Interview with Virgie Townsend, Author of Because We Were Christian Girls
Virgie Townsend (she/they) is the author of the fiction chapbook Because We Were Christian Girls (Black Lawrence Press, 2022).
As a fiction writer, essayist, and reporter, her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Tin House Online, Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Sun, among other publications. Virgie lives in Syracuse, New York, with her family. Find her online at virgietownsend.com.
Virgie Townsend’s debut short story collection, Because We Were Christian Girls, was released in October 2022 from Black Lawrence Press. She sat down to answer questions on gender conformance, grief, and her current obsessions.
Jacquelyn Scott: Congratulations on the publication of your debut short story collection! What was that moment like for you?
Virgie Townsend: Publishing Because We Were Christian Girls came with a range of emotions. When Black Lawrence Press (BLP) accepted it last year, I had been working on the stories for ten years. It had been shortlisted for several awards, but never won. Publication felt just out of reach, which was discouraging. I had always wanted to work with BLP, so I was elated when they accepted it.
One of the first people I told was my cousin, Tarlie. She joked she wanted a gold-plated copy. She is one of the dearest people in my life. Unfortunately, she died suddenly of melanoma in May, a month after her 31st birthday.
Now there’s a bittersweetness to the publication. After years of working and dreaming, I’m proud Because We Were Christian Girls is out. I absolutely love hearing what readers see in the stories and how they connect with the characters.
At the same time, one of the people I most wanted to share it with isn’t here. In a way, I dedicated Because We Were Christian Girls to Tarlie to defy death. She's still part of it, like we planned.
For most of my life, I assumed publishing a book would fulfill me. It feels great, but it’s shifted by the gravitational loss of Tarlie. I want to write more books that bring insight and beauty to others, and yet, I’ve also never felt more deeply that my calling is living alongside my loved ones.
Scott: How did you avoid creating a sense of alienation in your readers when fundamentalism is a foreign concept for some people in a modernized United States?
Townsend: Christian fundamentalism is more familiar in U.S. culture than many people think. Many of the ideas we now think of as mainstream conservative Christian beliefs originated from fundamentalist groups.
I wrote the opening sentence of the short story “Instructions” in 2018. The line reads: “Don’t say gay.” Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was introduced nearly four years later.
It’s a fictional story. I wasn’t pulling from my own experience, and I’m not a prophet of state government. I was just so embedded in fundamentalism that I saw there was a growing urge to control the language and education around LGBTQ+ issues. Over time, it bled out into popular conservative Christian thought and then real legislation that hurts people.
The Duggars and TLC also helped normalize Christian fundamentalism. For a while, “19 Kids and Counting” was TLC’s most popular show and reached millions of people. TLC deserves its share of blame for giving an enormous platform to abusive parenting and ideologies.
Scott: Gender roles and conformance play a major role in each of the stories in this collection. How did your background influence and develop these ideas?
Townsend: Gender conformity is all-consuming in fundamentalism. There was a brief period in my childhood when church was a place where I learned Bible stories, did crafts, and hung out with my little friends. Like an abusive relationship, fundamentalism often has an early wooing or honeymoon phase. All of a sudden, I was 12, and the pastor was getting me alone behind a van to scream at me that my shorts were too short.
My church basically segregated us kids by sex. If you wanted to be friends with someone of the opposite sex, it was treated as a red flag for future sin. That meant I only spent time with girls and women. The unintended side effect for me was that it nurtured my sense of solidarity with women, laying the foundation for eventually becoming a feminist.
During my senior year at a conservative Christian school, my class got to hold our own chapel for the entire school. One of the male student council members immediately said the theme should be on how men need to be leaders. Can you imagine being so power-hungry and boring that, given the opportunity to talk to hundreds of your peers, you want to use it to convince them of your superiority? In hindsight, the open fixation with dominating others is wild to me and clearly dangerous.
I was probably attuned to the pressures of gender conformity early because I’m nonbinary. By the time I was seven or eight, I knew I didn’t feel like a girl, especially not as described by fundamentalism. I just didn’t have the language to describe it yet, which goes back to the “Don’t Say Gay” issue. Of course, denying us the language doesn’t change the fact of who we are. I still felt it and figured it out.
