Jamie Quatro brings to her fiction a poet’s awareness of language, a historian’s sense of tradition and folklore, and a theologian’s concern with eternal questions. She is the author of I Want to Show You More (a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and 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 Times Literary Supplement). Her most recent novel, Two-Step Devil, won the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing, was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an ALA Notable Book, and a Best Book of 2024 by the Paris Review and Atlanta Journal Constitution. A new story collection is forthcoming from Grove Press. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters’s MFA program and in 2026–27 will be a visiting scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge University. She lives with her family in Chattanooga. She was interviewed by Culture Editor Nick Ripatrazone at the Glen Workshop, Image’s annual week-long gathering for artists and writers.
Image: You are teaching a spiritual writing course this week. In your course description, you note the complexity of the phrase “spiritual writing” and affirm “that the Incarnation sanctified matter forever,” so the best way to “‘write spiritually’ is to start with the material world.” As a writer of fiction, what does such engagement look like for you?
Jamie Quatro: A few years ago I was asked to lead spiritual writing at the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops, but I didn’t know what “spiritual writing” was. Kaveh Akbar was leading the poetry counterpart to the prose workshop, so I wrote to him: “Help—what is spiritual writing?”
“I have no idea,” he wrote back.
We went on to do some thinking together via email. He shared his thoughts on the political utility of reading ancient religious texts; I mentioned my interest in magic realism and its ties to sociopolitical violence. We talked about writing into perplexity and wonder, and about not-knowing as a crucial approach to writing. But in order to write prompts and select readings, I needed some kind of working definition. Is “spiritual writing” necessarily engendered by something ephemeral? Is it writing that’s somehow divinely inspired? Is it writing about the divine? Do we have to believe in God or a higher power to write “spiritually”?
Two writers have helped me think through all of this. The first is Abraham Heschel, who said our goal should be to “work with the things of space but to be in love with eternity.” “Things are our tools,” he wrote, “and eternity, the Sabbath, is our mate.” I love this way of thinking. Our tools—for writers that means words, images, sounds—are the material world. Abstractions may be our lovers, but they give us nothing to work with. If we approach artmaking through abstraction, the work will be dead on arrival. We have to thrust our hands into the dirt.
The second is Gerard Manley Hopkins, through his idea of inscape, this feeling that when you look at the universe with concerted attention, the universe seems to look back at you. In paying close attention to an object’s uniqueness—whatever makes it itself and nothing else—you get to its holiness and thereby can intuit something of God.
Hopkins may have been intuiting something more than metaphysical. Michael Pollan, in an On Being interview with Krista Tippett, talks about the mystery of consciousness. No one really knows what consciousness is, but there are three prevailing theories. The first is that consciousness is generated by our brains—that it’s an emergent property of complex neural systems. This is the way we’re used to thinking about consciousness, in the Cartesian Je pense donc je suis way. The second theory is that consciousness is a universal field, external to our brains, that our neurons channel like antennae. And the third theory is that consciousness inheres in every bit of created matter—that the nature of matter itself is to contain “some infinitesimal amount of psyche,” as Pollan puts it. This sounds to me like the beginnings of a scientific explanation of inscape. What if the psyche in our cells and the psyche in, say, the atoms of plants or animals are connecting and communing in ways we don’t yet understand? Maybe these lines from Christian Wiman’s “In the Time of Fire” say it best:
Look hard enough, look lightly enough,
and the un-looked-at world looks back at you.
That reciprocal seeing is the site of soul.
Image: Speaking of the Incarnation, in an interview with the Kenyon Review, you said:
When I was young, I desperately wanted to be a Catholic. My best friend was Catholic, and so were my cousins. I envied them their medals and saints, their incense and holy water, their rituals and plaid uniform skirts. We went to the Church of Christ, which had nothing: no artwork or stained glass or even instruments. I used to sneak into this church near our house—it was Episcopalian but used to be a Catholic monastery—because it had a confessional in the basement. I’d go inside the little wooden phone booth and kneel down, and it was dark and utterly quiet. Confession felt like an interior, underground experience.
