About This Conversation
When Faith Gets Heavy is a Literary Salon™ built for a specific reader: the one who still believes but has grown tired of performing what belief is supposed to look like. Ayanna Elise's Dear God, I'm Tired is a spiritual memoir that refuses the resolution arc, and this salon refuses it too. The conversation will move through the book's central tensions: the difference between faith and the performance of faith, the particular grief that accumulates when prayer feels like silence, and what it means to write honestly about God without needing to arrive at an answer. Ayanna Elise joins the session to discuss the writing of the book, the reader responses that have surprised her most, and what she hopes the SoulWrite Sunday™ community takes from the act of gathering around this kind of writing. This salon is designed to feel intimate, unhurried, and safe for the full range of what its participants are carrying. No theological position is required. Presence and honesty are the only prerequisites.
Discussion Themes
- 01Faith in the aftermath of grief
- 02Prayer as literary voice
- 03The spiritual memoir as witness
- 04Reading as an act of restoration
- 05What honesty with God looks like on the page
The Books at the Center of This Conversation
The Author
Ayanna Elise
Author, SoulWrite Studio™
Ayanna Elise writes at the place where spiritual honesty and literary memoir overlap, and Dear God, I'm Tired is the fullest expression of that practice. She does not write faith as aspiration or testimony, but as an ongoing and sometimes exhausted conversation with the divine. Her work has found its readership among people who needed someone to say, without apology, that faith can be heavy without ceasing to be faith.
From the Conversation
Reader Voices
“I have never read a book about faith that felt this much like being given permission. Permission to be tired. Permission to say so.”
“Ayanna Elise does not resolve anything, and somehow that is the most healing thing I have ever read.”
Reader Perspectives
Reader Reflections
Celeste · Memphis, TN
I have been in grief for two years and have not been able to say so in a room with other people. This resource was the first time that felt possible.
Latasha · Baltimore, MD
Ayanna Elise answered the question I had been afraid to ask, without knowing I was the one asking it. That is what the best literary conversations do.
Sandra · Birmingham, AL
I brought the book to this with tabs on every page where she said something I needed to hear. By the end, the tabs felt inadequate.
Explore More Resources
Browse all discussion guides, character profiles, story timelines, and reader resources in the Literary Vault™.