Therese Doucet
My historical novel with magical realist elements, "The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment," was published by D.X. Varos in February 2020. I'm also the author of "A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel," published through my own Strange Violin Editions micropress imprint in 2011.
My fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in literary magazines including Embark, Hotel Amerika, and Bayou Magazine, and an essay of mine was selected for the Notable Essays list in "Best American Essays 2011." I'm also a creative writing residency fellow of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and then studied philosophy and classics at Brigham Young University. My graduate studies included a Fulbright Fellowship year at the University of Hamburg in Germany and degrees in cultural history from the University of Chicago and in public policy from The George Washington University. I currently divide my time between Washington, D.C., and Knoxville, TN.
“A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross.”
“Leaving your religion and having to invent your own system of values is a big deal, after all.”
“Maybe I’m strange and perverse, but I’ve always thought there was something sexy about a compelling argument.”
“I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.”