You are now Episcopalian. In what ways does that faith tradition retain or reveal the mystery that you imagined as a young woman?
JQ: In the tradition in which I was raised, belief was primary, actions secondary. You believe first, and only then get baptized. You listen to sermons, read Bible stories, think, study, pray. I later became Presbyterian, and Reformed theology gave me a meta-narrative, a framework to hold the Bible together. Both traditions were tremendous gifts. But in both, the pathway to faith is via the brain. For most of my life, I felt like I had faith but no religion. There was nowhere to put my body or my imagination, no embodied ways to worship or to think about the material world—objects, animals, plants—as spiritual teachers.
But the body comes first, not the brain. I have a one-year-old grandson who adores our golden retriever so much that he often pulls her ears, hard. We could try to reason with him—“Though ear-pulling is an expression of your love and delight, it hurts Luna, so please touch gently”—but of course we don’t. We understand that “love” and “pain” and “gentleness” are abstractions he won’t understand till much later. Instead, we take his hand and help him stroke her ears while repeating the word “gentle.” His body believes first; understanding will come later.
Last week I went to see a therapist who does a kind of body work that I’ll call energy work. I’ve seen him in the past for various running injuries; this time it was for neck pain. He is usually silent during our sessions, and I always feel compelled to talk a lot, at least initially, to fill up the silences. After a while I can usually relax and stop talking, but on this last visit I kept fidgeting, verbally. I’m not used to having work done around my head and face. I started to feel panicky, and when I told the therapist, he paused, and then I felt him pull my ears open, away from the sides of my head. He held them that way for probably five minutes.
The weird thing is that for years I’ve been praying to become a better listener. I catch myself finishing people’s sentences in my head and formulating responses before they’ve finished speaking. It’s awful, to hear yourself interrupting people over and over and feel somehow helpless to stop. I’ve read articles on active listening and always set listen as my intention in yoga practice, but nothing has really changed. But in those few minutes, with my ears pulled open, something shifted. I felt these giant satellites on the sides of my head. I imagined myself with Dumbo ears that could reach around and enclose whoever I was talking to in a kind of bubble; I imagined them as massive bowls containing all the words people placed inside them. Somehow the abstraction—listen—became tangible. Satellites, bubble, bowls. I thought of Jesus putting his fingers into the deaf man’s ears, or spitting into the mud and caking it onto the blind man’s eyes. This is the same Jesus who spoke the storm into stillness. He could’ve healed with words. He chose to involve the body. I’m not saying I heard God speak, but I also want to say: God spoke to me there on the table. Make your ears large.
The Anglican/Episcopal tradition has given me the gift of my body and senses as part of the worship experience. Bowing, genuflecting, kneeling—these aren’t empty gestures or ritual. They are ways of bypassing the brain to impart corporal knowledge. Take, for example, making the sign of the cross. It isn’t something I grew up doing, and the gesture is only just beginning to feel natural. I’m reading Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild, and he talks about how, before he became Orthodox, he assumed the gesture was superstitious, a warding off of evil. That’s how I used to see it. But Shaw says he feels a great universal ingathering implicit in the signum crucis. Heaven on the vertical axis, earth on the horizonal; the meeting point at the heart, where Christ dwells, where the eternal and temporal intersect. Shaw writes that “when we make the sign of the cross, gathered within it are all precious things, healed or in need of healing. Not some perfunctory gesture for our own gain, but a warm stabling for all.”
Or take the fracturing of the wafer. It’s a dramatic, almost performative gesture: The priest lifts the host, breaks it in half, and pulls the halves apart. At this point in the service we’re kneeling in the pews, looking up from below, and if I’m sitting close to the front, the lifted wafer obscures the cross behind the altar. When the pieces come apart, it’s as if the cross itself has broken through. It is a moment of visual rending that invokes rent flesh, rent temple curtain, rent scrim between time and eternity. We then ascend to the altar to receive the Eucharist alongside the church universal, past, present, and future. I’m not sure the collapse of kronos time into kairos time would be so striking were it not for that embodied fractal gesture.
