Tag Archives: I Want to Show You More

An Interview with Jamie Quatro

19 Sep

Jamie Quatro’s collection I Want to Show You More was called the “most engaging literary treatment of Christianity since [Flannery] O’Connor,” by J. Robert Lennon in The New York Times Book Review

When you read Jamie Quatro‘s biography, it becomes clear that talent is not divvied up equally. She is the daughter of a physician father and classical pianist mother, and was herself trained as a classical pianist until the time that she left for college. She graduated from Pepperdine at age 20, knocked out a MA in English at William and Mary, and was then awarded a Presidential Fellowship from Princeton for doctoral studies in British Romantic Poetry.

She left Princeton when she found out that she and her husband were expecting the first of their four children. Since then, she has earned her MFA in Fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, published fiction in numerous journals, published the story collection I Want to Show You More to wide acclaim, and most recently had a story chosen for the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories anthology.

In this interview, Quatro discusses her revision process, her approach to writing backstory, and the moment in her story “The Anointing” that took her by surprise.

(To read “The Anointing” and an exercise based on its use of detail, click here.)

Michael Noll

One difficulty in writing about religious experience is translating the immediacy and intimacy of the experience to readers who do not share the character’s beliefs. You solve this problem in a single sentence. You write, “Anointings were eleventh-hour efforts—what you asked for after you’d asked for everything else.” In the story, Diane knows that the anointing is a long shot, and yet she’s desperate for a positive signs, any change for the good. It’s almost as if the story is saying to the reader, “Look, this anointing probably isn’t going to work, but it sure would be great it it did.” The religious element is understood through universal human feelings of hope, desire, love, and desperation. I’m curious if this sentence was always present in the story. Did you worry in early drafts that readers would not be sympathetic to Diane?

Jamie Quatro

Funny you should ask about that line — it was indeed a late addition to the piece. In fact, I rewrote the entire opening, right up to that line, almost five years after I finished the story. Originally I’d written “last-ditch efforts,” but when my editor and I began working together, she wondered if we might come up with a less cliche, more immediate phrase. “Eleventh-hour” felt like something Diane herself would think, as the term is used, of course, in the gospel of Matthew, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. And no, I didn’t worry about readers being unsympathetic. I don’t think about readers, or publication in general, when I’m drafting. For personal reasons, this story stayed in the proverbial drawer for a long time. I didn’t think I’d ever publish it. It was the last piece accepted by a magazine before the book went to press. Cathy Chung — Guernica’s brilliant fiction editor — bought it.

Michael Noll

The first part of the story is spent with backstory—how a successful marriage and life got the point that a last-ditch effort was made to rescue it from ruin. The rest of the story is spent, essentially, in scene–in the moments prior to and following the anointing. One of the cliches of workshop is that writers should avoid clumps of backstory–always integrate it into the fabric of the scene, students are told. And yet you do precisely the opposite, and it works beautifully. The backstory held me to the page as much as the in-scene portions. What was your approach to the backstory?

Jamie Quatro

It’s difficult to talk about “approach” to backstory — as I mentioned, I don’t think about such things when I draft. I think each story comes to an artist with its own structure, its own cadence and music, and that the artist’s first responsibility is to listen. For me, drafting is very much like listening to a piece of music or watching a film. You simply let the work rush on and do what it wants to do, take the shape it wants to take. That might involve “clumps” of backstory, as you say; or it might involve interspersing the backstory throughout the piece; or it might involve using no backstory at all. To be honest, I’ve never heard the workshop rule you mention above. I’m always skeptical of rules. An upfront “tell” at the opening of a story — here’s what’s happened in the past to get us where we are — can be used to great effect. Look at some of the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners: “A Little Cloud” begins with “Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed.” Or “Araby,” which begins with the backstory of the priest’s death: “The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing room.” Even if you end up cutting the backstory, it can be a useful exercise, to spell out precisely what has happened in the past before entering the first scene.

Michael Noll

The story begins with the characters at the edge of a precipice–perhaps Mitch will kill himself, perhaps Diane no longer believes in God—and immediately offers a solution to both of these problems: the anointing. As a result, I expected a conclusion that resolved one or both of those problems. Mitch would be saved or become worse. Diane would be strengthened in her faith, or she’d give it up completely. But neither really happens. The situation remains mostly the same. The primary change is that Diane despairs, whereas at the beginning she was hopeful. I’ll admit that I was taken aback by the ending. But as I thought about it, the ending seemed truthful in a way that a neat ending wouldn’t have. In life, there are very few dramatic shifts. Was this ending always present? Did you consider ending the story differently?

Jamie Quatro

Yes, this has always been the story’s ending. In a way, that hand pressing on Diane’s head is an anointing of a very different kind, a more radical and truthful version of the oiled thumbprint on the woman’s forehead at the beginning of the piece. To me a it’s a redemptive moment: Diane has been deceiving Ellie about Mitch’s true condition, even as she’s been deceived by Ellie and Mitch. Neither of those deceptions will be possible from this point forward. The only path open to any of them will be one of honesty. What took me by surprise, as I drafted, wasn’t the ending, but the moment Diane discovers that her daughter has been hiding the pills in her little purse. That was a devastating realization. I didn’t want it to be true, but there it was.

