Start Here
If you found your way here, there’s a good chance something brought you: a Note that made you feel seen, an essay a friend forwarded, or simply the particular hunger for a voice that asks hard questions and doesn’t offer easy answers.
Welcome. I’m glad you came, and I invite you to settle in and stay a while.
My name is Priscilla. I was born and raised in the American South, and I currently live in Little Rock, Arkansas, with my husband, our two children, a dog, and a fish. If that background has you forming judgments about me, read some of my work first. You may be pleasantly surprised or annoyed and disappointed by my evolving, progressive views.
For sixteen years, I worked as a federal law clerk. I spent eight years writing a memoir, the book that taught me I was a writer. My memoir traces high-functioning addiction and the first two years of sobriety, when giving up alcohol became a deep spiritual and emotional reckoning. It is finished now and looking for a home, which turns out to be its own kind of spiritual practice. Pain may be the touchstone of spiritual progress, but I’m beginning to think the querying process deserves its own chapter in the canon.
I quit drinking in 2010. In the wreckage and grace of that unraveling, I found something that might be what people call God. It was invisible but real, something worth paying close attention to. On most days, it feels as real as the wind. But there are days when the air goes still. If you know a Southern summer, you know that kind of misery: heat clinging to the skin, sweat gathering, not even the slightest breeze to bring relief. That is what it feels like when I cannot feel God.
I started writing here because I wanted a place to write that could hold all of me at once. I have no interest in becoming a brand. I am multifaceted, like everyone in the real world, and I do not want my online self flattened into something uncomplicated. So I bring all of myself to the page here.
I am a mother, but also a mystic. A Southerner and a progressive. A woman in recovery and in the pew. A person who some days feels God everywhere and other days wonders if there is a God at all.
There are days I love the church, and days I can hardly stand how patriarchal it still is because empire shaped so many of the stories we inherited. There are days I want to leave religion behind, convinced it is doing more harm than good as I watch Christian nationalists commit inhumane acts in the name of Jesus. But on other days, I understand that wrestling with an old, stubborn faith is shaping my soul in ways that skipping from one feel-good influencer to the next never could. My faith asks something of me, often more than I want to give. And the Bible’s complicated, often contradictory stories keep me wary of easy certainty and unexamined authority. I return to these stories because they are full of people at the margins wrestling with God and with those in power from the beginning, and because each time I return, I see something I did not see before.
That tension between faith and doubt is not a problem to solve. It is the ground I write from.
Here you’ll find essays on sobriety and recovery, not the triumphant kind where everything resolves neatly, but the ongoing, unglamorous, grace-filled kind. I write about what it means to stay sober not only in body but in spirit. What it means to feel everything you once numbed. What it means to keep returning to spiritual practices until your soul feels alive again.
I write about faith, especially the progressive, questioning, mystical kind that does not require you to leave your brain at the door. I’m an Episcopalian who reads Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Merton, Parker Palmer, Marcus Borg, and Elaine Pagels. I believe the sacred can meet us almost anywhere, including, and maybe especially, in the hardest places.
I write about motherhood and intentional living, about raising children in a world that wants their attention, their innocence, and their wonder, and trying to offer them something sturdier than speed, noise, and distraction. I write about teaching them to love reading, to notice beauty, to think critically, and to move through the world with both kindness and depth.
I write about ancestry, family history, and the reckoning that truth sometimes requires, because I cannot live honestly in the present if I am unwilling to be honest about the past.
And I write about living in the South, my home, a place with a complicated and painful history and a beauty so deep it lives in my body. I write about this political moment from where I am standing, because I cannot write with any depth about faith, sobriety, motherhood, or belonging without writing about the place I am from and the time in which I am living all of it.
The best place to start is wherever you are. But if you’d like a few entry points, these pieces will give you a feel for what lives here:
After 15 Years, Do I Ever Regret Sobriety? — on the unglamorous, quietly miraculous truth of long-term recovery
How Early Christians Buried the Feminine and the Divine — on the Gnostic texts and how they inform my faith today
When It's Not Your Name They Call — on disappointment, being seen, grit, and mothering a child who in turn teaches me
Ancestral Gifts: Unruly Southern Women — the first in a series on family inheritance, abolitionist poetry, and the spiritual work of reckoning with the past
How I Arrived at a Christian Writers Retreat with a Healthy Dose of Skepticism and Left with Something Else — on belonging and the power of showing up in circles of people we assume are not like us
The Corded Comeback — on installing a landline, what was lost when we stopped talking to each other, and what is gained when we begin again
If something here resonates, subscribe and stay awhile. Everything I write is free. But if you feel moved to support the work financially, there is a paid tier, which helps sustain this space and my ability to stay in it, write, and reach others.
If you ever have a question, a suggestion, or just need a companion on your own walk, please send me a direct message.
Thank you for being here.