This is not to say that one tradition is superior to another, or that I’ve “landed.” I’m grateful for every tradition of which I’ve been a part. The Church of Christ taught me to read the Bible. They gave me the gift of a cappella singing in four-part harmony. The Presbyterian church gave me a hunger and thirst for theology, and a profound sense of God’s sovereignty that is a great comfort. And I don’t think of myself as having left one denomination for another. That would be like saying I could leave parts of my own body behind. The body might look different at various stages of life, but it’s still the same body.
Image: I and others have compared your work to that of Flannery O’Connor, for good reason, but I am starting to think it also feels in conversation with John Cheever. You both write beautiful sentences about people behaving badly, and who are haunted by God. Cheever would frame his belief in God by half-joking that “there has to be someone you thank for the party.” Before family dinners, he would say grace, including revised lines from Plato: “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus may we live happily with one another and with God.” How do those lines resonate with you?
JQ: I don’t think I’ve ever been compared to Cheever. I’ll take that as a massive compliment. Reading Cheever, I always think how desperately conscious he was of human fallibility, including his own. Those journal entries about how he just wanted to make it to eleven a.m. without drinking…
I’d never heard this prayer of his. I quite love it. But can we talk about Plato for a second? We Westerners all have to contend with his influence at some point, especially the dichotomy that evolved in the church (and among Gnostics) between body and soul, shadow and form.
I’ve always been somewhat mystified by Plato’s famous cave metaphor, but my understanding goes something like this: We are prisoners in a cave, facing the rear wall with our backs to the entrance, where a fire burns. And between us and the fire, forms pass back and forth, casting shadows on the wall. The shadows are everything we see in the material world. We apprehend the shadows with our senses—material things are real in the sense that shadows are real—noting that what we see is subject to decay and death. We also intuit the forms casting the shadows, which are real in some fuller sense, not subject to death, which exist beyond space and time and matter. Death, the shedding of the body, will be the release from the shadow world, in which everything is a copy of an ultimate spiritual reality. This is why Plato wanted to banish artists from his ideal city, because they were making copies of copies.
N.T. Wright has written extensively about how this idea—of the incarnate world as inferior to an ultimate spiritual reality—became Christianized, and how it has led to some very bad modern eschatology. Christians see the material world as subject to decay and death, and blame sin, the fall recorded in Genesis. But not to worry: When we die, we’ll shed the flesh, the immortal soul will be disentangled from the sinful body, and we’ll fly away to be with God on some far-off spiritual plane called heaven. This idea would have been unrecognizable to first-century Christians, who were waiting for God’s kingdom to break through into the contingent universe. Heaven and earth were not separate planes of existence, one spiritual and one material. They were mutually immanent realities, interlocking and intersecting at every point.
So I suppose, for me, the physical resurrection of Christ stands against the Platonic separation of body and soul. The central tenet of our faith is that God has done in Jesus what God intends to do for every human, and for the entire created cosmos: physical, embodied, material resurrection; the unification of body and soul; a lifting-up out of bondage to decay into some heightened reality, something more real and tactile and material than we can now imagine.
This is why I cannot accept the physical resurrection as a “beautiful metaphor,” as a friend once challenged me to do. I’ve heard priests call the resurrection a metaphor. If the resurrection is only a metaphor, I’m out.
