Spiritual Writing with Jamie Quatro
When I saw the title of this workshop, my first question was: "Okay, but what is “spiritual writing?”. Do we mean writing about organized religion? Writing about “spiritual” ideas, such as faith and hope and charity? Are we (gulp) talking about some kind of 19th century “automatic” writing, listening and transcribing from beyond?
None of the above! If you believe, as I do, that the Incarnation sanctified matter forever, then the best way to “write spiritually” is to start with the material world: to inhabit, explore, and sanctify matter in our work. This generative course will provide a range of prompts centered on BODY, ANIMAL, OBJECT, PLANT, FOOD, DRINK, WORK, PLAY.
The goals of the workshop are:
- To establish (and/or bolster) a daily writing practice.
- To give and receive 'from-the-gut' feedback
- To come away with five or six "seedlings"—drafts you're excited to work on after the week concludes.
Each Day
This class is generative. Students will receive prompts and sample readings each day. They will draft 300-500 words in the afternoons/evenings, and come to the following day's class ready to read aloud and receive feedback. No advance preparation is required. The mutual understanding among participants is that nothing we share will be polished or edited; writing will be draft material snatched from the desktop.
Preparation
Nothing is required in advance.
Supplies
Writing materials; laptop if preferred
Who is best suited for this class?
Anyone who likes to write, and who believes that the visible, tactile world contains wonders worthy of our best artistic engagement.
About the Instructor
Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent novel, Two-Step Devil, is the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the novel has also been named a New York Times Editor's Choice, a 2025 ALA Notable Book, and a Best Book of 2024 by the Paris Review and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. A new story collection is forthcoming from Grove Press. Quatro's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters’s MFA program and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.