Kelly Foster Lundquist presents Beard in conversation with Chris Stedman

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.

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.

Chris Stedman is a writer, podcaster, and professor who teaches in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of the books , , and the forthcoming , as well as the writer and host of . Chris is the founder of Good Judy Productions, a new podcast studio based in Minneapolis committed to telling stories that, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, take the “view from below,” or “the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.” The studio’s first series is currently in production and will be distributed by iHeartPodcasts. In addition to his podcast work, Chris has written popular essays for outlets including the Atlantic, Pitchfork, BuzzFeed, VICE, the Washington Post, and others.

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