Wright also talks about a newer, progressive version of Platonism: the idea that we’re meant to transcend our material bodies via technology, to get off this planet and colonize Mars; that the earth is just our evolutionary cradle. I attended a conference with a friend at MIT called “Beyond the Cradle.” I listened to panels of experts talking about space hospitality and the moon habitat as an eventual launch site for Mars, and how artificial intelligence and Neuralink will help us attain transhumanism. This is what I mean about bad eschatology. If we see the planet as doomed, and our bodies as something we’ll eventually be rid of, we’ll have absolutely terrible theologies of creation care. If we really believed that the end of all things was the renewal of this planet, of these bodies—maybe we’d give up the race to control space, maybe we’d stop mining fossil fuels. Maybe people like Musk and Bezos would use their money to begin solving the climate crisis.
Image: In your short story “Yogurt Days,” which appeared in The New Yorker a couple of years ago, Anna, the narrator, describes her mother this way: “She was always putting herself in the way of the sufferings of others.” Interesting syntax there; it’s almost as if her mother inserts herself into the lives of others. Could you talk about suffering a bit in this vein? As someone conversant with the Christian tradition of suffering via saints and prophets, what do you think about how we talk about suffering in relation to belief?
JQ: The mother in that story is very much based on my own mother. For her, Christianity was much more than going to church, more than individual salvation. I think one reason I never left the faith is that I saw it in action, in my parents. They believed, literally, in becoming the hands and feet of Christ. They ran ministries to unhoused people and sex workers. We were always having people over for meals or taking food and medicine to people across town.
I don’t feel qualified to speak about suffering from a personal standpoint. I’ve had hard times, but I would not say I’ve experienced the kind of pain or loss or need that would qualify as suffering. I do think we need to make more space for lament as part of our experience of belief and worship. Too many of us move too quickly into offering comfort and solutions. Sometimes we just need to sit with anger or heartbreak. Lament is an act of worship: to weep and mourn alongside those who are suffering.
There is a kind of suffering that follows on the heels of what I’ll call sin: some kind of wrong action or word levied against another being that causes pain. Sometimes it’s obvious, external, and chosen; sometimes it’s accidental, but there’s collateral damage. I’ve experienced the suffering of knowing I’ve hurt others, wanting to make it right, and not being able to do so. This is why it’s so important to return, again and again, to forgiveness, including self-forgiveness. The greatest suffering can be in the refusal to forgive oneself, to accept God’s love even though you know you don’t deserve it.
But to bring the conversation back to fiction: There’s a quote (I think misattributed to James Baldwin) about how the artist must “walk the reader to the guillotine without his knowing it.” The experience of art as a blind walk to the guillotine—I like this. You’re about to have your head chopped off and you don’t even know it. There’s an element of surprise to suffering, maybe—this idea that you’ve been singled out. Fiction allows us to approach our own pain and suffering—the guillotine—in a safe, even generative way. I admire people who seem to turn their own suffering into beauty on behalf of others. I’m not sure it’s something I’d be capable of doing, were I to face, say, starvation or torture or profound loss.
Image: In the story, as Anna tries to make sense of the suffering she sees in the world, she recalls her mother’s words: “Places of suffering are the places Christ shows up, she said. I took this literally. I was always keeping an eye out for him. In my imagination, Christ was forever vanishing around some corner. If I caught a glimpse, it would be the hemline of a robe, an upturned sole.” In this story, and in your novel Two-Step Devil, ecstatic visions of differing intensity permeate the lives of characters. What draws you to visions, as a storyteller?
JQ: Well, as a kid I had visions. I suspect most kids do, to an extent. In second grade I was in the bathroom stall at Sewell Elementary School, in Tucson, Arizona, when I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of my future self, a self who wasn’t in time at all. This self was with me but also was me, somehow, and this self-but-not-self said: Look at Jamie Utz in this bathroom stall, age eight! How strange that she is eight at this very moment! Why is she here, at age eight, in this place? Why not another age, in another place? And the self-not-self answered: This is where and when she has things to do. All four of my children said to me, at around the age of four or five, something like: “Is this all just a movie?” or “Are we in a video game?”
