First Fiction Fridays: Watch How We Walk by Jennifer LoveGrove

What:

Watch How We Walk (ECW Press, 2013)  

Who:

Since the mid-90s Jennifer LoveGrove has had her work published widely in magazines and has previously published two poetry collections with ECW Press, The Dagger Between Her Teeth and I Never Should Have Fired the Sentinel. She hosted a literary radio show on KCLN and published a literary zine for a decade in the late-90s. She currently divides her time between Toronto and Haliburton.

You can follow her on Twitter here.

Why you need to read this now:

LoveGrove recently wrote an article, "Jehovah’s Witness and Writing" for the National Post‘s Afterword, where she discusses many of the misconceptions and myths about this isolationist religion. And as someone who grew up a Jehovah’s Witness, LoveGrove knows of what she writes.

In Watch How We Walk, she has created a sparse, vivid, suspenseful, and darkly humorous story that provides readers with an emotional and visceral look inside a Jehovah’s Witness family through the eyes of the unforgettable Emily.

When Emily was a little girl, all she wanted to be when she grew up was a Full-Time Pioneer; in her Jehovah’s Witness family, the only imaginable future is a life of knocking on doors and handing out Watchtower magazines. But Emily starts to challenge her upbringing. She becomes closer to her closeted uncle, Tyler, as her older sister, Lenora, hangs out with boys, wears makeup, and gets a startling new haircut. After Lenora disappears, everything changes for Emily, and as she deals with her mental devastation she is forced to consider a different future.

Alternating between Emily’s life as a child and her adult life in the city, Watch How We Walk offers a haunting, cutting exploration of “disfellowshipping,” proselytization, and cultural abstinence, as well as the Jehovah’s Witness attitude towards the “worldlings” outside of their faith.