Spiritual Writing with Jamie Quatro
Okay, what is "spiritual writing?" Is it writing about "spiritual topics," such as faith, hope, and love? If you believe, as I do, that the incarnation sanctified matter forever, then the best way we can write spiritually is to inhabit, explore, and sanctify matter in our writing. The closer we stay to the specific human experience, the more likely it is that our work will contain news of the spirit. This generative workshop will provide a range of prompts centered on matter: BODY, ANIMAL, OBJECT, PLANT, FOOD, DRINK, WORK, PLAY.
The goal of the workshop are:
- To establish (or bolster) a daily writing practice.
- To give and receive 'from-the-gut' feedback on new work.
- To come away from The Glen with five or six "seedlings" of stories or essays or poems you're excited to work on after the week.
Each Day
This class is generative. Students will receive a prompt and sample readings each day; they will draft 300-500 words in the afternoons/evenings, and come to the nexzt day's class ready to read aloud and give/receive feedback. No advance preparation is required. The mutual understanding among participants is that nothing we share will be polished or edited: the writing will be nascent draft material snatched from the desktop.
Preparation
Nothing is required in advance.
Supplies
Please bring pens, paper, and a laptop.
Who is best suited for this class?
Anyone who has an inkling of belief that the visible, created world contains wonders worthy of our best poetry and music and art is welcome.
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.