New Unreformed Excerpt in Midwest Review, dedicated to Doug Sirman, my favorite staff member
Plus Jesus Land is being made into a movie!
I’m in Biloxi. I decided to make this trip at the last minute. It’s kind of insane—but my schedule lined up and I felt propelled by the universe, or maybe even God,* to drive seven hours from Georgia to meet up with Julia Scheeres, author of the must-read Jesus Land, which takes place at the same white evangelical reform school in the Dominican Republic that I attended, but five years before.
Julia and I have known each other online for 20 years—I interviewed her for Guernica in 2013— but we’ve never met in person, even though we’ve coordinated on so much activism against the troubled teen industry. We even shut down our school, Escuela Caribe, and New Horizons Youth Ministries, based in Indiana, though—spoiler alert—it just became a different school with many of the same staff (something which is common in the troubled teen industry), though the DR campus is finally closed. At least our abusers aren’t abusing kids, there. You have to take your wins when you have our background.
Julia lives in the Bay area. She’s in Biloxi because her friend, the writer and director Saila Kariat, is filming a movie of Jesus Land. Part of the reason why I drove over is because I’m writing about the making of Jesus Land the movie for Literary Hub and why it matters now, when the Trump administration is unlawfully deporting immigrants to prisons in foreign countries. More on that soon, but for now just know that it’s been so amazing to have been on set, watching all these actors and extras and others come up to Julia and describe how much their book meant to her. People who haven’t even been to Escuela Caribe. People who can’t even begin to understand what it was like. Because she wrote Jesus Land, what happened to all of us MATTERS.
This week I also published an excerpt from my memoir, UNREFORMED (February 2027), in Issue 12 of the Midwest Review. My reform school, Escuela Caribe (Dominican Republic), was based out of Indiana, in a program called New Horizons Youth Ministries, which I aslo attended:(. The excerpt I published, ‘Certificate of Affection,’ took place my very first Sunday at Escuela Caribe. I attended a ceremony where my high ranker and her boyfriend had to get a certificate to kiss. It was mind-blowing at 15, and now.
If you’re a writer with some tie to the Midwest, I highly recommend working with the Midwest Review. I loved how the editor, Jeff Snowbarger, had me explain the theocratic, pronatalist “philosophy” behind making teenagers have a certificate to kiss. Though in some respects we at Escuela Caribe/ New Horizons Youth Ministries were lucky—a lot of reform schools don’t let girls and boys talk to each other.
I dedicated “Certificate of Affection” to my favorite staff member at Escuela Caribe, Doug Sirman. He was my counselor at Escuela Caribe. Usually girls only had female counselors, but I asked if Doug could be mine—he was such a smartass—and for some reason, they said yes. Maybe because they thought I needed to work on relationships with male authority figures (you have to read UNREFORMED for more on that, but know that fixation—my having relationships with male authority figues, at least 60% of whom were creepy AF—was part of their weird patriarchy). But for me, part of it was because Doug and I both were from the South, which meant a lot to me in that school, where I was essentially fetishized for being from Mississippi. That’s why I don’t have an accent—because the staff, who, besides Doug, were mainly from the Midwest, made fun of mine. Doug and I also had similar family dynamics, in that we were both raised by people who saw us not as our own persons but rather as extensions of our parents.
Doug was really smart about people—he was the type of person who’d make an observation about someone and you’d be like “yea, that’s exactly right.” Which sounds really general, and is hard to explain, unless you knew the same people we did. But, for instance, he was the first person who let me know I was a writer. I mean, I knew I was, but he knew why. I think I was bitching about the fact that my parents had put me on mail restriction. I was the only kid in school not allowed to write to my friends—control of communication is a legit CIA torture technique—something, which, even today, I’m still pissed about.
But that day Doug said, “I get it. Back at home you were this Southern Gothic Emily Dickinson, scribbling away in your bedroom. Your parents were afraid that you were going to out them, so they sent you here instead. That’s why they don’t let you write to anyone but who they approve.”
I remember at the time, how I felt, my brain spinning, looking up at the fucking palm trees outside the gazebo, trying to figure out what Southern Gothic was. Trying to figure out how Emily Dickinson —a blueblood New England poet!—was connected to a country Mississippi white girl like me.
But now, the very fact that he told me that, about my parents, in that school, is STILL revolutionary.
I’ve never even written about that, until now. And just writing it out, about what it felt like to have someone tell me the truth about my parents, instead of the program line about how I WAS THE PROBLEM, not my parents, feels amazing.
Thank you, Doug.
Doug passed away last year. I think the last time I spoke with him, or texted—I can’t remember and it hurts too much this week to look it up—was back in 2023. I didn’t know he had cancer, or I would’ve reached out personally. But online, until it got bad, I guess, he remained my cheerleader, commenting and sharing what I wrote.
At the least it feels really good, posthumously, to be able to give him credit for retaining his humanity, in that place. For speaking the truth when it would be more convenient or comfortable were he to not. And maybe this is just the white girl idealistic hippie in me, but I like to think he knows I appreciate him. I like to think he knows I gave him that shoutout, that I always will, wherever he is right now.
*By which I mean God, speaking through Jesus, who said, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, (John 8:32),” which, fun fact, is the epigraph Julia chose for Jesus Land (order it now!).