There were other visions, but I want to save them for my fiction. I do think when you grow up in a family that is looking for signs of the end—especially during the Cold War, in the eighties, when at any point the missiles could appear and you’d have seconds before you were vaporized—you’re sort of primed for the visionary. I also love the medieval women mystics. I suppose it was inevitable that the visionary would find its way into my fiction.
Image: You and I did a short interview for Image online around the time Two-Step Devil was released, and I’ve been pondering something you said: “There’s something inherently performative about the devil, isn’t there?” Can you talk more about that? Do you think evil, in addition to the devil, is inherently performative?
JQ: I need to qualify that. I should have said: There’s something inherently performative about the devil as he is portrayed in literature. Dante, Milton, Goethe, Dostoyevsky. In fiction I can take liberties with the devil’s character. My Two-Step is cheeky and petulant and (to use a favorite Britishism) whingy. Were I writing theology or nonfiction or memoir, I would tell a very different story about evil. I believe evil is a corruption of good, and it is deeply, troublingly, desperately real. Performance implies pretending, putting-on, that there is something else behind what you see on the surface. There is nothing performative about evil. It is the ultimate inversion or undoing of an original perfect reality. It is anti-creation, anti-imago-Dei.
Image: You are a runner. You’ve written about how running can cause you to enter “a state of prayerlike consciousness,” an “interior stillness” that is almost surreal. Running, like the real, slow work of writing, sometimes elicits quizzical looks from other people. Is running for you an action of routine? Does it anchor you? Does it ever surprise you?
JQ: One of the great disappointments in my life right now is that I can’t really run anymore. Not the way I used to. Every time I go back to running, I get some injury, like Achilles tendinitis, which I’m dealing with now. The body has its limits. I started running at fifteen, so I think the shelf life of my legs just kind of expired. I envy people who started running later in life. They can go into their seventies and eighties. Every time I’m at a race and see someone in their seventies, I ask when they started running. Nine times out of ten they say, “I didn’t even start this until I was middle-aged and needed to make some changes to my health.” It’s a grief, not running. Only another runner can really understand the particular loss. I do other things—yoga, walking, HIIT classes—but nothing comes close to the endorphin rush of a good long run.
Maybe this is the surprise: finding that a lifetime love has left me and allowing something else to fill that space. I’m learning to be okay with other ways of caring for my body and mind and emotional well-being. I think about this with writing. One hundred years ago, writers weren’t slotted into neat categories: poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, journalist, playwright. Where would we put Augustine? Shakespeare: poet or playwright? Thinking of myself as only a runner is narrow and feeds the grief; thinking of myself as only a fiction writer is the same. I’m about to go to Cambridge as a visiting scholar, where I’ll be working with both English and theology professors. My proposal included an academic article on the etymology and use of the word rend in Scripture, a spiritual autobiography narrated through the history of stained glass, and a short-story collection based on historic UFO encounters. So what kind of writer am I?
Image: In running there are no pucks or balls or nets. The sport is defined by the paths that we take, our favorite routes, and in a way, a runner becomes defined by form. In a similar way, you demonstrate a willingness to play with form in your fiction. I’m thinking of stories like “Demolition,” as well as much of Fire Sermon, which has a kind of vacillating epistolary form. You also play some devilish games with form in your most recent book, including a one-act play. Is this playfulness with form a product of the runner in you?
JQ: In my workshop at the Glen this week, we had a great conversation about structure. At what point does structure come into play, when you’re drafting? Does structure precede the draft—I have a structure in mind, I’ll fit my story to it—or do we start drafting with no structure in mind, and watch and listen for a structure to emerge? I think the answer varies, depending on the project. When I write fiction, I’m very much of the let-structure-emerge camp. With nonfiction, especially assignments like reviews and travel essays, I do have more structure in mind. Word count, for starters.
That isn’t how I run, though. For the most part I map out my runs in advance, especially if I’m in a new city. But I do solve story problems when I’m running. If I start the day writing and then break to go for a run, I’ll have all these ideas and solutions buzzing around in my head. I must look crazy, stopping every few feet to dictate into my phone.
