Amy Leach

What kind of church forbids pickles? The Seventh-day Adventist Church of Amy Leach's childhood, for one—along with coffee, dancing, and any theology that didn't perpetually brace for the apocalypse. For years, Leach sat through sermon after sermon (she's counted: roughly five thousand), absorbing rules about what not to drink, what not to do, what not to think.

Then somewhere between the fiddle and the philosophy, between becoming a mother and becoming herself, Leach discovered something dangerous: canned asparagus teaches you to love fresh asparagus. Canned ideas teach you to love fresh ideas. And once you've tasted freedom, you can't go back to the jar.

In her first two books—Things That Are and The Everybody Ensemble—Leach has been busy reconsidering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers, and whether linnets have tenets (they don't). She has assembled choirs of 20 quintillion animals, championed imperturbable caterpillars and fainting goats, and made the case that dogness defies dogma. Her essays leap from jellyfish to medieval mystics to photosynthetic bacteria with the gazelle’s sure-footedness and the groundhog’s unpredictability.

Now, with The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations, she's turned that kaleidoscope on to herself. Borrowing the words of an old hymn—"This is my story, this is my song"—Leach delivers what one reviewer called "a madcap, whip-smart theology of joy." Where does freedom live? Why does it sometimes feel so good to be told what to do? What on heaven and earth is the Apicklypse? These aren't rhetorical questions. Leach is genuinely curious.

She writes with obvious affection for what she's questioning. The idealistic, generous people she grew up among. The gluten steaks. The Sabbath that demotes money and promotes time. The way Adventists welcomed her while traveling through South America. What she's after isn't escape but immediacy—God speaking directly, not through interpreters.

Accompanied by four-year-old mystics and six-year-old geologists, bears and butterflies and willow trees, Leach champions Emily Dickinson and Jesus over religious middlemen, questions over answers, the soul over the institution, Miles Davis over miles of marching. She praises not obedience but freedom, not secondhand but firsthand thoughts, not homogeneity but heterogeneity.

The book defies categories—it's part memoir, part sermon, part glossary, part praise song. She riffs on Erik Satie's absurdist performance instructions for pianists (play "Like a nightingale with a toothache" and, “a little bloody,” and even, “play the notes in your head.”) “The obedient pianist,” Amy points out,  “is not amused.” Because freedom involves ambiguity and ambiguity confuses the obedient. “Many institutions provide a cure for this affliction: dogma. Dogma is a vise in whose jaws you are free from being free.”

Amy writes freely. She writes freely about stars, hamsters, birds, and the history of words. Readers report wanting to call friends and read lines out loud. Lines like this one: “The hog is whole-hog, the dog is whole-dog, the frog is whole-frog, and the bat is very batty. As Kierkegaard wrote (I am paraphrasing): The task of the self is to become itself. And the animals -- even the child-frogs-- often seem to have achieved this task better than people, though there are exceptions, like Walt Whitman.” Poet Christian Wiman found himself spontaneously quoting her in his own sermon. The book infiltrates vocabularies, becomes part of thinking.

This is a writer who argues against argument, against restrictions of all kinds and their limiting effect on our humanity. One who advocates saying "Sayonara!" to anyone who tries to control you by speaking for God. Who urges us to become as salty as children, who have not yet learned to be bland. To run toward mischief, music, love, the wonders of nature, and the wild joys of all that we don't yet know.

Amy Leach lives in Montana, where she plays piano in church, fiddles without fundamentalism, and writes sentences that make readers stop mid-page to wonder how language can possibly do that. A recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, Granta, Orion, and Tin House.

Come join us again in conversation with this astonishing writer—this lover of Shimmer the hamster and loather of dogma, this former fundamentalist fiddler who found her way to freedom through linguistic cartwheels and philosophical shenanigans, through praise songs to the cosmos and permission to be gloriously, saltily, unapologetically alive.