Cover Photo: Hands lifted in prayer against a black background
Photograph by Amaury Gutierrez/Unsplash

Women Writing About Complicated Desire Saved Me When the Evangelical Church Couldn’t

What I’d been looking for at the convent, I could find in reading and writing. If other writers could channel their desires, I could use it, too.

The Sound of Music


Nothing about my desire was shameful, or even unique. It was material.

BluetsThe LoverReading Lolita in TheranThe Woman WarriorI Want To Show You More

Cameron Dezen Hammon is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in Ecotone, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, The Butter, NYLON, Them, The Houston Chronicle, and elsewhere. Her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017, and she is a contributor to The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers (W.W. Norton), and My Caesarean: Twenty Mothers on the Experience of Birth by C-Section and After (The Experiment, 2019). Her debut book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession is forthcoming from Lookout Books on October 22, 2019. Follow @camerondhammon