Julia Turshen discusses the power of true strength [Video]

“I think that Julia helped me realize that being strong is pushing yourself for your own personal growth. And when you’re doing powerlifting, it’s not about how you look in the mirror, it’s like about the number changing. So you’re like ‘okay, I’m getting stronger!’ in a certain way, and it’s making me feel like I can do something I never thought I could do before. So what else could I do in my life that I’ve never done before?”

This is a moving testimony from one of the members of the queer barbell group started by cookbook author and podcaster Julia Turshen after she got into powerlifting. And while Turshen herself loves lifting heavy things — as you can see in the below video, part of Everand’s Welcome Home video series, and read about in her latest book, Built for This — it’s always been about far more than physical strength.

Welcome Home visits authors, artists, and creators where they most feel at home and creatively empowered. It explores how places, people, community, and emotion affect the creative process — giving insight into the story behind the author, the human behind the name, and the passion that drives them to create. Find all the Welcome Home videos here.

Julia Turshen is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author who teaches cooking classes most Sunday afternoons. Her latest cookbook, Simply Julia, a national bestseller, is available wherever books are sold.

Turshen is also the author of Now & Again (named the Best Cookbook of 2018 by Amazon and an NPR ‘Great Read’), Feed the Resistance (named the Best Cookbook of 2017 by Eater), and Small Victories (named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2016 by The New York Times and NPR). She also hosts and produces the IACP-nominated podcast called Keep Calm & Cook On. Turshen lives in the Hudson Valley with her spouse Grace and their pets.

Her most recent work, Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting, is part of Everand Originals’ Roxane Gay & series, which is a series of essays curated by Gay that celebrate original voices and the human experience.

Find out more about the works released in the Roxane Gay & series below.

Built for This by Julia Turshen

Let cookbook author Turshen lift you up with her memoir about embracing her inner and outer strength. Turshen shares how she learned to appreciate her appetite for food, started powerlifting to marvel at all the things her body could do, and now knows the meat on her bones is “made of the things [she’s] capable of.”

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Also available as an ebook

You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions by Randa Jarrar

Memoirist, essayist, and novelist Jarrar offers an honest and wholly original user’s manual on how to raise a happy and well-adjusted child with little help and even fewer resources, but a fierce willingness to live out loud.

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Also available as an ebook

My Year of Psychedelics by Gabrielle Bellot

In this fascinating and literally trippy memoir, acclaimed essayist and columnist Bellot shares the story of how magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and other psychedelics transformed her life for the better.

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Also available as an ebook

Good Girl by Elaine Castillo

Award-winning novelist and essayist Castillo details her life spent rescuing and training dogs, a story that reveals just as much about modern society and culture as it does our relationship with humankind’s first domesticated animal.

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Also available as an ebook

For up-to-date Roxane Gay & series releases and more, follow us @everand_us on Instagram and TikTok.

About the Author: Ashley McDonnell

Ashley is an Everand editor who loves Ernest Hemingway, “The Hunger Games,” and EDM. When she’s not reading, she’s making nerdy podcasts about anime and manga and learning to DJ.

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