Scott: What elements of fundamentalism did you want to strictly adhere to in your stories, and what did you want to play around with?
Townsend: I didn’t need to change anything about fundamentalism itself. Christian fundamentalism isn’t a monolith; it exists on a spectrum. You find a lot of different kinds of people and ways of being fundamentalist.
There are some overarching requirements, like saying a salvation prayer and believing in a so-called literal interpretation of the Bible. Also, many of the adults who convert to fundamentalism have unresolved trauma histories or untreated mental health challenges.
But from there, you’ll find some weird nuances. One IFB college is obsessed with cleanliness and does white-glove room checks of students’ rooms. One IFB leader was really into swallowing live goldfish as a horrific party trick, so it’s still part of the culture of the school he founded.
Scott: What is the biggest takeaway from your stories that you want for your readers?
Townsend: I hope people who grew up in high-control Christianity find truth, validation, beauty, and community when they read Because We Were Christian Girls. For people who didn't, I hope it shows them the hidden strength of the people raised in it.
Mostly, I want people to bring themselves to the book and have their own experience of it.
Scott: What is your writing process? How do you make time and space for your writing?
Townsend: Right now, I’m still discovering the ways my cousin’s death has changed me, including creatively. In the past, my stories or essays emerged from developing a sentence or general concept that clicked with me. Once it had its hooks in, I’d write a very rough draft in a notebook I have for early ideas. If it still felt compelling after that, I’d transcribe the rough draft into Word and start writing in earnest.
I’ve had the same early-ideas notebook for about seven years. It’s incredibly satisfying to flip through it and see all the fragments and half-baked ideas I’ve grown into pieces that are out in the world and readers have said spoke to them.
Scott: What are your obsessions right now?
Townsend: My household just got obsessed with Pamela Pumpkin’s Halloween Workout. A few nights ago, I caught my toddler muttering, “kick Satan in the crotch.”
I’m obsessed with the show Reservation Dogs. The whole second season is brilliant. It’s the most powerful depiction I’ve seen of grief evolving in a community and individual characters throughout time.
Scott: What are your favorite and least favorite words?
Townsend: I like words with ‘u’ in them. That’s not a pickup line.
Scott: What are you currently reading or working on?
Townsend: I recently started Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, have Ursula Villarreal-Moura’s Math for the Self-Crippling up next, and just picked up The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela.
Scott: What is the best piece of writing advice you've received?
Townsend: You don’t have to write every day to be a writer. When I was in law school, I didn’t write for three years.
Creativity is a well from which you draw to be refreshed and help refresh others. Sometimes you can’t visit it for a long time. Sometimes it runs low. The well will change throughout your life, but it’s always there.
From Black Lawrence Press:
Because We Were Christian Girls by Virgie Townsend
A finalist for the Fall 2019 Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition, the Cupboard Pamphlet’s 2020 Annual Contest, and the 2021 Newfound Prose Prize.
Inspired by Virgie Townsend’s own experiences growing up in an independent fundamental Baptist church, the seven stories in Because We Were Christian Girls examine religious and gender oppression through an unforgettable cast of Christian fundamentalist girls.
In the titular story, Townsend writes, “All Christian girls know what happens when they disobey, even if it’s by accident. We end up pregnant, kicked out of our churches, and used as examples in sermons about what happens to disobedient Christian girls. Eventually we go to hell, where we fall for eternity in a dark, fiery pit, bound in rough chains that tear and burn our flesh, deprived of any human contact except for listening to the eternal screams of other Christian girls who are also bound, falling, and should have listened to their elders.”
In prose alternately lyrical and humorous, and through stories sometimes dwelling in poignant realism and at others in the surreal, Townsend’s girls navigate child abuse, body image issues, sexual curiosity and homophobia, addiction, racism, and classism on their paths to self-actualization and, ultimately, freedom. This is a debut short fiction chapbook you won’t soon forget.
Get your copy from Black Lawrence Press.
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