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Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

Page 28

by Cami Ostman


  VALERIE TARICO is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. Valerie is the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, an interactive library of quotes, poetry, stories, and essays that “elevate and celebrate humanity’s shared moral core.” As a writer she tackles the intersection between religious belief, psychology, and politics. Her books include Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings: Ten Spiritual Folktales for Children. Her articles, which have appeared at Truthout, AlterNet, Jezebel, Slate, and The Huffington Post, can be found at www.awaypoint.wordpress.com.

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR-MEAD was born in New York during the baby boom generation. Moving to London at age twenty, she formed Metropolis Pictures, a documentary film company. Her Jehovah’s Witness background provided great training for a producer: making cold calls without fear and conducting evangelical pitch meetings. Metropolis built a reputation for provocative award-winning films and was part of the emerging independent film movement in the United Kingdom Returning to the United States after eighteen years, she raised movie-worshipping daughters while working on PBS documentaries, followed by ten happy years as a director of a fine art house cinema. While she is currently planning her next adventure, she is pretty certain it will not include warning people to prepare for the Apocalypse.

  NAOMI J. WILLIAMS’S short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous literary journals, including One Story, A Public Space, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, and The Gettysburg Review. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis and lives with her family in Northern California.

  About the Editors

  CAMI OSTMAN IS A life coach, marriage and family therapist, and author of Second Wind: One Woman’s Midlife Quest to Run Seven Marathons on Seven Continents (Seal Press). Cami holds a Bachelor’s of Education in English in Theater from Western Washington University and a Master’s of Science in Marriage and Family Therapy from Seattle Pacific University (both in Washington State). She has a special interest in helping women live more authentically and freely. She is also a dog lover, a wine connoisseur, a runner, and a blogger. Her blogs can be found at 7marathons7continents.com and psychologytoday.com/blog/secondwind. Cami hasbeen appeared in O Magazine, Adventures Northwest, Fitness Magazine, The Mudgee Guardian (Australia), and La Prensa (Chile). She lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband and for-legged creatures.

  SUSAN TIVE IS A writer and editor for a variety of academic, film, and women’s studies projects as well as non-fiction book titles including Faith and Feminism and Rachel’s Bag. She is currently the grant-writer and Development Director for Salt Lake Film Society. A former stay at home mom, she raised three, now grown, children in a small orthodox Jewish community in northern New Mexico. Along the way she completed her Bachelor of Science degree and earned her Masters of Liberal Arts from St. John’s College. Susan is currently writing her memoir, Woman of Valor, the occasionally humorous tale of a twenty-something wife and mother who bid farewell to her fashionable freedoms and blue jeans to become a religious Jew. She now lives with her agnostic husband Michael in the Pacific Northwest where she is learning to brave the rainy weather and play in her garden, delighting in the fruits no longer forbidden in her life.

  SELECTED TITLES FROM SEAL PRESS

  A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman, by Lisa Shannon, foreword by Zainab Salbi. $16.95, 978-1-58005-359-4. Through her inspiring story of turning what started as a solo 30-mile run to raise money for Congolese women into a national organization, Run for Congo Women, Lisa Shannon sounds a deeply moving call to action for each person to find in them the thing that brings meaning to a wounded world.

  Lessons from the Monk I Married, by Katherine Jenkins. $15.00, 978-1-58005-368-6. Katherine Jenkins offers up ten powerful lessons about life, love, and spirituality that she has gathered during her marriage to former Buddhist monk Seong Yoon Lee.

  Kissing Outside the Lines: A True Story of Love and Race and Happily Ever After, by Diane Farr. $16.00, 978-1-58005-396-9. Actress and columnist Diane Farr’s unapologetic, and often hilarious, look at the complexities of interracial/ethnic/religious/what-have-you love.

  Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair with a Homeless Homeland, by Pamela Olson. $16.00, 978-1-58005-482-9. A powerful, deeply moving account of the time Pamela Olson spent in Palestine—both the daily events that are universal to us all (house parties, concerts, barbecues, and weddings) as well as the violence, trauma, and political tensions that are particular to the country.

  Second Wind: One Woman’s Midlife Quest to Run Seven Marathons on Seven Continents, by Cami Ostman. $16.95, 978-1-58005-307-5. The story of an unlikely athlete and an unlikely heroine: Cami Ostman, a woman edging toward midlife who decides to take on the challenge to run seven marathons on seven continents—and finds herself in the process.

  Found: A Memoir, by Jennifer Lauck. $17.00, 978-1-58005-395-2. Picking up where her New York Times best-selling memoir, Blackbird, left off, Jennifer Lauck shares the powerful story of her search for her birth mother, and lays bare the experience of a woman searching for her identity.

  FIND SEAL PRESS ONLINE

  www.SealPress.com

  www.Facebook.com/SealPress

  Twitter: @SealPress

 

 

 


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