(2016), The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (2019) and The Fear (2023), generously supported by The Society of Authors. She has written for Glamour, Stylist, LitHub, The London Magazine, The Irish Times, Architectural Design, Byline Times, Art Quarterly, Prospect, Aeon + Psyche, Flux, Dazed & Confused, The Quietus, and Studio International. Spens wrote her PhD thesis on visual portrayals of terrorists and other political villains in media and fine art, before turning to practicing art herself.
At Lit Hub Spens shared a reading list of her spiritual disillusionment. One title on the list:
Matt Rowland Hill, Original SinsRead about the other entries on the list.
When I had broken up with my first love at university, the betrayal and disillusionment was so crushing that it felt I had lost my religion; it felt that Earth-shattering. More recently, echoes of that feelingreturned, reminding me of that sense of total loss and desolation.
And then I picked up Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill—about the author’s loss of faith and then addiction after a childhood in a fundamentalist family—and found in it a kind of lifeline. When we are brought up in controlling, precarious, chaotic situations, whether it is in a cult, or through being left for one, or in some other way, we have to deal with this crushing loss of faith and love, from the youngest age, before we are remotely equipped to deal with it.
What are the repercussions of this sort of childhood, this philosophical and emotional framework—and how, as individuals, do we find ways to rebuild our lives with true freedom? In these memoirs, each author found reading, or writing, or love, or some combination; the key was in painstakingly creating a new faith and everyday stability despite the ever-present absence of the one we were brought up to want for.
--Marshal Zeringue
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