Our Bodies Electric

Tormented by his religious family and the broader conservative community of Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, fourteen-year-old Josh struggles with the pressure to conform to their puritanical standards. As he embarks upon his high school years, Josh meets a supportive cast of eccentric small-town characters, falls in love with his classmate, becomes obsessed with David Bowie, and fumbles in his attempts to make his own thongs. But it’s when his elderly neighbor gives him a copy of Walt Whitman’s ＂ Song of Myself＂ that he begins to understand his own sexuality. Our Bodies Electric is a coming-of-age story that celebrates the exuberance of youth, the individual quest for sexual identity, and the joy of finding connections in the most unexpected of places.

Zackary Vernon is a writer and scholar based in Boone, North Carolina. His work has appeared in a range of magazines and journals, including The Bitter Southerner, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Cultures, and he received the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University.