Michael Noll

What are you working on now? Many short story writers are also working on a novel. Is that the case for you as well? Quite a few of the stories in your collection are very short, a few pages or so, and they’re so masterfully written that I wonder if a novel is even something you’re interested in.

Jamie Quatro

Ah, the novel question. You know, I love the story form, and I’m at work on a second collection right now, but I will say this: one of the pieces I thought was a short story is threatening to become something bigger. For now I’m pitching it to myself as a novella. Time will tell. I do write poetry and essays, and lately have been doing some longer book reviews. I also just wrote a film treatment. So who knows? Maybe a play is next.

September 2013

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Michael Noll is the editor of Read to Write.

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How to Write about an Unearthly Experience

17 Sep
Jamie Quatro's story collection I Want to Show You More made New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner "laugh and gasp at the same time."

Jamie Quatro’s story collection I Want to Show You More made New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner “laugh and gasp at the same time.” You can read “The Anointing,” a story from the collection, at Guernica.

When writing about religion, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to find language or images that match the intensity of the believer’s experience. The problem is that this language almost always requires comparison and metaphor: “it felt like a strong wind” or “it was like there was a fire in my chest”. Such writing is fine for an audience inclined to believe, but it almost always fails with skeptics.

One writer who succeeds in finding a language to describe religious experience is Jamie Quatro. Her story, “The Anointing,” from her debut collection I Want to Show You More, is a perfect example of a successful description of what can seem like an indescribable miracle. It was published at Guernica, where you can read it now.

How the Story Works

In the Bible, most of Jesus’ miracles are described simply. The focus is almost always on the physical items involved, not on the experience. The apostles passed out the handful of loaves and fish, and the food never ran out. The water-from-wine at the wedding in Cannae tasted better than the wine from the original casks.

This is the same strategy used by Quatro in “The Anointing.” In the story, Diane’s husband is so depressed that he refuses to get out of bed. She has begun to fear for his life, and so she requests an anointing from the church elders. Here is how Quatro describes the kind of miracle that Diane has in mind:

“During evening worship—held in a makeshift auditorium beneath a stained canvas tarp—a boy with braces on his legs was brought forward by his mother, his wheelchair leaving tracks in the sawdust. The camp’s pastor removed the braces, knelt in front of the chair, and rubbed oil all over the boy’s white calves as if he were applying sunscreen. The following summer the boy came back to camp still wearing the braces, though now he used crutches with metal cuffs around the wrists.”

Notice the details that Quatro provides: the stained canvas tarp, tracks in the sawdust, oil applied like sunscreen. These are the mundane details of the physical world, not the language of spirituality. The result is that readers are more likely to set aside their natural skepticism.

Here is how Quatro describes the arrival of the church elders, the source of the miracle she hopes for:

“She thought they’d have a small phial, like a test tube—maybe something crystal—but Pastor Murray stepped in carrying a family-sized bottle of Wesson Oil. Diane was startled, not just by the oil (would something from Sam’s Club work?), but by the image of Florence Henderson that popped into her head, wearing padded mittens and frying up a mess of chicken.”

Because of the specific plainness of that description, we are engaged in the scene. We want to see the unearthly miracle that will (or will not) begin with that practical bottle of oil.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s write about an unearthly experience using “The Anointing” as a model:

  1. Think of an experience that is either unearthly (a miracle or encounter with something unearthly like God, a ghost, or an alien). Or think of any experience that has a hard-to-explain effect on a character.
  2. List the items involved: the room, the furnishings, the personal items. Be specific in your list: not just oil but “a family-sized bottle of Wesson Oil.”
  3. Now, set the stage for the experience. Assume that your audience is skeptical and ready to dismiss the first inklings of something unearthly. (This is always the assumption made by magicians, and the next few steps you will follow are the same steps they follow as well.)
  4. State what is about to happen (the miracle or unearthly experience).
  5. Show the items that will be involved, both directly and indirectly. (In Quatro’s miracle with the boy in the wheelchair, oil is used directly but the tracks in the sawdust are indirectly involved.) Make the reader believe in the physical reality of the scene. (This is why everyone knows the passage in the Bible where Jesus asks Thomas to probe his wounds with his fingers. We’re struck by the physical reality of the physically impossible.)
  6. State and show someone’s skepticism: the narrator or another character. (In Quatro’s story, Diane sees the oil and wonders if “something from Sam’s Club” will work.)
  7. Draw the curtain. Remove the object of the experience from sight, either literally (the narrator or main character leaves the room) or briefly (the narrator or main character looks away for a moment or becomes distracted). Make the audience forget for even a few seconds what is anticipated.
  8. Show the miracle or unearthly experience. State it simply. If the experience is truly remarkable, no loaded language is necessary.

Good luck and have fun.

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