this series, I link to one of their online pieces at the end. Today, though, I’m going to wholeheartedly recommend an entire book. If you love to read— if you don’t love to read!— then On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, an accessible treatise on building character through literature, will be both an improvement for your mind and a journey of delight. The chapters on A Tale of Two Cities, “Tenth of December,” and Persuasion are three of my favorites. I’m due for a re-read myself… and I might need to finally read Pamela.
Book Review: You Have a Calling by Karen Swallow Prior
It seems odd to center a review of a book about calling on the idea of not being called. But in this deeply personal work about the deeply personal idea of vocation, the chapter that stood out the most to me was in the very center.