Zadie Smith has a great lecture in which she talks about scaffolding your novel. I used the four parts of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as my scaffolding for Two-Step Devil. But Smith points out that you have to be ready to dismantle your scaffolding when your novel starts to take on its own shape. It’s very much a process of listening. Finding your structure is a sonic experience. I believe the sounds of words making sentences will lead you to the paragraphs and sections and chapters that will give you your eventual structure. My writing process transferred to running would be: Strap on my running shoes, put my head down, run twenty feet. Look up, listen. Head down, next twenty feet, look up, listen.
Image: You’ve described “Yogurt Days” and two other recent stories as a triptych. So far, you’ve published three books: a short story collection and two novels. Are they also a triptych of sorts for you? What is the significance—theological or otherwise—of such a grouping?
JQ: I’ve never thought about my three books as a triptych. I don’t think they are. With each book, I wasn’t thinking of the one before or the one that would come after. But with those three stories, I was thinking of them as a group. One focuses on Anna’s father, one on her mother, and one on Anna herself. That story—“Two Men, Mary”—is itself a triptych.
I do love threes. I’m one of three kids. I love the form of the ode: turn, counter-turn, stand. I’m a Trinitarian; it can’t be helped. If you believe the truth of God is triplicate, if the perfect being is three persons in loving communion, then it makes sense that as image-bearers we’re attracted to threes, that we find things in triplicate satisfying. I have often thought about the American meal as a kind of triptych: appetizer, main course, dessert. I wonder if Trinitarian thinking has inflected even that structure. But at meals in, say, India or Japan, the food just keeps coming. That abundance, too, is the image of God.
Image: Last year, Harper’s published an excerpt from an essay you read at Sewanee. It reads like a prose poem, a litany of ideas related to the nature of naming. The excerpt ends with this beautifully harried moment: Your daughter-in-law texts the family group chat that she is going into labor, and you encounter your son in the driveway: “Car seat in one hand, instructions in the other. Do you know how to do this, he asked, meaning install the base, but what I heard was pain children parenting love, what I heard was Mom, the last day I would be only that to him, or to anyone.” As a fiction writer, you are constantly naming characters and places. As a mother, you have named children. You have even, perhaps, named your belief. What are the joys and perils of naming, for you?
JQ: That was an amazing Easter, a month after the baby came. The conclave had assembled at the Vatican, and we were all together, the whole family, watching CNN to see if the smoke would be black or white. The commentators were speculating about what name the new pope would choose. And with a brand new baby—our first grandchild—we were all trying on new names. My son was father, his wife mother, my other kids aunt and uncle. In the South, you’re supposed to choose a grandparent name: Honey, Meemaw, Peaches. My girls have always called me Lolly, so that’s the name I chose. My grandson is fifteen months old now, and he can say everyone’s names but mine! The L sound is difficult. So for now, I’m Ollie.
Naming is a big deal in the Bible. There seems to be a tradition of a name change at some crucial juncture in a person’s relationship with God. Saul becomes Paul, Jacob becomes Israel, Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah. I heard a lecture somewhere that the Hebrew letter hey—breath, spirit—was inserted into both names, as if God was saying: I’m giving you the spirit that you’re going to need to continue on this journey. I also think about Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. When Jesus first appears to her, he calls her “woman,” and she thinks he’s the gardener. It’s so strange, the way Jesus begins with that impersonal address. But when Mary tells him they’ve taken away the body and she doesn’t know where it is, Jesus does this incredibly intimate thing: He says her name. Mary. Somehow, hearing her own name allows Mary to recognize Jesus as her rabboni, her teacher.
Naming characters in fiction, though. That’s a tough one. For me it’s usually a sonic choice: one or two or three syllables, depending on the flow of the sentences. I have a hard time naming my characters. There are always associations. Don’t ever tell anybody what you’re naming your children or your novel characters.
Image: Vishal Vasnani. Unsplash, 2019.
